Killing Floor 3 has forgotten its roots, now it's just a boring zombie shooter

I'm a simple fella with simple needs when it comes to horde shooters. Me see monster. Me shoot monster. Monster explodes into a billion pieces. Brain drip feeds me a morsel of dopamine. Me joyful. It's a simple cycle for a simple fella with simple needs. Marie Kondo'ing zeds in Killing Floor 3, however, doesn't spark joy. In fact, it doesn't really spark much of anything. To help explain why, we need to head back to 2005.

The original Killing Floor mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 was a homage to grit, gore, and everything else 'eugh.' Its lead artist-turned-head dev, Alex Quick, inspired by 28 Days Later and the gruesome Out of Hell mod, also for UT2004, gouged the sci-fi out of Epic's FPS game, filled its gaping wound with Gorefasts, Stalkers, and Fleshpounds, and let them fester. The yellowed substance that leaked from its husk wasn't pus, though, but liquid gold. The first standalone horde shooter was born and, even though it wouldn't get a full retail release until several years later, it quickly became a cult hit.

In the 20 years since, the horror game series has changed dramatically, but has never seemed to get its sequels right the first time. Killing Floor 2's meat system treated us to more… diffused appendages, while its weapon and zed animations were markedly improved. But this was brought down by a barebones launch experience, a continuation of KF1's questionable monetization, and, depending on who you ask, some very unwelcome space oddities. EDARs… why?

Regardless of its slow start and jarring robo-entities, I adored KF2. The two pillars of any game like this worth its pound of flesh are satisfying gunplay and pulse-spiking encounters with tons of killable shit. Kaboomsticks, Husk Cannons, lawnmower blades. Gears of War said it best: variety is the spice of death, and after years of updates, KF2 had the perfect 'fuck yeah' arsenal. Sure, King Fleshpound is hardly the pinnacle of boss design, but for the most part, the bare minimum could be checked off with a big ol' sharpie.

In many ways, Killing Floor 3 is the next natural evolutionary step for a series looking to transcend its magnum opus. Now in 2091, things are characteristically more futuristic, and Mr. Foster has gone international. You're no longer just a tea-supping mercenary for hire, but the member of a bonafide resistance group known as Nightfall. A cog in an elite machine composed of the world's finest specialists, ready to cleanse the Horzine-engineered scourge with… wait a second. Where are all the perks? Where are all the weapons?

It does feel a little below the belt to draw comparisons between a game that has had almost a decade's-worth of content patches and one which has just launched, but the fact that there are only six perks with four unique weapons each makes Killing Floor 3 feel pretty barebones. The new mod system is ace, and provides some extra expressiveness for my favorite weapons, but the tools of the trade themselves are largely forgettable and lack the je nais se quois of their predecessors. I yearn for Killing Floor 1's audible grunt when pulling the trigger.

It's a similar story with the zeds. While I am loving some of the new redesigns and additions (the Siren is a massive upgrade over the EDAR), they have the personality of stale bread and, to extend the metaphor, their animations are as rigid as hardened crust. Did you know that zeds used to properly brawl each other to the death? Now they just stare at each other, and when one uses an ability the other just sort of stands there, unfazed. I have yet to see a charging Fleshpound decimate the fodder in its wake, and sadly this isn't the worst example of the game's disconnected design.

The kicker, for me, is how Killing Floor 3 has stripped away much of what made its co-op gameplay loop unique. The removal of the welder and the ability to syringe other players isolates your experience. If I ran dry of ammo in KF2 and lacked the means to resupply mid-round, I knew I could still assist my comrades by doing my best Hodor impression, or zip around like a reverse-engineered mosquito using my portable proboscis to keep them topped up. Now it just feels like I'm droning along on my own, clearing mediocre story beats and never really interacting with my squadmates outside of the odd cash drop and emergency resurrection. I can't even drop a 'gg' at the end of a match because text chat isn't in the game yet.

This feeling of isolation is best visualized through Killing Floor 3's Stronghold hub area, currently a completely superfluous space. Here, you can access a training room to test out your builds, pick a mission to jump into, or check out the shop to admire more of those delightful MTX options. You know the phrase 'this could've been an email?' Yeah, this could've been a menu. You do get to say hi to your party members, but it's a far cry from rival Warhammer 40k Darktide's bustling Mourningstar Hub, and infinitely more humdrum in its presentation.

It also compounds the overarching issue that Killing Floor 3's sci-fi shell, that Quick-shucked carapace, is too sterile for its own good. While KF2's Biotics Lab is very similar in scope to KF3's R&D Lab, it still had the decency to feel lived in; a birthday banner and a fridge filled with carrots offer a small, yet significant link between the organic and the engineered. Yes, decades have passed and the world is now in total ruin, but the spectres of humanity should still linger. In Killing Floor 3, they don't.

And this brings me neatly back to the game's new cohort. My issue with the zedvengers is that they're way too quiet. Killing Floor's characters are renowned for yapping permanently, fueling the sensory overload that keeps your brain whirring. Now, you're lucky to get a couple of lines of dialog here and there, resulting in a ton of empty space in the mix. I want the game to assault me from every angle. I want to permanently feel disoriented by what's going on around me. I want to enter fight or flight mode as soon as the round starts. I don't care if Mr. Foster isn't saying "tighter than a duck's arse" on cooldown, but the word salad needs seasoning.

To me, it feels like Tripwire has overcorrected Killing Floor's more esoteric eccentricities while ostensibly pitching to a broader audience, erasing much of what brought players to the series in the first place. The weapons are forgettable, and the personalities of its warring factions are MIA. If it weren't for its trademark enemies and zed time mechanic, Killing Floor 3 would be an entirely generic affair.

Killing Floor 3 in its current state is a sparse, lonely experience that fails to innovate on its predecessors in any meaningful way, at times taking huge steps back. Blitzing zeds should spike my testosterone like a bodybuilder's stack, but instead I feel pejoratively apathetic. Though I won't be returning to Tripwire's latest to get my reps in any time soon, I remain hopeful that the studio can once again put its money where its mouth is and do the heavy lifting to turn things around. I look forward to revisiting it next year, though for now I've got a hot date in Burning Paris.