After many years of slaughtering zeds through Killing Floor 1 and 2 we’ve finally come to the third installment: Killing Floor 3. It comes complete with buckets of limbs, blood and gore as well as a variety of new customisation options and… a few new faces.
Killing Floor 3 is a team-based, horde shooter that puts you into the shoes of one of six members of the Nightfall team. The Nightfall team, in this case, is a futuristic group aimed at taking down the Horzine Company’s manufactured horrors for the betterment of mankind (and a bit of dosh on the side).
The main premise of the Killing Floor series, as a whole, is effectively wave-based survival with the waves getting increasingly difficult and the harder waves being nearly impossible gauntlets of intense, gargantuan beasts as well as some heavily-geared ‘zeds’ that are primed and ready to tear you clean in half.
Killing Floor 3 features quite a number of returning creatures, which I found to be a bit confusing. I did, personally, imagine that it would have a bit more variety among the enemy types. Currently, it only features three new bosses, which rear their heads at the end of each mission: The Chimera, Impaler and Queen Crawler. The limited numbers lead to some repetition, especially when you get unlucky and have to get hammered by three impalers over and over again.
With Killing Floor 2 featuring five bosses I did imagine there would at the least be the same amount, if not more, but I would imagine that more are to come in the future — especially what with the store selling multiple passes for future content all the way into 2026.
I also had a number of issues with bugs in the game, with load times and crashes quite frequent. I imagine that a lot of these issues revolve around the Unreal 5 Engine — compared to Killing Floor 2, the ragdolls and corpses have been toned down to not over stress the engine, so it’s likely being pushed to its limits as is.
One of the key features of Killing Floor 3 and the entire series is the visceral combat and gore, This has notoriously got players stuck in (literally) with melee weapons and guns that feel weighty and fun. This feels as great as previous entries, and is built on by team members having different abilities, such as being able to stun or add status effects to the larger zeds. It adds a slightly more strategic, thinking layer to it, which is welcome.
Of the six classes available to choose from there’s enough variety there than most people will find a groove to slot into. Whether you like getting up close and personal with blades, blowing up everything and anything with explosives or sitting as far back as possible and plinking the dead with a sniper rifle, Killing Floor 3 has you covered.
I am particularly fond of the Ninja class. It does seem to be a bit of a glass cannon, especially in the early game with nothing unlocked, but it can really pack a punch with its dual katanas and various knife-based throwing weapons making it one of the most versatile of the team.
Although the customisation of classes and weapons are extremely fleshed out, with weapons and skill trees being fully customisable, one main part of the series that players loved was choosing their own character regardless of class and that seems to have been removed entirely, instead favouring classes being tied to specific characters. For some games this is the norm, as in Rainbow Six Siege where its operators are highly identifiable it’s commonplace, but for a series that regularly had this customisation option it does seem a bit off.
There is some semblance of a story to Killing Floor 3, with an overarching mission that seems to have you bouncing from location to location adding a bit of purpose to your wave survival mayhem. These missions mainly feature you going to location A and then finding an item or activating a machine to then go to location B and do the same.
With eight maps currently available, I did imagine it would lead you to more of the locations but by following this mission system I seemed to be replaying the same areas over and over. You can just choose to go to any map you want, but, I assumed it would have taken me to each at least once before repeating the same levels.
Overall, I think Killing Floor 3 is something that will be amazing once more of its content comes out, but has had a bit of a rocky start. It’s a great base to build on but does feel like it’s missing its mark with some largely repetitive content so far.
You can find Killing Floor 3 on Steam, PS5 and Xbox.
Comments are closed.