I keep coming back to the same question with Killing Floor 3: where’s the rest of it? I comfortably spent the last week teaming up against waves of mutant clone zombies, and mindlessly hacking and slashing through these Zeds was a lot of fun. But more than once, my teammates and I – many of whom enjoyed Killing Floor 2, myself included – found ourselves asking one another, “Is this the final release, or is it just Early Access?” Whether you like to play online or if you just prefer to go it alone, Killing Floor 3’s singular Survival mode is generally a good time, but it’s also a much simpler, more tightly-woven shoot-em-up compared to its predecessors. The weapons and classes it does include are at least a blast to use, and its enemies are perfectly balanced; they’re dangerous when you let them swarm you, but boy do they die good. But all this fast-paced action loses its luster once you’ve seen everything it has to offer, which doesn’t take long.
Killing Floor 3’s moment-to-moment action follows the same formula as the first two games, just streamlined for a snappier, more live service-oriented delivery. That includes quicker movement that feels great immediately, letting you dash from side-to-side, mantle up surfaces, and powerslide from sprint to crouch. You’ll still be slashing and blasting your way through waves of enemies, setting up defenses and earning currency to spend on upgraded weapons, armor, ammo, grenades, self-heal refills, and so on between each assault. There’s no linear campaign to break up that chaos, and a relatively limited selection of options at launch: just six playable classes called Perks, 30 weapons (plus the knife), 13 enemy varieties, eight maps, and three total bosses. That does make this a good entry point for anyone just trying to get into the series compared to the infamously bloated Killing Floor 2, but a tougher sell to series veterans who have come to expect a higher level of complexity and tactical depth.
Thankfully, its lone Survival mode stays fun thanks to the off-the-wall combat system. The mode itself is pretty self-explanatory: the only goal is to survive five increasingly deadly waves of Zed and then fight one of the bosses at the end, like the Zerg-like Queen Crawler or the rhinoceros-horned Impaler. According to one of my teammates, who managed to get into a full group with over five players (we only managed to play together in smaller groups of three due to time constraints), these bosses will spawn in clusters as the team fills up – this is meant to keep everything balanced, in theory. You can get pretty creative with how you take them out as Killing Floor 3 hands you an arsenal full of deadly armaments, even down to the basic starting weapons for each class. That could be the Engineer’s versatile Krait submachine gun, the Ninja’s Kiba and Shuriken combo, or even just the knife that every class gets, which is delightfully overpowered.
There are always a few other tactical considerations at play too, adding layers of variety to the carnage. For example, timing your special ability – like the Ninja’s shocking Hebi-Ken, or the Medic’s area-denying and team-healing Sanctum – so that you use it on more powerful opponents like the Scrake or the Siren, or landing enough headshots at the right moment to activate Zed Time, aka sparkling slow-mo, to make wave after wave of these satisfying-to-kill enemies pass by pretty quickly. Class interplay in multiplayer, while still pretty simplistic on paper, can also get interesting when it works well. For instance, the Sharpshooter can turn a group of foes into ice sculptures with her Cryo Grenade, so the Ninja can quickly get in and shatter them with his sword.
Killing Floor 3’s 13 monster types are way more believable-looking and just plain fun to fight, leaving behind puddles of gore and lasting destruction to the environment, and also responding to your attacks in ways that look and feel more realistic thanks to the new and improved physics system. They die quickly enough to make you feel powerful, but the real challenge is in making sure you manage your resources – ammo, health, grenades, trade tools, and your class’s special ability – while providing enough of a fight to keep them from overwhelming you in numbers. Acid-spewing Bloats and sonic boom-launching Sirens show up way more often in Killing Floor 3 than I recall them showing up in Killing Floor 2, as do most of the other sub-boss type enemies – including the series-classic Scrakes, which now don cybernetic augmentations, heavy armor, and a fearsome combination of chainsaws and grappling hooks. Just be prepared for a lot of realistic-looking blood effects. More Zed blood flows across your screen in any given frame than water in a typical Final Fantasy X cutscene.
The eight maps you’ll fight them on are also decently unique in layout and aesthetic design, but there’s nothing particularly different about each to set them apart. The main differences are in tactical advantages, like Convoy’s generous placement of turrets or the height brought by R&D Lab’s different floors, where you can use zip lines to quickly get away from enemies in the main atrium but mantling over the guardrails will drop you to your death. Radar Station is my personal favorite, since I like its spooky central Washington backdrop, complete with mist-cloaked forests under a full moon.
Aside from Normal difficulty, there are two harder difficulty variants to further test your reflexes across each map, as well as your tactical understanding of class, weapon, and monster mechanics. Plus, there’s a pretty cool Weekly Mutation option in the world map menu that throws you into a match with randomized modifiers that work in favor of the Zed swarm. My party and I haven’t managed to beat one of these tougher matches yet, so it’s safe to say they provide a good challenge. I don’t doubt that putting more time into Killing Floor 3, leveling up my characters a bit more, and getting even better with the mechanics will feel rewarding when I’m finally able to beat a boss on the Hell On Earth difficulty.
The six classes are distinct enough that playing each one feels like a meaningfully different experience. You’ve got the versatile small arms-wielding Commando, pyrotechnics-obsessed Firebug, crowd-controlling Sharpshooter, close-quarters combat-focused Ninja, utility and heavy-weapons-savvy Engineer, and a Medic who wields SMGs that shoot healing darts. These classes are pretty standard fare on the surface, and it’s nice that you can mix and match weapons between them, but they all feel unique thanks to meaningful skill progression, as well as their special abilities and unique grenades. Each one also starts with a different trade tools; for instance, the Engineer has the Multi-Tool, which can conveniently activate points of interest around the map, like automated turret installations, armor lockers, and zip line routes. Meanwhile, the Medic starts with a Syringe Bag, which allows players to load up on an extra self-heal syringe mid-battle instead of waiting to buy them at the end of a wave.
Developer Tripwire Interactive took the between-match skill-based progression from previous entries and made it way more accessible by having it come into play earlier on – it now starts when you hit level two with a class instead of level five, a la Killing Floor 2, and then rapidly increases in complexity by unlocking new options every two levels instead of every five, up to what appears to be a level cap of 30. Since leveling up is so quick between sessions, it can feel overwhelming (in a good way) to head back to the hub area after a long series of back-to-back attempts to select a ton of new skills for a given character class.
But that’s all fine, because skills provide modest bumps in tactical performance in various areas, each one pushing your character in the direction of a specific playstyle but never doing so much as to completely redefine a class’s appearance or role. For example, the Ninja is a clear predecessor to Killing Floor 2’s Berserker, wielding melee weapons like the Kiba, Shurikens, and the dual-Katanas while exploiting enemy movements with shock traps. I’ve decked out my Ninja to heal himself by landing parries while increasing the damage of his heavy attacks, which incentivises me to stick to his starting Kiba longer, rather than invest in his Bow or Tanto weapons at the Trader between waves.
My Sharpshooter is the exact opposite, with skill progression that positions her as a stationary combatant by, for instance, giving her boosts to damage while crouching in place or freezing foes with her Cryo Grenade. This makes her tactically advantageous no matter which weapon she’s using, just as long as I keep her far away from the action. This is a great amount of meaningful choice, letting me decide how I want to engage with the carnage ahead of time, without getting lost in the skill menu. My only issue here is a weird bug that caused my UI to completely lock up whenever I hovered above a skill choice for too long, forcing me to completely reboot my game.
Class customization feels deeper than before, but it comes at the expense of Killing Floor 3’s weapon progression system. My main gripe is that the tier system feels completely backwards. First off, there is both persistent progression and mid-match progression to consider. Persistent progression takes place in the hub area, where you use the Armory system to set up custom loadouts for each main weapon and sidearm for each class, which exist in addition to fully decked-out default weapon loadouts that are immediately accessible mid-match – assuming you earn enough currency in a given match to afford those upgrades.
Those predetermined weapons scale from grey to purple, but the tier system only seems to make sense when you consider default loadouts. The basic weapons you start with can be permanently upgraded in the Armory to extremely powerful levels, and it only takes a match or two to earn enough crafting resources to do so. The higher-tier weapons do offer a boost against the default loadouts for lower-tier weapons, but my teammates and I kept finding that our upgraded starter weapons consistently outperformed the expensive purple-tier gear we had to save up for. It creates this weird economy where you’re better off ignoring half the weapon selection entirely – since, with enough (easily obtainable) crafting materials you can craft every mod for every weapon from the very start – giving you the option to create an OP and relatively inexpensive grey weapon for any class, grab it near the beginning of any session, and stick to just that. This can make each match’s mid-game progression feel dull, since the expensive stuff you’re meant to be working toward feels like a downgrade at that point.
At least the weapons across each of the four tiers all feel good to use, regardless of raw damage output, adding to each class’s style and strategy when wielded with the right skill boosts and player tactics. That could be the Engineer’s deadly Ifrit plasma cannon or the Firebug’s explosive Dragonbreath shotgun, which is a total blast against bigger foes like the jetpack-wearing Husk or the aforementioned Impaler boss.
I love that the well-designed Stronghold hub area gives you a place to relax between matches and during Killing Floor 3’s brief but helpful tutorial. This is the central spot to mess around with class and weapon modifications, try different weapons in the shooting range, play with cosmetics, dig into the Season Pass, and pick your next mission. Standing at the mission terminal and plotting a course from the world map genuinely feels like you’re part of Killing Floor 3’s world.
Similar to Killing Floor 2’s Objective Mode, which is absent in the third outing, there are some basic side missions to complete for extra story flavor bits that are built directly into the Survival mode. Those missions have objectives like “scan all the cargo crates at a location on X map,” or “kill 10 of X enemy type,” or “run 2,000 feet,” – you probably get the gist by this point. These reward crafting supplies, Battle Pass points, and experience points that later become useful when unlocking crafted weapon mods, Battle Pass rewards, and class skills in the hub. It’s worth noting that you can also get more crafting supplies by taking out random pieces of equipment, like surveillance cameras and vending machines, which is a small but fun touch.
The missions are all easy to complete in large batches during routine gameplay, but they don’t do much more than add lore flavor and loot. In fact, Killing Floor 3’s story is entirely forgettable. If not for its rather hefty Codex explaining all the important details about these characters, weapons, enemy types, background stories, and so forth, I probably wouldn’t even consciously realize there’s any semblance of a narrative at all. But I already knew what I was getting myself into, and sometimes, as in the case with a series that’s this irreverent, action-packed, and unapologetically gory, less is more.
The hub is also where you’ll encounter the usual live-service stuff that comes with modern multiplayer shooters. Here, you can set up cross-platform multiplayer, which is a welcome inclusion that works well. And then there’s the microtransactions store. It seems to have a small revolving selection of cosmetics for now, kinda like what Diablo 4’s cosmetic store looked like during that game’s launch. I only looked at it once or twice before moving on, so it’s safe to call it an afterthought and not essential to gameplay.
Speaking of live-service checklists, I barely touched the Season Pass or messed with the limited cosmetic customization of my characters – you can only change headgear and armor skins, nothing else. Just expect to spend the equivalent of $4.99 for 500 in-game store points for aesthetics that don’t really matter or differentiate your character too much. Are these microtransactions burdensome? Probably not. Marginally annoying? Definitely.
