‘Killing Floor 3’ Has the Foundation for a Great Shooter, But Currently Lacks Meat [Review]

As much as they go through periods of oversaturation, mowing down zombies is one of gaming’s simplest pleasures. It’s something so morally straightforward and viscerally satisfying, while still being versatile enough to be either scary, humorous, or somewhere in between. Killing Floor 3, the latest in the well-loved co-op multiplayer horror franchise, once again harnesses the good game feel of blasting zombies to bits, but after spending several hours with it, I began to wonder if that was its only trick.

While I have experience with some co-op multiplayer shooters, I never ended up playing either of the other Killing Floor games. I’d heard great things about them, but none of my friends owned them so I never got around to giving them a try. I point this out to make sure you know my perspective going into this, as my conclusions may be different from someone with experience with the series. I won’t be able to point out the differences between this game and its predecessors, but I can provide the viewpoint of a new player, which is theoretically what they are trying to capture with a new entry in the series.

My first impression of the game was pretty positive. As I ran through the tutorial, I was impressed at how good it felt to shoot zombies, or Zeds as they’re called in this game. There’s some great dismemberment tech that allows you to blow off chunks of the enemies, creating some pretty great gore effects throughout. The hordes felt well-paced and exciting to blast your way through, and the guns packed a good punch. But once I got through the first real match, I was taken aback by how surprisingly simple the game was overall.

When the match started, I was running around looking for an objective marker, but there was none to be found, just a counter in the corner of the screen with the number of remaining zombies, and an indication that there would be six rounds. I was trying to figure out if I was missing something, but I slowly came to realize that the structure of this game was just about surviving hordes of enemies wave by wave. It’s hard to tell if I just had different expectations based on other, more objective focused co-op shooters, like Left 4 Dead or GTFO, or if this was something the game wasn’t communicating well, but this second impression of the game was where things started to feel a bit underwhelming.

Each match has six rounds; the first five are standard waves of zombies, sometimes with specific mutators that will buff the enemies in certain ways to add challenge or variety, followed by a boss fight at the end. In between each round, you go towards a trader terminal that allows you to spend money that you accrue during each wave on new weapons, upgrades, tools, health items, and ammo in order to prepare you for the next round. There’s no items to be picked up or scavenged from the level, so this is your only opportunity to resupply to prevent your guns from running out in the middle of all the carnage.

Waves of Zeds feel pretty satisfyingly varied and well-paced, escalating nicely throughout the 30-minute matches. Within the world of the game, the zombies are all clones created by evil megacorp Horzine in the year 2091, so there’s a clever sci-fi element integrated into their designs. There are some standard fodder zombies, but they’re mixed in with tougher enemies that are armed with built in chainsaws or jet packs, adding an element of prioritization that you have to do as the hordes bear down on you. It’s a satisfying feeling to have to keep your head on a swivel to spot wall crawlers while trying to take down a massive brute that could grapple you at any second, forcing you to be attentive during the chaos.

To deal with these zombies you’ll be selecting one of six Perks, which are the character classes for Killing Floor 3. There’s the all-around gun expert Commando, flame-based Firebug, rifle-focused Sharpshooter, melee expert Ninja, heavy weapons toting Engineer, and self explanatory Medic. Each of them are defined by a gadget, which acts as a rechargeable special, and their array of four weapons that they have access to. As you play more with each Perk, you’ll begin to unlock their skill tree, which provides you with several avenues to customize the character to your playstyle, often giving you new passive abilities or upgrading your carrying capacity. I tried out all of the classes and found myself gravitating most to the Firebug, whose weapons leave large patches of flames that can help do damage over time to the waves of Zeds that rush you. I found something to like about almost all the classes, except for the Ninja, who felt like such a departure from the others that I couldn’t get a good grasp on how to play him correctly.

The gunplay in Killing Floor 3 is definitely one of the highlights of the game, and the wide variety you see between the classes feels great. The weapons find just the right balance of having a good amount of recoil that forces you to be deliberate with your aiming, but not so much that it’s annoying to play. While I wish they would have leaned a little bit more into the futuristic setting, the different types of weapons presented each had their own utility, allowing you to pick what feels best for you. Within a Perk, they all manage to feel thematically similar while still each being unique. For example, the Firebug starts with an SMG that leaves some flames behind anywhere it hits, but other weapons you can buy in her arsenal include an incendiary shotgun and a straight up flamethrower.

When interacting with the trader, you’ll see the different weapons for your Perk, but each of those weapons will have variants that modify its stats in some way, improving things like damage or handling, sometimes even switching out the ammo type. One nice touch is that you can take resources you earn in the game to build your own custom versions of these weapons that will show up in the trader store among the other variants. Sometimes they get quite pricey if you give them a ton of mods, but it feels great when you’re finally able to grab the custom weapon you built and see just how effective it is in practice.

In addition to weapons, you’ll also have tools that can be used by your character. Each Perk starts with a specific one, but you can swap it out at the trader any time you see fit. You can get pouches of ammo or healing items that you can drop for other players to refill their supplies mid-match, helping your team turn the tides when things start getting dicey. There’s a couple cool traps to equip that allow you to control the battlefield a bit more, setting up ways to funnel the hordes effectively into killing zones. My favorite of the tools was the multi-tool, which interacts with specific places in the level and allows you to activate things like armor lockers, ziplines, and even defensive turrets, transforming the space as the match progresses. I had plenty of satisfying moments where our group was falling back from the hordes and we stumbled upon a turret that helped us gain the advantage, so I was rarely without my trusty multi-tool.

As you kill Zeds, there’s a meter on the screen that builds up throughout the match. When it’s full, it activates “Zed Time,” a slow motion effect that lasts for a short time and extends to all six players on your team. When this works, it feels really cool, allowing you to quickly take out a pack of Zeds with gory slow motion headshots, but often it felt kinda hollow to me. Many times, I would find myself in a situation where either it would activate after I cleared most of the enemies nearby, or my teammate in a different room would activate it while I was in a room that was completely empty, making it more of a nuisance than a reward.

Killing Floor 3 has eight levels, and while they all have their own theme, I wouldn’t say any of them particularly stand out. The level design does a good job of allowing you to circulate through the level, making sure you (and your enemies) have plenty of paths in and out of each space, but as a result none of the spaces felt particularly interesting. Given the fact that you’re just killing your way through hordes rather than focusing on specific objectives, a well-coordinated group can sometimes just pick a room and make a stand there, without having to engage with a good portion of the map. The only thing that forces you to move around is the ever-rotating location of the trader, but even then you usually have enough time that if you wanted to go back to where you were, so it’s not that big of a deal.

One of the best parts of the levels is that some elements are destructible, and by the end of the match you can see the tale of the carnage reflected in your surroundings. Big bruisers smash through doors, leaving the walls around them broken and deformed. Blood persists on every surface, showing you a heat map of the death your team has dealt. It’s really satisfying, but I wish there were more opportunities for it throughout. I imagine a game like this with the destruction mechanics of something like Red Faction would be killer, and there’s just enough hints at things like that in this game that it left me wishing for more.

For whatever reason, I assumed that the boss you ran into would be tied to the level you pick, but I quickly discovered that there were only three bosses in the game, which felt surprisingly low. They all kind of fall into the camp of big aggressive bullet sponge, with a few key differences. Two of them, Chimera and the Queen Crawler, both summon lots of other creatures to distract you, while the Impaler is actually a triple boss, forcing you to fight three copies of the massive beast. These boss fights feel like great climaxes to the match, one of the rare times that I felt like coordination with my teammates was critical to my success, but again, I just wish there were more of them.

At the beginning of the game, you are given some assignment missions, which ask you to go to a specific map and find objects throughout, but this feature, to me, feels weirdly implemented. These are goals for you personally, not for your whole team, so it encourages you to run off on your own, which feels antithetical to the idea of a co-op game. It’s not as big of a deal if you’re playing with friends, as you can stick together, but when playing with random players it’s rare that another one will follow you to pick up the MacGuffins you’re looking for. These types of objectives are what I was hoping for in the game, but they just feel so inconsequential and tacked on that it felt more tedious than fun to do.

Even though this game had been delayed a couple times for polish, I still found myself with some technical issues during my time with Killing Floor 3. My computer is a little on the older side, but it still can handle most games, and I found myself with a lot of performance issues, slowing down the game a lot when things got more chaotic. I also experienced several full crashes in the middle of matches, which was really frustrating. Looking at other reviews, it doesn’t seem like I’m the only person experiencing this, so hopefully they are aware and start patching this game soon to stabilize things.

As with any live service game like this, there’s a battle pass you can purchase, but it’s only cosmetics, which I frankly didn’t find that interesting. There’s some personality in each of the classes, but I didn’t find that many of the alternate costumes added that much to them. Other items you can purchase included player banners, weapon color schemes, and little trinkets to hang from your gun, so it’s pretty easy to ignore all this if none of that sounds appealing to you.

Sequels to long running multiplayer games are hard to make successfully. After years of updates to Killing Floor 2, a brand new game is going to look way less fleshed out in comparison, which doesn’t really give old fans a reason to upgrade. But even a new player like myself was underwhelmed with the amount of content that’s available at launch. With a gameplay loop this simple, I was really hoping for more ways to mix it up, whether that be more levels, more bosses, or more classes, and Killing Floor 3 just doesn’t have that right now. There’s definitely something appealing to the gameplay, so hopefully this game gets there. The foundation is there, with core gunplay that feels good, but it’s hard to recommend this when there are so many other games out there that can give you that same feeling, but with a more interesting setup or more content.

Killing Floor 3 is out now on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series. Review code provided by publisher.

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