The game play quite strongly reminds me of Nazi Zombies from World at War. Basically, you play through a set number of waves where each wave has a set number of zombies. Unlike Nazi Zombies, there are a variety of zombies in Killing Floor -- some of which are absolutely brutal. In the early waves, you see nothing but Clots (your basic plodding, melee zombie), Bloats (VERY similar to Boomer's from L4D in that they spray you with bile), and Goreclaws (zombies that plod along, get close, then rush at you with some nasty blades). As the levels progress, you eventually encounter Crawlers (spider looking zombies who jump on you), Sirens (slow moving but have a stunning "scream" ability), Stalkers (mostly invisible right up until they start swiping at you), Scrakes (similar to Goreclaws but instead of blades, they wield very mean chainsaws), and finally Gorepounds (very tough zombies who chase you down and have the ability to kill you VERY fast). The variety of zombies makes for some ridiculously fast paced matches that are often quite frantic.
Also different from Nazi Zombies is the fact that there are a set number of waves. Survive them all and you enter a final wave where you must take down a Patriarch (big, tough and has a chaingun, rocket launcher, and a serious melee attack). He's definitely nasty and requires some actual strategy to defeat. The patriarch battle is a good capstone to the rounds and has satisfying feel to it that Nazi Zombies lacks, even when you go through 20+ rounds.
As far as weapons go, Killing Floor has a pretty decent variety. There are a handful of melee weapons including an axe, a katana, and chainsaw. The guns include dual wielded
The thing I most like about Killing Floor, however, is its perk system. You can choose from one of 6 (I think) different perks. Each of these boosts a specific weapon class. There is one for healing, one for the shotgun, one for melee, one for pistols/rifles, one for machine guns, and one for the flamethrower. They provide a boost to your damage, your reload speed, and even provide weapon discounts (you buy weapons from a trader between waves). Each perk levels from 0 to 5. To level them up, you merely use the related skill/weapon. The best part is that you don't need to be that class to level up the perk, e.g. if you are a Firebug, you still level up your medic perk by healing your teammates. The perks level up in a matter resembling a quadratic curve, i.e. they level a LOT slower after the first few levels. So far, they've started to get really amazing at just level 2, so we're pretty anxious to see how they end up.
My biggest beef with the game so far is definitely how buggy the graphics are. While Draenoth reports that things seem okay for him, I have some really annoying problems with textures that seem to disappear. I even filed a bug on the official forums (it's still in moderation, I'll link it when it's up).
The final, most interesting thing we noticed about the game is just how challenging it is. We started playing on Normal (2 difficulties above it, 1 below) and found ourselves dying quite consistently in only the second round. After spending some time in Beginner, with a mutator turned on that only spawns Clots, we managed to level up our perks enough so that we were able to finally get through a game on Normal. I think it's actually pretty cool that the game has such a wide range of difficulty options.
I'm going to wait until we play the game more to write up final thoughts, but so far I'm relatively pleased. It's not amazing, it probably won't be something I'll play for a really long time, but it was easily worth the $20 I paid for it. Oh, and if any of you pick it up, let me know as it supports up to 6 people.
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