If you made a list of every complaint that you ever heard from another player in “Friday the 13th: The Game” (whose original developer, IllFonic, handled this one as well), “Killer Klowns” would seem to provide some kind of experimental solution for each of them, however successful. Where a skilled Jason Voorhees was generally overpowered and difficult to deal with, a Klown’s fairly easy to take out as long as you’ve got a good weapon or two. The counselors in “Friday” were often a little passive, hiding and running out the clock in hopes of escaping to the police; here, the clock fully favors the Klowns. And, as a human, there’s not a bunch of downtime spent spectating other players in the event of your death; you can either respawn with the help of your teammates or help them out with a series of minigames, delivering useful items to the living through the clever Hand-of-Fate system.
The pace of play feels faster and livelier than “Friday” because there are three killers, plural — three Klowns and seven humans — plus plenty of objectives to keep you busy when you’re not in a fight for your life. If you’re a Klown, you’ve got four Lackey Generators to get powered up. Each of these holds four hot-pink “cocoons,” which you can find scattered around the map or create by zapping your human prey with a weapon like the Cotton Candy Raygun. As you power these machines up with more and more cocoons, you’ll spawn computer-controlled Lackeys, which patrol the map and act as a kind of alarm system — or a living trap if a human gets close enough to one. If you manage to fill up all four machines, with a total of 16 cocoons, you’ll trigger the Klownpocalypse right away. Normally, this is what happens when the clock hits zero; a ball of dark energy appears in the sky at the center of the map and expands outward, killing any remaining humans caught in its radius.
For the human team, looting is the name of the game. A sharp weapon or two can kill a Klown, a sparkplug or gas can will help you activate one of the escape routes, and there are even cassette tapes like the collectible audio logs in “Friday.” (The one time I found one of these, a bug prevented me from picking it up.) There’s an underground bomb shelter the humans can escape to, a locked gate that leads to a bridge, a teleportation portal, and a motorboat. In the last couple minutes before a Klownpocalypse event, the ice-cream truck from the “Killer Klowns” film — called the Terenzi Truck in the game — will crash through a barrier on the periphery of the map, creating a fifth, last-ditch exit point.