Killing Floor: Incursion doesn't challenge the notion that shooting galleries are a shoulder-shrugging default for virtual reality. Any potential for dramatic tension and imaginative gunplay is squandered by repetitive enemy encounters, tedious action, and rudimentary objectives. Loud guns and roaring carnage are muted by Killing Floor: Incursion's nondescript comfort in inertia.
Killing Floor: Incursion is a shooting game for virtual reality. There are many shooting games for virtual reality. Pointing a gun and pulling a trigger is easy and intuitive, and performing that same action in virtual reality is a reliable thesis for a game. It’s so effective that Arizona Sunshine, The American Dream, Farpoint, Doom VFR, and Pixel Gear, just to name a few, have also used shooting as a primary action. Killing Floor: Incursion does this too. It is unclear whether Killing Floor: Incursion is hoping to ride a crowded wave or genuinely believes it’s attempting to make a statement.
The opening moments of Killing Floor: Incursion hint at a larger sense of ambition. A training sequence is equal parts humorous, instructive, and promising. You’re some kind of unwilling participant in an AI training program that also might be real for Horzine Security Forces. They shoot and kill Zeds, which are zombies. The voice guiding you, Emma, makes the process seem like a bureaucratic nightmare. In any case, you’re taught how to shoot guns, throw knives, and slash with knives. Movement is a mixture of a point-and-shoot teleport mechanic and left-right 90-degree rotation. These are familiar VR rules.
Killing Floor: Incursion then diverges, slightly. Each pistol can be holstered on a side of your “body.” Knives (and, later, axes, assault rifles and shotguns) can be attached to your back. Grenades can somehow be stored below the gun holsters. Effectively managing all of these items is a larger nightmare and greater challenge than anything that happens on purpose Killing Floor: Incursion. PlayStation VR, even on its best days, is unequipped to coherently manage all of this and expect a competent response from the player. You’re the world’s most clumsy marksman.
You don’t know this yet because you’re still in the tutorial and pieces of Killing Floor: Incursion still appear to be fresh and new. Take, for instance, NODE; a little flying robot buddy activated with a button on the Move stick. NODE can scour the field for health pick-ups and ammunition and direct the player to the next point of interest. Sometimes the navigation option isn’t there and sometimes NODE leads you somewhere you’re not allowed to go. OK. Time to properly start Killing Floor: Incursion.
The first level is an effective demonstration of virtual reality horror. Nighttime in the woods, as you slowly approach a decrepit trailer park, is terrifying. Killing Floor: Incursion has yet to play any of its cards and anything could be out there. Before long you have to find gasoline to power a generator to power a hacking program on a door, at which point the trailer park fills with Zeds. Pistol fire and feckless knife slashing can eliminate the Zeds. Later you’re moved to a haunted house where you have to use a flashlight’s special x-ray vision to locate puzzle pieces. This gives way to an open field where you have to toss grenades and/or empty the pistol at a large bullet sponge boss while surrounded by Zeds.
Grenades, shotguns, and sniper rifles present an interesting conundrum. With the grenade you’re supposed to pull the pin and toss it after putting away your pistol and unhooking the slightly-lower grenade from your belt. You’re also expected to do this while being approached by Zeds and rushed by the huge boss, so, good luck. Hopefully you’re pointed in the right direction. The shotgun and sniper rifle demand a cocking action, which is tough to do with any sort of consistency—any action that places one Move controller in front of the other, where the sensors overlap, confuses PlayStation VR’s camera—making both weapons unlikely candidates for effectively dealing with hordes of Zeds.
Catacombs and Paris, Killing Floor: Incursion’s next two levels, drop the unsettling horror motif in favor of tight corridors and waves of enemies. Zeds are joined by crawling spider creatures, then stronger Zeds, then half-invisible sexy Zeds, and then black Zeds with a blade arm. Escalation becomes Killing Floor: Incursion’s only means of expression; setup shop in a corner, face right and shoot to your right while wildly slashing your axe at Zeds approaching from the left. You’re now playing an early Wii game.
Killing Floor: Incursion likes to mix it up by providing objectives across Zed mobs. The most popular is its preference for using your special flashlight to locate glowing red corruption pieces, all of which must be shot before progression is enabled. Another is slowly turning a valve while waves of Zeds approach. One that I actually liked involved severing a Zed’s head and arm so I could use each to pass an eye and handprint scanner. In any case, these are all extremely basic objectives resting on the novelty of VR to provide any sort of gratification.
There is also a lack of clarity inside of Killing Floor: Incursion’s fiction. I’m told what I am in is a simulation. Zeds appearing and disappearing, seemingly at random, seems to indicate this is true. When Emma buzzes in my ear there appear to be real-world consequences to my actions. Sometimes a mysterious third party interrupts and complicates the conspiracy. Searching for reality can be a compelling narrative driver but Killing Floor: Incursion instead prefers confusion and indifference as storytelling mechanisms.
The Paris level concludes with an interminable rooftop sniper battle. You’re surrounded on four sides by at least two fellow rooftop snipers. The challenge is to avoid their fire (and roaming Zeds wandering up from the door you refuse to close) and hopefully pull off a headshot. Another sniper will soon take their place. You have to go through a dozen. This is difficult because you have to actively use the sniper rifle’s scope by bringing it close to your literal eyeball. Due to PlayStation VR’s aforementioned difficulty in tracking precise movement, it’s a chore. Worse, this is an action that must be repeated after every shot because it is a bolt action rifle that must be manually cocked. The sniper battle is tedious and miserable.
The fourth and final level presents a climactic boss fight that is another aggravating sequence of trying to solve a puzzle while enduring waves of Zeds and a tentacle monster. I don’t know what I expected, it’s not like Killing Floor: Incursion was going to turn it all around at the last minute, but when I finally finished the game I felt a sense of relief. I didn’t have to deal with this anymore.
Perhaps I am looking for too much in a game about indiscriminately mowing down waves of zombies. Maybe I should have played Killing Floor: Incursion with a friend; after all the entire campaign is co-op. It’s possible that newer PlayStation VR owners will experience Killing Floor: Incursion as their first shooting gallery. In this collection of scenarios, I can see Killing Floor: Incursion making stronger impact. It’s fun to shoot stuff. Killing Floor: Incursion allows you to shoot, hack, and obliterate your way across four levels in as many hours. Shooting is fun.
We’re past the point where virtual reality games can get by on a premise as basic as Shooting Is Fun. The American Dream, for example, employed nearly identical shooting mechanics, but rolled it up in a box of criticism and commentary. It had something to say with its depiction of violence. Even Arizona Sunshine had personality behind its southwest take on Evil Dead. Killing Floor: Incursion, while visually accomplished and very pretty, doesn’t have anything on its mind. We’re two years into commercial virtual reality and Killing Floor: Incursion is as plain as it is tired.
