Killing

There’s something to be said for teaming up with your friends, holding your ground against an ever-increasing horde of “Zeds”, and turning them into all sorts of chummed, chopped, exploded, and otherwise eviscerated gibs with buckets of blood to boot.  It’s been since November of 2016 since Killing Floor II launched.  The team at TripWire has a whole new futuristic look at a monster-infested dystopian future, but the longer I play it, the more I find myself asking about the road ahead.  Let’s get into what’s here at launch and what lies beyond.  

Killing Floor, as a series, is a survival class-based wave shooter. In the first game, a bioengineering company named Horzine Biotech was hired by the government with the sole purpose of creating an unstoppable super soldier.  The development is as problematic as it is unethical, so the Board of Directors for the company shuts down the project.  In a Green Goblin-esque move, the CEO of the company instead uses himself as a test subject, transforming into a grotesque creature called The Patriarch.  The British government immediately moved to destroy this Patriarch and his vile creations, but they were little match for them. 

In the second game, which takes place a month after the first game’s initial outbreak, London has been fully overrun, and now the infection is spreading across Europe.  Military forces have mobilized but offered little in the way of resistance against the ever-expanding hordes.  You’re tasked with joining a ragtag group to break into the various Horzine bases where more Zeds are being spawned with the sole purpose of finding the boss monsters that serve as the leadership caste of the Zeds and taking them out.  This second game expanded on the storyline for the series, giving us a peek into the Zeds, their leadership structure and more, granting more backstory for the creatures than being shambalic hordes of teeth and death.  

Bafflingly, the story of Killing Floor III is…well, there isn’t much of one.  There is a central hub, we’re fighting the same horde from the same corporation, the year is 2091, and this time we’re part of a rebel group called Nightfall with the same objective as the group from the second game – destroy the Zed army.  The narrative takes a back seat to relentless horde-based gameplay where humanity has already lost.  You’ll recognize familiar places from the first two games, though the maps have been rebuilt with more verticality and variety, and you’ll feel the loss of that expanded storyline.  

The first thing you’ll notice is that Killing Floor III is a brutally gorgeous game.  The Zeds explode in a hail of gore, teeth, blood, and worse.  Acid and bile splash the camera, blood paints the walls and floors, and every map looks futuristic and dystopian.  One map is a forest complete with fog and enough dark corners to keep you on your toes.  The maps are all very vertical, varied, and extraordinarily well laid out to my eyes.  If I graded this game on graphics alone, it walks away with a perfect score.  The content may be stomach churning, but it’s a feast for the eyes.  That said, there seems to be a persistent issue where connection issues causes the game to chug in a way that drops frames and makes motion blur look like a smear.  Patches are needed here. 

After finishing up a super quick tutorial you’ll gain access to the matchmaking system.  Heading to a central computer hub you’ll have your choice of a few locations, you’ll match up with your friends, get on a VTOL, and drop in.  Gameplay, at launch, is a single Survival mode – multiple waves where you are expected to wipe out a certain amount of enemies, then you’re given a bit of time to rearm, upgrade, and reload.  Ready to face the next horde, you take out increasingly more difficult enemies, patching up between waves.  The final wave is a boss fight, with peon Zeds acting as backup.  The second game introduced these boss fights at the end of the waves, and the third game wisely keeps that. That also means that the moment-to-moment gameplay is going to feel both familiar and the same, albeit with some major differences. 

I had to install and play the second game for a bit to confirm it, but Killing Floor 3 moves a bit faster than the second game, but there’s more to it than that.  Dashing, climbing, sliding, and sprinting all feel refined and faster than its predecessor, more akin to Call of Duty than Ready or Not.  

While Killing Floor has always been class based, the new classes each feel like they’ve been polished to perfection.  Each one of them feels widely different from the other, even though you can share weapons between them.  The special attacks and powers that you can use right out of the gate, as well as the improvements that evolve over time via the Perk system, make you feel like you’ve got a lot of evolutionary choices to make.  It’s how long that evolution takes that perhaps didn’t get as much polish.  Let’s get a touch deeper into it. 

At launch there are six classes, and in a team they all have very distinct and useful roles.  The Commando is your run and gun balanced class, perfect for newcomers to the series and folks just getting back into series.  They’re a sort of jack-of-all-trades.  The Ninja is on the opposite of the spectrum, operating as a fast melee combat focused fighter, using a grappling hook to zip around the battle space, electrified attacks, and ruthless health-leeching attacks when you’ve built them up enough.  The Sharpshooter is a traditional sniper, focused on precision.  They don’t seem all that useful, except when you remember that the boss fights go a lot faster and more smoothly if you can get some high-impact firepower into their exposed weak spots.  Cryo grenades buy space to land those shots, also helping the team displace in a pinch.  If cold isn’t your jam, my favorite class, the Firebug, is for you.  Every weapon is built around fire, doing area-of-effect damage as well as stacked flame damage.  The Engineer is your logistical support, able to open boxes that contain armor, turn on turrets in the environment, grant access to ziplines, lay mines to create choke points, and more.  The final class, the Medic, is about expanding the survivability of the team.  Able to provide area-of-effect healing, hitting players with more effective healing darts, and generally helping keep everyone alive.  Each class is fairly effective on their own, but when used as part of a team it instantly makes you feel like a cohesive badass crew.  It’s the skills that pay the bills, though.

Each class has a special Perk that is unique to them.  While you can spend the cash you earn from kills to buy weapons and equipment from other classes (e.g. everyone can buy the Phosphorus Shotgun that is normally in the Firebug arsenal, and everyone can deploy ammo cans or use engineering tools to turn on turrets), the Perks for each class take time to build up and are only usable by the specific class to which they’re assigned.  This completely overhauled system is the secret sauce of this sequel and clearly a place where TripWire spent a great deal of time.  Let’s go over a few, though this isn’t a comprehensive list by any stretch.  

The Commando class is likely where you’ll start your journey, so we’ll talk about their Perk first.  On a cooldown (though it’s a fairly short one), the Commando can deploy an automated Hellion drone that can fire explosive acid rounds into Zeds, almost assuredly and instantaneously killing whatever they hit.  You can spread the love by having it target multiple foes as you move around, or just keep it trained on a bigger foe to whittle them down.  Leveling up gives you access to new perks, including reducing that cooldown, increasing the acid splash damage, or raising the damage and amount of time the drone stays deployed, to name a few.  Other perks can cause grenades to bounce, increase blast radius, and more.  

As a second example, the Firebug has a special attack called Wildfire that busts a massive ring of fire around the player, burning everything around them.  Upgraded perks increases the duration and radius (Tar Fuel), adds an underslung grenade launcher for your rifle, reloads your flamethrower faster, or vastly increases the amount of damage and burn time of all fire effects. All of the classes have similar perks to unlock, and there will inevitably be a bunch of guides on what is best for the meta, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Beyond classes, weapons, and Perks, you also have “Zed Time”.  Zed Time is a gameplay mechanic where the game would slow time for all players, giving a bit of a reprieve where the team could thin the herd a bit.  Where this was triggered almost randomly by killing a specific Zed in the previous game, it’s a reward for precision in Killing Floor 3.  By popping the heads off of a certain amount of the horde, the game now triggers that slow motion for the crew in a predictable fashion – an improvement as it feels like something you earn instead of something you stumble into.  Better still, if you’ve got a Commando on your crew, and they’re within a 10 meter range, you get a tidy 15% multiplier for how fast Zed Time is earned, as well as extending it a touch.  It’s a great perk and a good reason to bring a Commando along for the fight.  

Let’s pause for a moment on tactics and talk about numbers. Killing Floor 3 has a solid variety of critters to crush into gore confetti – 13 types in all.  In a nod to games like Diablo, each wave will assign a randomized modifier to each of the creatures, giving them affixes such as a touch more health, an environmental effect like resisting fire or cold, or other similar modifiers.  Similarly, the foes you face also get an upgrade, with creatures like Bloats (the acid puking foe) being more puke-prone than previously, Sirens having a more devastating shriek attack, or the Scrakes coming equipped with Hellraiser-esque hook arms.  The variety plus the modifiers means you have to really pay attention to what foes you’re facing rather than just trying to chew them up as they shamble towards you – sometimes displacement is the better part of survival.

In addition to the variety of weapons, skills, and foes, there is now more variety of ways to gib the Zed horde.  Pipes can be shot to create flame choke points, fans can be activated to chum smaller Zed into bits as they attempt to walk past.  Shock traps, closing doors, raising and lowering platforms, and otherwise controlling the map makes each of the eight maps that are available at launch feel like tiny puzzles in and of themselves. Mastering them will help you conserve your resources and give you a fighting chance at survival.  

There are a total of 30 weapons in the game, and as I mentioned before you can mix and match them between classes.  I personally like using the Firebug’s weapons regardless of which class I’m using, but that’s personal choice.  You’ll find your favorites.  As you’d expect in a Counter-Strike round-based approach style, the first weapons suck, and the top tier ones cost a bundle of Dosh (the currency) but have a number of effects as well.  These feel balanced, but I have to say that the mods feel like a step in the grind direction.  

The mods feel like they fell straight out of a mobile game.  Finishing a map gives me, as an example, 10 gray matter, 10 electrical parts, 32 chemical weapons, 24 bio samples, 12 scrap metal, 10 biosteel, 4 ZedTech, and 2 ichor.  Unlocking the Electrical Ammo upgrade might cost you 24 of those electrical parts and 9 bio samples, giving you 5% more accuracy, 4% more damage, and 30 Shock Affliction, as an ammo mod, just as one example.  It just feels like a ton of resource types, and for such a “make the number go up” sort of upgrade.  I feel like this chase detracts from the fun of the core experience in a way that lacks creativity.  I hope that we see a “Weapons 2.0” overhaul for these mods in future patches.  

The last number is three – that’s the total bosses you’ll face in the 1.0 version of Killing Floor III – the Impaler, the Queen Crawler, and the Chimera.  I don’t want to spoil how to fight them, their weaknesses, or anything like that – they’re the puzzle you’ll need to solve to win the wave, so they’re yours to discover.  I’m just sad there’s not more of them.

We did run into some challenges with the game at launch.  We purposely waited a few patches for the majority of the bugs to subside, but we struggled to get three of us into a match when crossplay was involved.  Four attempts had us bouncing out randomly with a message about crossplay not being enabled despite all of us checking that setting.  It finally clicked and remained stable from there.  We did have a player get knocked down and fall into the floor in an unreachable state.  We also had an issue with a crash to desktop (though the rejoin worked flawlessly), and framerate dropping to around 30fps when synched up with a PS5 player when I was running on my 5090. It didn’t happen all the time, but when it did it stuck there till the map ended.  Patches have cleared up the vast majority of the launch bugs, but there are still a few more to crush.  

This brings me back to the point I said I’d come back to – I feel like I’m looking at where Killing Floor II launched in Early Access.  Yes, there is a fairly solid game here, and it’s a lot of fun with friends (up to six of them!) but it’s leaning forward into cosmetic microtransactions and a bit of a live service-like grind.  Battle passes (including a second season in the next four months) that includes a seventh class, another map, more weapons, and more are a part of that live service, as are what feels like a heavier emphasis on a long and repetitive grind in the core experience.  The second game launched in a similar state where it needed additional work, but thankfully we’re talking about a company that has demonstrated time and again a willingness to support a game for years after launch.  The core is here, it just needs time and attention to build on that in a way that matches where Killing Floor II eventually landed.  Right now we have a gorgeous game that just feels like it needs a bit more to bring back veterans and entice new players alike. 

Review Guidelines

Good

Killing Floor III launches with a few bugs to hammer out, absolutely gorgeous and balanced maps, a completely revamped class system that is a blast to play, and enough gore to fill a swimming pool full of blood and teeth. It also feels like it’s a bit light on content.  The live service portions can all die in a fire – take it out and this game improves immediately.  Let’s hope TripWire hammers on this the way they did with the previous game – the core is here, just waiting to make it the tactical shooter it needs to be.  

Pros

• Deliciously rendered gore aplenty
• Monster variety and modifiers are a welcome improvement
• Classes are excellent and improved over KF2
• It’s just plain fun to play with friends

Cons

• Live service systems belong in the trash
• Feels light on some content
• Story has just been dropped almost entirely
• The grind is excessive and pervasive

This review is based on a retail PC and PS5 copies provided by the publisher.

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