Killing Floor 3 Review

The original Killing Floor was my early example of the dumb fun, junk food game best enjoyed with mates. In this first-person survival shooter, six players buddy up and shoot waves of mutant grotesqueries that have escaped from their labs. These ‘Zed’ monsters erupt in gore as you fire off their body parts while they rush you, and when the action reaches a fever pitch, its heavy metal soundtrack blasts while the server turns into a greyscale, slow-motion viscera fest. It’s a specifically kinetic and thrilling flavour that developer Tripwire has nailed since the first game, and there’s encouraging evidence of it here for its third go around. 

For a series with over 15 years of formula to iterate on, Tripwire have made some decent strides towards bringing Killing Floor into the current co-op survival shooter era. Movement has been greatly revamped. Players can now dodge in any direction and clamber up most obstacles, offering a fresh sense of player speed and agency. The fearsome Fleshpound with its akimbo pulverisers will be trying to play whack-a-mole as you nimbly skirt around it. Sliding, dashing, and zipping around with a horde of six Scrakes doing the Leatherface waltz on your tail is a heartpounding experience that’s sure to delight fans. It’s also much rarer to find yourself fatally hemmed in by a group of weak Zeds.

Killing Floor 3 offers players six classes, or perks, complete with a featured hero, cooldown ability and perk tree. The abilities are all impactful and come in clutch. Medics can cast a healing bubble for the team that disrupts or damages trespassing foes. The Firebug unleashes devastating, mob-clearing flames around them.

No phones in sight. Just Zeds living in the moment.

The perks’ skill trees can significantly boost and augment the classes, with subtle yet powerful build options available for players to consider. For example, the melee-specialising Ninja will first choose between a passive skill that can increase armour far beyond its cap or the ability to restore health on every successful melee parry. Being an open weapon system, the ninja could take a 50% armour boost and instead opt to lean on firearms. My only gripe is the inability to reset perks. The interface would often reset during allocation, causing me to accidentally drop precious points into skills I couldn’t use.

Melee combat has seen a needed overhaul. All players can use their knives to block and parry attacks. There’s a stamina meter thrown in, as well, but it’s too hard to read when the blades are at work. Ninjas benefit the most here, with many of their skills leveraging their bladed loadouts with health regeneration and increased damage for successful parries. A well-levelled Ninja on the exhilarating “Hard” or “Hell on Earth” difficulties will be the tank you need.

Then there’s the return of Killing Floor’s Trader – a faceless voiceover that beckons players to its location between the six rounds on each of the eight, mostly small maps. As you mow down the familiar array of bipedal, spider, and toxic bloat Zeds, money accrues per individual performance. This can be spent at the Trader on any of the five weapon types for your or any class, as well as grenades, armour, stims and tools.

A LOT is going on with the weapon customisation, but at least it shakes out feeling powerful

Each weapon type comes in the standard looter-shooter colour rankings, but this can be misleading. Without getting into the weeds, the weapon economy in this game is incredibly confusing. At the outset, all of Killing Floor 3’s 30 unique weapons are offered at the trader in a variety of attachment loadouts with an associated cost. A grey-tier starter shotgun with no attachments is cheaper than one with a scope, and naturally cheaper than the green-tiered shotty. Cool, got it.

With little explanation, players will soon need to craft their own attachments, assigned to custom weapon loadouts between matches, to populate the Trader with vastly better weapon mod loadouts on offer. Eight material types are farmed during matches, some sought out ala Helldivers 2. Others, gained by a low-chance drop rate. Every single weapon-specific attachment requires these to create its simplest grey iteration, and they can then be upgraded (grey through to purple) with substantially more materials that you’ll never have quite enough of. 

Eventually, you could create a custom loadout of that basic grey shotgun and turn it into a fire-spewing gib machine with purple coloured attachments. The grey starter is now a modified grey starter of destruction, which also costs almost as much as most classes’ bare tier 4 purple weapons. Uh oh. All that time grinding and it’ll be uncertain whether you can even afford this weapon loudout from the trader, and you won’t be 100% sure if you can budget for it during a match, as the trader still rarely gives you the correct figures when shopping. 

What in the COD: Zombies is happening here?

That’s just one of many persistent interface bugs we must work around. After 45 hours, I’ve begun to ignore the near-constant UI issues outside of firefights. Things like: No way of easily checking the team’s loadout during a match you’re participating in, while alive. No way to double-check round modifiers after they’re announced. No way to see what round I’m joining when entering an in-progress game. 

However, what I’m really fighting is: Frequent server-wide stutters during crucial moments of play. Devastating base PlayStation 5 frame drops in a full lobby of players, worse during late-match madness against dozens of zeds on screen. Having the session abruptly disconnect in the final round and getting no progress or resources. All in, a bit disappointing for a near $60 multiplayer title that has had beta testing and opted to skip its previously announced early access launch with a brief delay. 

PlayStation 5 is not (yet) a worthwhile platform for this experience, performance aside. The controls often work against the player and lack adequate options to properly address this. Often, I would reload next to a zipline. The reload button activates both, with the zipline being off-screen and only nearby. I’m now whisked away, unable to zip back, and cut off from support as I get gorged to death. The lack of adaptive triggers is also a tragedy, as the weapons otherwise look and sound dramatic and chunky.

Moments later, I reload my weapon, only to accidentally zipline into quite a pickle

The least of Killing Floor 3’s problems, but no less disappointing, are the cosmetics. The battle pass-like system has players allocating points on cosmetic rewards as they choose, unlocking further pages of rewards in the process. Character skins virtually look identical to what freely exists, with maybe a different shade of brown or a visor on a headpiece. Weapons seem to have all of about three patterns available, and most of the colour sprays are simply inverted. The art direction in KF3 is very ‘red and dark’, but not much else, foregoing any notable visual identity.  

Final Thoughts 

Despite some grave issues, I want to affirm that Killing Floor 3 is not a bad game. It’s certainly a bad time if you’re on PlayStation 5. Rather, the low ceiling for gratification that the Killing Floor formula offers has seen some exciting improvements and controversial tweaks this time around. The itch is scratched, slow-mo hyperviolence intact. I’m just unsure where its confidence has gone, as it has unnecessarily overcomplicated every aspect of the otherwise casual horde shooter into a bafflingly opaque mishmash of its competitors’ form.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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