Killing Floor 3 is fun, frenetic, and a bloody good time. This series has come a long way since its initial entry, and Killing Floor 3 is a very strong entry that innovates on the core loop while delivering all of the gorey, zombie dismembering horde shooting you could want. It feels great to play, but it almost feels like the amount of content it brings to the table is a little bare for a full release.
Killing Floor 3
Developer: Tripwire Interactive
Price: $39.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PS5, Xbox Series S/X
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
I love me a good cooperative shooter experience. You don’t need to sweat so hard, you aren’t having fun, and it’s a great little playground just to hang out with your friends. In particular, I’ve been drawn to horde shooters since I fell in love with Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 360. I remember finding the original Killing Floor on PC and really enjoyed the added layer of customization you had as a player, even if I preferred the light narrative structure of Left 4 Dead levels over the more closed in arenas of Killing Floor. I don’t have a ton of experience with the second entry, but I remember thinking it was fine; it just never managed to grab me.
That being said, I can’t put Killing Floor 3 down. There are some skeletons in the closet we have to address, but I’ve been having an absolute blast playing the third entry so far. The guns feel weighty and responsive, with some really great audio and visual feedback associated with them. Shotguns in particular are always something I pay attention to in first person shooter games because I love a good shotgun, and I was eating so good with those in particular in this game. Every perk (think of a class in most any other game like this) has access to four different primaries and a secondary meant for them, but you can also use other perks’ weapons mid-match, so there is a pretty wide variety of weapons to choose from.
Killing Floor 3 has a player hub for yourself and up to five other players, where you can prepare your perk, loadouts, skills, and more that you start out with every time. You start a match once you are ready, pick your difficulty, and you can enter matchmaking to fill up the rest of your party before you go and fight wave after wave of zombie monsters before the final wave, where you will fight one of the 3 current bosses (Where is the Patriarch though????). After that, win or lose, you get points to level up your perk, crafting items, and experience for what is essentially your live-service battle pass.
The game looks great running on Unreal Engine 5. Unfortunately, I’ve been having issues getting the performance to where it should be. Even after the absolutely massive day one patch they dropped, which I figure is what they worked on during the 4 month delay the game had. I’ve had to play the game on low settings to get frame rates approaching anything respectable. Thankfully, that is better than the latter, where even on low, my game would drop to single digits during hectic fights. I’m hoping the developers follow through with their plan and continue to release performance hotfixes, given how this appears to be such a widespread issue for the playerbase. Hopefully, my experiences with performance issues will quickly become dated.
I ended up having a blast with the build-crafting options in Killing Floor 3. Between the guns and the perks, you can craft weapon mods from items you collect while playing the game and even upgrade them further. The gun loadouts you customize yourself are MUCH more powerful than the ones generated each round, so getting familiar with this system is key. You can totally change the way a gun operates, or just build to its strengths and its original function with this system. It’s actually pretty well balanced with the rate you get crafting items as well.
For perks, each one has its own skill tree to modify and improve their kit, a unique throwable item that is various flavors of grenades, and their gadget, which is a powerful ability on a cooldown that can level the playing field if you use it right, in addition to more passive buffs. Every 2 levels, a perk goes up, unlocks another tier of skills, which you can choose one of per tier, forcing you to find synergies and make decisions. My choices felt impactful. Every match you gain proficiency that you can use to further level up the bonuses to the skill, so I was always increasing my perk’s power in smaller amounts between larger jumps, like a new tier of super impactful skills.
The perks themself are a ton of fun to use. The Commando is a well-rounded fighter with a variety of fully automatic weapons and a flying turret to support him. The Firebug specializes in area of effect damage and denial, covering the battlefield in flames. At the same time, the Engineer carves through enemies at close range with an arsenal of heavy weapons like shotguns, grenade launchers, and a shoulder-mounted sonic turret! If longer ranges call to you, the Sharpshooter can dish out big damage from a distance and has a wrist-mounted launcher that shoots out a homing arrow that zips around killing enemies like Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy. Rounding out the cast, the Medic can hold his own in a fight while keeping the party fortified and healed up, and finally, the Ninja, my beloved. Cutting up zombies with a variety of bladed weapons feels great, while his throwing weapons have limited ammo that you can retrieve, and he can even zip himself to enemies while delivering a large shock to everything around the target.
Killing Floor 3 Delivers Intense Action but Feels Incomplete
The framework in Killing Floor 3 is great. The enemies have an awesome variety present that you will have a blast learning how to fight, and the game has super fun customization allowing for tons of player expression via gameplay. It even has a quick and dirty little story to lead you to the next match for the first five or so hours, which I understand will continue in later seasons of the game. I just worry that a lack of basic things you would expect, like text chat and emotes, combined with me seeing a majority of the content besides jacking up the difficulty and the associated grind for it in about 20 hours, that this got pushed out a little quickly. It feels a little bit more like an Early Access title in a lot of ways, and I was hoping for a bit more of a content-rich launch. Only five waves are available, and three bosses are a bit disappointing in particular.
The Final Word
Killing Floor 3 provides a great FPS experience for people looking for a horde shooter to play with friends. It has deep, fulfilling customization for the genre, great feeling gunplay, surprisingly good melee combat, and fun perks to choose from. You might be quick to exhaust the content with only 8 maps to choose from if you don’t want to dive deep into multiple perks. I think Killing Floor 3 is one to watch if you aren’t sold yet. I think the fine folk at Tripwire are cooking something up that is only going to get better from here, despite feeling a little bare on release.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
