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Killing Floor 2 wears its heart on its sleeve—a bold move considering there’s no ace stuffed up there. The few things it does, it does boldly and unabashedly well. It’s a fast, fun co-op shooter with cool classes, satisfying guns, and aggressive, grotesque enemies, all doused in fitting heavy metal music. However, zoom out from the gorefest a bit and you’ll see Killing Floor 2 is also an online shooter with only two modes, two boss battles, and some unnecessary time sinks. It’s not a buffet though; it’s comfort food, meant to be eaten again and again and again. With that mindset clearly front and center for developer Tripwire, Killing Floor 2 delights on the back of its great gameplay.
Killing Floor’s 10 classes, awkwardly referred to in-game as “perks,” are distinct and fun to play, and putting together a good team has a huge impact on whether you’ll succeed. The first class to hook me was the Field Medic, which passively gains armor and movement speed, wields weapons with secondary-fire healing darts, and gains the ability to self heal while healing others. I felt incredibly strong and useful, as I did with each class given enough time to unlock their abilities.
One class is a demolitions expert, with access to explosive pistols and C4; another spews fire on everyone and everything, making for a great crowd controller. They all become fun and useful eventually, but the biggest problem is that they don’t begin to feel distinct until level five when you unlock your first special perk, which can easily take two to three hours of play. Until that point, you’re really only working with your passive bonuses which haven’t yet scaled well because of your low level. Combined with the fact that any class can wield another class’ weapon, it’s going to be a while before your role feels powerful and solidified - I’d say around level 10, when you unlock your second skill, which will likely take around six hours.
Putting together a balanced team, and seeing how well you do remains fun time after time.
So, if you’re interested in a class but you’re not sure if it fits your style, you can easily put in the time of a short-ish shooter campaign only to learn that you don’t care much for it. That’s simply too much time to waste. You can level up classes you aren’t even playing, which is a good touch, but that progress is very slow and it forces you to buy odd weapons or play in ways that don’t line up with your equipped class. If you’re into Killing Floor for the long haul, it might matter, but the bonuses I saw from this throughout 15 hours of play were negligible.
Once you do find a few classes you like, you can really dive into what Killing Floor is all about: killing stuff with your friends, earning money (or “Dosh”), buying better guns and armor between rounds, and doing it all over again. Gearing up, putting together a balanced team, and seeing how well you do remains fun time after time.
Killing Floor is great at replicating those moments in movies where everything is going very wrong for our heroes. You might look around and see that, over by the bus, a zombie is gnawing on the medic’s leg while others close in for a bite. The sharpshooter up on the ledge doesn’t see the cloaked enemies sneaking up behind her. The heavy-duty commando is holding his own for now, but his ammo’s low and he’s about to be vomited on by a huge, bloated monster. Everything is frantic and on fire, and pulling through with your class abilities, limited weapons and ammo, and some good old-fashioned teamwork (and yelling) is incredibly fun. So fun that, if you’re not bothered by a lack of variety (think MOBAS, which are often played in one mode), there’s enough here to keep you entertained for a long time.
Thanks to Killing Floor’s over-the-top sound and graphics, weapons are satisfying to use—and not just the big ones. This is crucial because most classes start with tiny guns and spend their Dosh every round for bigger toys, like a grenade launcher or a microwave gun. They’re well designed, loud, and their bullets have a huge impact on whatever they hit. Enemies blast apart and flail wildly before their bodies are lost beneath a sea of incoming foes. I’m not a big rock or metal music guy, but the music fits the action well, and firing an auto-shotty off to chunky guitar riffs just works on an original DOOM-cover art level.
Killing Floor 2's weapons are satisfying to use—and not just the big ones.
Despite the trigger-happy approach to combat, it becomes much more tense and tactical the more you play. Ammo and equipment are limited. Sometimes ammo can be found around the map, and certain classes stock you back up but it’s not common enough, nor is the resupply large enough, to let you be totally reckless. There’s a constant friction between struggling to survive by spending your precious resources or conserving your goods for the next (tougher) round. It’s tempting to spend the first few rounds using only a pistol or melee weapons, though on higher difficulties you’ll risk getting overwhelmed, and if you die because you’re hoarding the good ammo you’ll lose your Dosh survival bonus for the round. It’s fun to test yourself and see what you can get away with.
You’ve already seen all of Killing Floor’s enemies before if you’ve played other zombie survival games, though what’s there works very well. Aside from a few types of standard fodder, there are bloated vomiters, invisible melee Zeds, huge dudes with chainsaw arms, screaming witches, and more. Some get right in your face, some cut off your mobility by grabbing you or spewing bile, and others get you just when you feel safe. You’ll quickly learn how to deal with all of them, even though they keep things interesting through sheer, overwhelming numbers.
The final wave culminates with a boss fight, a difficult battle with tons of potential for crushing letdowns and clutch finishes. Because of their huge health bars, brutal attacks, and tendencies to single out one poor player (#justmedicthings), bosses rip apart teams that don’t work together or that have a poor balance of classes. One boss, The Patriarch, punishes targets with a minigun that shreds armor and health bars in seconds. As he slowly dies, he’ll eventually cloak, run away, and recover health if you and your team don’t focus and keep on his trail. Another boss fires off canisters of poisonous gas that can segment the battlefield and keep teammates from assisting each other, making him especially dangerous on maps with lots of hallways or other choke points. Spreading out and using the map to your advantage, while also staying in communication to heal and resupply each other, makes these boss fights a great, tense test of your skills unlike the garden variety Zeds that came before.
Unfortunately, those are the only two bosses in the game. After playing for only a few hours, you’ll know their introductions, their goofy voice lines, and their attacks. This doesn’t turn them into easy prey though, and the fights are a fun, difficult test every time. Still, more variety would have been nice.
Killing Floor’s other main mode, Versus Survival, is there for anyone who needs more competition. Players are split into two teams: Zeds and humans. For the humans, it feels largely like business as usual. For the Zeds, it can be a really good time or a really bad time depending on the creature you’re randomly assigned. Smaller monsters can feel underpowered, but playing as a bigger unit and wrecking everything is good for some laughs.
With longer matchmaking times and tons of players dropping and joining mid-match, Versus Survival absolutely feels like the secondary, less important mode, though. It’s fun, but until some of the weaker Zeds feel viable, I wouldn’t recommend taking it too seriously.
In a time when shooters are competing to have the most modes, the biggest campaign, the most guns, and generally the most “stuff,” along comes Killing Floor 2, totally unconcerned with running that race. Its lack of modes and bosses will eventually turn away anyone but the most dedicated of fans, but its foundation is so fun and rock solid that, even if you only plan on playing for a few weeks with your friends, there’s plenty here to enjoy.