Killing Floor 3 Review: A Work-In-Progress? Or Another Misfire?
Summary: To justify buying the game now, you’d have to have supreme confidence in Tripwire (whose team has changed dramatically since KF2), and assume that they’re treating this like an Early Access game, but realistically, it’s better to wait and go play the other games in the meantime.
2.8
Justice down
Killing Floor is a scrappy series that built itself up from a Unreal Tournament mod in 2005. Tripwire Interactive has seen some changes since then, and with Killing Floor 3, few of the original team remain. Bill Munk (previously known as William Munk II), is one of them and remains on as head designer, but Bryan Wynia is Killing Floor 3’s director. Wynia, originally a character artist (specialising in monsters) did not work on the earlier games, and it shows. After the misfire that was the original planned release– if you didn’t see it, fans unanimously bemoaned the lack of polish– Tripwire took a step back to refocus on KF3’s place in the series.
Three months later–which is closer to three days in game development time– the changes are laughable. One of the biggest complaints was having character hard-locked to perks– Tripwire attempts to ape hero shooters like Overwatch, fell flat with plain designs, no character content, and few voicelines. The only change so far is to switch the word “specialist” back to “perk”.
It’s an issue of management. Wynia & Co. have a fundamentally different interest in the game and franchise than the original Tripwire developers, both aesthetically and fiduciarily. Wynia has said, in not so many words, that he doesn’t understand the series’ appeal. “Dark, but still grounded in reality” and “a little more Christopher Nolan” was the new direction he described in an interview. He cited Carpenter’s The Thing and the first Killing Floor as main inspirations, and if you play Killing Floor 3, you’ll see The Thing’s DNA all over it, but not Killing Floor’s.
The first game was campy and cheesy with a 80s British sense of humour– you could toss your buddies spare dosh and shout loadsamoney! It had a brown, grungy, found-footage aesthetic like 28 Day Later, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre– not the clean blue & grey sci-fi of Christopher Nolan. Most of all, it was not grounded. It had a chicken commando and the Pyro from Team Fortress 2. Some of the best fun was welding a door closed to trap your buddies. Now welding isn’t in the game.
Yet despite all these differences, people tend to forget that both KF1 & 2 launched as grounded, horror-survival games and evolved from there. So if they bring back the fan favourite social co-op silliness like the Summer Sideshow and Hillbilly Horror, we’ll know they’re on track. After all, KF2 launched with not even half the maps KF3 is launching with, so it’s already got a leg up (If you remember rotating through the three KF2 maps to Biotics Lab. you’ll be thankful for KF3’s variety).
That said, there’s a long road ahead of Tripwire if they want to compete with Killing Floor 2 (or even 1). The positive additions include gun mods, far better traversal options– mantling, sliding, dashing– and “gadgets”, which are like Overwatch’s ultimate attacks (the best one is the sharpshooter’s homing arrow that zips around like Yondu’s in Guardians of the Galaxy). The monsters have also had some great redesigns (it’s Wynia’s strength after all). The bosses are all bizarre and terrifying in ways the other games haven’t come close (though they hit like a wet sandwich on Normal difficulty). And the new “crawlers” are my favourite of the redesigns, taking the monster unnerving monster and making it more shockingly disgusting to see ambling towards you.
But this also brings one of the worst downgrades of KF3 to light–they’ve sacrificed their iconic motion capture. When Killing Floor 2 was in development, Tripwire finally had the budget and manpower to go all out on a project. They spared no expense and fully mo-capped everything, even recreating leatherface’s iconic chainsaw ballet from the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre for their Scrakes. They designed a new gore system from the ground up, allowing you to dynamically maim and cripple zeds and it looked great– thankfully, the M.E.A.T system returns in Killing Floor 3, but it feels less reactive, especially with the less-humanoid designs like the crawlers and bloat.
So all that’s to say that Killing Floor 3 is a disappointment– something that their fans and forums have stated and restated in minute detail, even pointing out faults in the “visual sightlines” of the HUD design. Tripwire has released a base game that will hopefully grow into something great, just like the others, but it’s hard to see the forest when there are so many dead trees– I haven’t even touched on the painfully empty homebase, or the impressively boring battle pass. To justify buying the game now, you’d have to have supreme confidence in Tripwire (whose team has changed dramatically since KF2), and assume that they’re treating this like an Early Access game, but realistically, it’s better to wait and go play the other games in the meantime.
About the Author
Branden Zavaleta Based in Perth, Branden writes on the arts for a handful of Australian outlets. He's also a street & creative portrait photographer, who's work can be found @brandenzp on Instagram.
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