Spending unholy amounts of ammunition to wipe out evil hordes is a time-honored tradition in games. Admittedly, this is something I prefer doing the proper way—after pushing a coin into the lightgun game at the arcade. However, I’m not averse to cleaning the Earth from scum in the comfort of my home either, and that’s where Killing Floor comes in.
My experience in the franchise is limited toKilling Floor 2, a game that leaned hard on three pillars: a banging soundtrack, classic Wright and Pegg humor, and an undying love of violence. It was a fun time that did not try to take itself too seriously, but which clearly valued and respected the setting.
The prequel was fun for me, but Killing Floor 3 is not a game I was super hyped up for. Tripwire Interactive stole my heart withRising Storm 2: Vietnam, then broke it as support for the game whittled away after the first two years.
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To Tripwire’s credit, the road to release for Killing Floor 3 has been rather transparent as far as hands-on time goes. The game has gone throughmultiple rounds of public testing, including a server stress-test that required no NDA last week.
If you care at all about Killing Floor, odds are you’ve been reading plenty about what Killing Floor 3 is and isn’t. This review only accounts for the release version, as it would be unfair to pile up on problems from earlier tests that have been rectified since.
Play It For The Plot
Let’s start with something fun, for the two other people out there who swear up and down that they play Killing Floor ‘for the plot’. Killing Floor 2 was set around 2017, but this game jumps straight into 2091. That alone has a few implications, most of which I’m not a fan of.
All of the cool, fleshed-out characters (within reason for a zombie shoot-‘em-all) are gone. Their replacements aren’t particularly memorable or charismatic, and are the equivalent of a mediocre American adaptation of a good British show. Poetic on Tripwire’s part that you may play as a clone of Mr. Foster, and he’s a shadow of his former self.
The more grounded, familiar world and guns of yore give way to… well, the same old, but with that unoriginal cyberpunk veneer slapped on top of it. The facilities get some neon lights and polished metal walls. Your gun is still that rifle from 90 years ago, except it now has some silly moving parts that serve no function. The future is now, and I hate it. We had it good with the 2010scurrent-day zombie oversaturation.
Rather than being a clean-up crew for Horzine, you’re part of a rebel group called Nightfall. The operations hub is an ersatz Batcave that has a more agreeable futuristic touch that wouldn’t be out of place inThe Outer Worlds. The facility is compact and easy to navigate, though I wish what each terminal did was a little more obvious without interacting with it.
Doing a massive time skip in a popular franchise is a bold move that can pay off if you use that clean slate to revolutionize the whole thing, but Killing Floor 3 uses it to deliver watered-down versions of the same old.
Killing & Chilling
Even if Killing Floor 3 fails to set the scene as well as its predecessors, that doesn’t have a direct impact on the gameplay. The loop should feel familiar for anyone who’s played a horde clean-up game: spawn, wipe out a wave while trying to complete minor objectives, rinse and repeat until you’re out of enemies or bullets.
Killing baddies, completing objectives and vandalizing Horzine property gives you money. you’re able to use that dosh to restock your ammunition and consumables at the pod between waves, and the game gives you a glowing line showing the quickest path to it so you don’t waste time bumbling around.
The combat in Killing Floor 3 flip-flops between mediocre and exciting, but even at its peaks, it falls short of the heart-pumping action of its predecessor.
The loop should feel familiar for anyone who’s played a horde clean-up game: spawn, wipe out a wave while trying to complete minor objectives, rinse and repeat until you’re out of enemies or bullets.
Zed waves have decent pacing to them, starting out with average weak specimens punctuated with a stalker or two, progressively escalating as the match draws on. This ties in nicely with the pod, since you typically want more firepower for the late waves.
Most of the specimens in the game are directly derived from those in earlier games, which is nice because they were so well-made in Killing Floor 2, but it feels a little repetitive. I liked how the sirens got a nice cybernetic makeover that makes them creepier by a good amount, and to that end, I wish the rest of the zeds had a more original flair like that.
I have developed an undying hatred for the wannabe Mandalorian zed since most of the time this bastard sits perched on top of a building, often without line of sight, lobbing rockets at you while you deal with its more personal friends. This makes blowing it up extremely satisfying.
On the plus side, the zeds have a bigger bonus for hitting weak spots so you’re not just riding the lightning on full auto. The game has overhauled zed time to make shot placement easier here, but I find that most of the time it’s triggered when there are three lonely specimens around that were never a problem anyway.
Shootin’ Bird
Much like my aim, the gunplay in Killing Floor 3 is inconsistent. I like that the crosshairs are off by default, so hip-firing actually feels frantic, and the visual feedback from the guns has a nice punch from the recoil.
Connecting a shot knocks zeds back, and occasionally pops a limb or two in a beautiful, gory spectacle. If you pink mist someone up close, your gun gets coated in a nice layer of blood. However, that illusion falls apart due to the lackluster sounds and awkward player movement.
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None of the movements in the game feel like they have any inertia, making it feel like you’re not controlling a body holding a gun but are just floating in the map.
I can understand these concessions in movement for the sake of gameplay, but extending that lightness to the aiming takes away the feeling that you’re firing anything. It’s also not particularly useful since the enemies typically come from one or two directions at most, so you have no need for that 360-no-scope twitch.
The second offender here is the audio. In simple terms, firing a big boy like the SCAR chambered in 7.62x51mm should not sound like spitting BBs from an airsoft gun, especially in a tight space. I’m not asking for tinnitus, but have a heart, Tripwire. Make me feel like the shots count for something.
Connecting a shot knocks zeds back, and occasionally pops a limb or two in a beautiful, gory spectacle.
In keeping with the cyberpunk vibe introduced by the time skip, the weapons in Killing Floor 3 are real guns dressed up with pseudofuturistic gizmos. If that’s your thing, maybe you’ll dig it. I’d trade it for my trusty M16 with the M203 grenade launcher any day of the week.
To Tripwire’s credit,the game’s roadmapshows somemore grounded weapons are cominglater, including the AK-12K, a carbine-length version of the Kalashnikov AK-12 that entered production this year.
Can You Hear Me, Major Zed?
Although it is most felt when shooting, the sound design in Killing Floor 3 lets the game down across the board.
The guns having no serious audible punch is bad enough, but it doesn’t come close to the zed mostly sounding like hungry Guinea pigs, or the corny, out-of-place quips that give me PTSD flashbacks fromSniper Elite: Resistance.
Excuse the lack of technicality here, but the entire soundscape of the game feels like it’s lacking in depth. Sounds do not significantly change regardless of whether you’re outside or indoors. That’s a shame because a zed horde charging you in a claustrophobic space like a lab corridor does feel scary, but the weak audio does not back it up.
The underwhelming audio gets especially clear when you’re surrounded or bleeding out. The specimens stand over you awkwardly taking swipes, with some strange animations of them eating you, and generic sounds playing from what feels far away.
Killing Floor 3 feels like such a massive downgrade from other modern horror titles in terms of audio, and I hope it’s something Tripwire addresses somewhere down the line because it holds the game back immensely.
The visuals are a different story, though the outcome is unfortunately similar—the game is not quite there yet. On high settings, Killing Floor 3 is beautiful, and you can see the amount of love that went into the characters, enemies, and maps. Most players don’t really get to enjoy that though, because the game currently suffers from severe performance issues that limit the average rig to medium settings even with DLSS on.
I don’t want to say that it looks ugly on medium per se, but it is definitely below modern standards, especially for a game that thrives on spectacle. It’s not a good thing to be playing a game and thinking that my time would be better invested in Killing Floor 2 than this.
Does It Need To Exist?
The attempt to reboot and modernize the franchise is a valiant one, and despite all the flaws, you’re able to see that the developers care about it. Just look at how much it improved between early public tests and now, fueled by community feedback.
Still, good intentions a great game do not make. You can see that Killing Floor 3 has the foundations to make a decent horde-slayer, and if the Killing Floor 2 support cycle is anything to go by, it will eventually get there. However, I can’t judge this by what I think it will be a couple of years from now. If you’re itching to blow up some zeds, just pick up the second game on sale and wait it out.
Closing Comments:
Killing Floor 3 is a lovingly executed game that just wasn’t too thought-through in the first place. Moving the franchise almost a century into the future only works if you have a concrete vision for how we got there from where we started, but this feels like a conceptual downgrade relative to Killing Floor 2, without the benefits of new tech. Mowing down zed is still fun in principle, but the weak sound design, questionable aesthetic shift, and repetitive gameplay loop make it hard to justify at the full price of $39.99. If Tripwire supports this game as much as it did with its predecessor, Killing Floor 3 stands a chance of being good. For now, it isn’t there yet.
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