Killing Floor 3 Needs To Make The Defence Alliance Mod Official

Nothing would bring the series full circle like Defence Alliance 2 making a comeback.

Killing Floor launched at the perfect time; right after Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, during Steam’s prime in which Valve was still a bustling developer making its mark on the PC space. It had an Aperture Science crossover level that played a big part in Portal 2’s Potato Sack ARG, appeared in Team Fortress 2, and, releasing only a year after Left 4 Dead, found a growing audience in the then-new co-op Zombie shooter genre.

Early Steam was also home to dedicated modding communities, where standalone mods, essentially fan-made games, were hosted on the platform itself. Killing Floor was originally an Unreal Tournament mod, after all, but it also led to the iconic Defence Alliance 2. Now a broken relic of what it once was, this mod has faded into unsupported obscurity, but Killing Floor 3 has the perfect opportunity to bring it back and pay homage to the series’ own roots.

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Defence Alliance positions you as soldiers in Killing Floor’s fascist near future, fighting in a giant dystopic metropolis. You can place SAM turrets and automatic sentries, tactically defending your home base against enemy players. There are classes, like the Rocketeer, Medic, and Rifleman, adding variety to each team. In many ways, it was Tripwire’s own Team Fortress Classic, the Half-Life mod that spawned the still immensely popular sequel. But as years went by, Defence Alliance 2 fell apart, negative reviews piled up, and Tripwire left it to the community, rather than taking advantage of its raw potential.

Defence Alliance 2 had a second mode called Specimen Survival. This is the one I lost most of my time to. Killing Floor traditionally boxes you into claustrophobic levels where the hordes can easily overwhelm if you’re not careful, framed much like classic Call of Duty Zombies, just swap the mystery box for a mystery merchant with a dodgy cockney accent.

Specimen Survival, on the other hand, saw those same classes of soldiers in open plains planning defences for swarms of mutants, placing turrets, mines, and other tools to curb their attack as squads banded together to fend them off. It was similar enough to be recognisably Killing Floor (complete with the classic Clots, Gorefasts, and Fleshpounds of the original), but different enough to keep things fresh when you grew tired of the base game.

The best moments were when streams of specimens flowed uphill into your traps as you and your team members stood to the side, ready to ambush them with grenades and a rain of gunfire. Every so often, someone would trigger a slow-mo attack, letting you enter a Matrix-like “zed time”, in which you meticulously popped heads off the encroaching clones in a satisfying cloud of goo and gore. With how repetitive Killing Floor could be, this mod breathed new life into its community.

Killing Floor 2 was decent. But now set in France, the British humour felt washed down to appeal to a mass audience and the enemies were spongier and less satisfying to gun down. Not to mention its predatory MTX model that embraced the 2010s world of Steam and its love of all things loot box and marketplace. It was a cynical time and Killing Floor 2 reflected that, much as the first reflected the budding optimism of a growing online platform. The third game has an opportunity to return to the series’ roots while also embracing its community like never before, leaning into an era of Steam that is clawing back good favour after years of fumbling around in the dark.

Defence Alliance could be an extra mode the second game was clambering to find space for, the refresher that keeps the experience from going stale. Like any multiplayer mod of the ‘00s, it’s a gaming relic lost to time. But 14 years on from its launch, there’s no better way to celebrate its impending anniversary than bringing it back and making it official at long last.

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James is a zoomer from Newcastle who didn't learn what a GameCube was until they were 18. They have bylines at IGN, VG247, and NME, and you can contact them at [email protected]. They/Them.