Killing Floor 3 is one of the most visceral games I've ever played. Insofar as, well, even a simple firefight will leave the place spattered with viscera, every corner of the room filled with buckets full of gore for just a handful of kills.
It's enough to make you want to reach for a mop and bucket, honestly. The thing is a game of Killing Floor 3 is never just a handful of kills. Killing Floor has a rich legacy as a horde shooter and developer Tripwire Interactive has gone hard on the horde part, practically drowning you in enemies at all times. There's usually a swarm of Zeds pushing at you from every angle, clogging up your field of view and forcing you to fight on the enemies' terms rather than your own. The game is at its best when you're on the back foot, low on ammo and hoofing it between enclosed corridors and debris-strewn courtyards.
Killing Floor 3's core premise hasn't changed much since the original game made its debut as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod in 2005. You're part of an elite paramilitary group desperately trying to survive against hordes of Zeds—not zombies but brand name mutant monsters from the Umbrella Corporation-esque bioweapons corporation Horzine—or die trying. You'll do this wave by wave, with just enough time between scraps to hustle to a trader and top off your ammo or armour or buy a shiny new gun.
Over time, these Zeds have evolved and so has Killing Floor. Killing Floor 3 takes inspiration from hero shooters like Overwatch or Marvel Rivals, making the individual classes of the previous games into specific characters with their own skills. Practically, this means that the classes have their own unique grenade, a selection of weapons they do more damage with, and an incredibly powerful "ultimate" ability. Mr Foster is no longer a skin you can select, but a character that means you'll be playing as the Commando.
Across Reddit and Steam forums, this looks like it's been a contentious change, but after playing for a couple of hours it doesn't feel that different from Killing Floor 2's perk system. It's more efficient to use assault rifles if you're the Commando, sure, but you don't have to. The biggest change? That's that all-powerful gadget that functions like an ultimate, giving you an incredibly effective emergency button you can hit roughly once every round and a half or so. The commando gets a little drone that pops up over your shoulder and fires acid rounds at hordes you target and it's a total game changer. But that's not my favourite. The Engineer has little shoulder-mounted sound cannons which you can fire manually, pulverising enemies in front of you until they are little more than paste.
Progression for these characters is much faster, too. I played for around three hours during a closed beta weekend and got a handful of levels for the Engineer, Commando and Ninja—this game's replacement for my beloved Berserker—that allowed me to choose a few different traits. This means each time you play, at least those first few sessions, you're going to feel like you're making progress. This was my biggest annoyance with Killing Floor and Killing Floor 2, where after a few hours you never really got anywhere.
Steam helpfully tells me I've played 63 hours of Killing Floor and 41 hours of Killing Floor 2 and I never felt like I'd made any meaningful progression. I didn't make any in a couple of hours with Killing Floor 3 either, but I can see a bright future where I'm actually rewarded for the time I'm pouring into the game.
Combat flows well, both solo and in multiplayer. A lot of this is the upgrades to the Zeds I mentioned earlier. From the lowliest Clot to the terrifying Scrakes, they've all been given some upgrades. Often, this just plays into the science fiction body horror theme of the thing, and they've had plates of armour welded on just about everywhere. Every enemy has one new trick though: the Scrake's chainsaw is now also capable of firing out a grapple hook to bring you right into chainsawing range, while the spiderlike Crawlers can now crawl over walls and ceilings to get to you, something that feels like a tiny change until they drop in behind you, blocking off your escape routes.
Bigger enemies will now blast clean through walls, tearing doors off their hinges as they step forwards to mess you up, and combat is faster across the board, and now I find myself pinballing through chokepoints, trying to thin a herd of enemies and avoid getting pinned down.
Gunplay feels fluid with this higher pace, too. Assault rifles bark and skip around at range, meaning you'll be looking to close the distance yourself, dancing in and out of the crowd so you can do the most damage. You can see this more with the Ninja's armoury, many of which are melee. This means a good Ninja player will actually have to hop in and out of combat, leathering a few monsters and then dodging back as it gets messy. Later you get a bow, which rewards precise shooting and careful ammo management. This adds a whole new dimension to things because, frankly, while ammo is often at a premium, Killing Floor 3 is not an easy game to conserve your shots in.
Despite all of the changes, everything still feels charmingly old school. In an interview with our own Tyler Wilde, Tripwire studio creative director Bryan Wynia explained that one of the biggest things the team learnt from a lengthy prototyping phase on Killing Floor 3 was that "classic wave based combat is the lifeblood of Killing Floor."
They also learnt that its players don't just see it as a co-op game.
"One of the things that we gathered data on from KF and KF2 that's now part of KF3 that I think helps make us a little different from other wave-based shooters is that our playerbase is almost 51 percent likes to play with a friend and 49 percent likes to play alone," said Wynia. "So, dynamic balancing is really important for us. If it's just me playing at a specific difficulty setting it's balanced for that. If there's six players, we have it balanced for that too. Prototyping let us find the lifeblood, the DNA, of Killing Floor, and really emphasise those biggest parts."
Which explains how Killing Floor 3 always made me feel like my back was against a wall whether I was playing alone or when I teamed up with PCG's Evan Lahti to mess up some Zeds as a pair. I vastly prefer the game as a multiplayer experience, both because I like the extra chaos, but because Killing Floor 3 is a game that's full of "what the f**k was that" moments, and sometimes it's good to have someone else there to talk through what you just saw.
This taste has given me enough to be excited for the main event, when the game releases on March 25, 2025 and I can get my buddies involved. I'm intending to be knee-deep in Zeds as soon as possible.
