Killing Floor 3 Review – The Bar Is On The Floor

Not every game, but some games, like Tripwire Interactive's Killing Floor 3, deliver exactly what you'd expect by looking at the cover. You shoot Zeds (read: zombies), and when you're done shooting Zeds in one level, there are more Zeds for you to shoot on another. In between the shooting, you'll level up your weapons, refill on ammo and gear, and then go back to shooting Zeds. Oh, and there are also a few narrative-driven tasks to complete, but the main course is shooting Zeds.

That's fine, really. I love a strong narrative, but I can just as easily get behind a game where the story is nothing more than a reason for the gameplay to happen. Or at least it would be, if shooting Zeds was worth the rest of the game's failings. It's not a bad thing for a game to be streamlined against everything else, but it's bad for those games to not even get their core pitch right.

Which is the unfortunate case Killing Floor 3 finds itself in. It's not about much more than shooting Zeds, and the shooting, along with the Zeds and everything else, is fresh from the 'just fine' section on the shelves of video game stores.

In some ways, it's not a bad shooter. There's a solid amount of Zeds that chase after you each wave, and their heads pop with enough satisfying zeal. Zeds are also varied enough and present an interesting enough challenge as you try to deal with the different variants that'll shoot you, charge you, and jump you from every direction. Also, it's not the only issue I have with the sound mixing, but these have to be the quietest zombies I've ever not heard the way I've been caught off guard. Maybe that's just a me problem, and I have to get my ears checked, but it's come up enough times and like I said, it's not the only problem with how the game sounds.

There's a good deal of weapon variety, you can run around each map half-decently, and I appreciate that in a game so focused on bodily mutilation, you can drop the firearms and flamethrowers altogether and just enter the fray with a couple of swords.

It's a solid mix, and can help make the gameplay feel a little more engaging than it does when you stick to more tried-and-true combos, with my preference being a classic assault rifle/shotgun loadout.

There's also a good amount of synergy to be found with the six currently available classes to choose from. Between weapon, build and special ability coordination, there's a lot that you can combo up between teammates with a little communication and preparation. Unsurprisingly, it's better to hop into matches with others instead of try to run through any of these maps on your own. Playing solo is an option, but it's a huge grind to get anywhere compared to playing with others.

And a grind is the only thing more plentiful than Zeds in Killing Floor 3. The number of objectives there is to grind for is perfectly set up for new players to make Killing Floor 3 their new forever game. Or at least that's clearly Tripwire Interactive's hope with how everything is already set up for it.

Not narrative objectives - there's only 10 main story-focused missions, through which Nightfall's director, Cordelia Clamely, narrates your way through as you jump back and forth between the Army Depot, R&D Lab, Horzine Factory, Radar Station, Convoy, City Streets, and Offices. When they're done?

Head back to all those same maps, plus one more (Sewers), and kill some more Zeds and the same three 'just fine' bosses, chasing after daily and weekly challenges, along with a random new challenge each week to mix things up a bit more if you are already getting tired of the base challenge the game's only core mode offers. Hear each of the characters rattle off their one-liners, and of course, there's also a battle pass with cosmetics for your character and weapons to work through. And then ramp up the difficulty when you get bored of running through each of the maps on the default 'Normal' setting.

Which, again, there's nothing inherently wrong with. I like a zone-out game as much as the next person, but Killing Floor 3 doesn't just feel like a surface-level game that you can zone out to. It feels like a game that's not totally there. That's not exactly complete, almost like the early access version of Killing Floor 3 before it's packed to the brim with DLC and actually chock-full of stuff to do and see. That's all on its way, of course. There's a first-year roadmap already laid out, with a new specialist, new map, new Zed type to mow down, new bosses, weapons, mods, and more campaign-focused missions coming before the end of the year. In 2026, there's another map coming, more weapons, mods, a new Perk, which is what the classes are called, and then whatever is unannounced as part of the second year roadmap.

It all feels as hollow as the weapons unfortunately do, which is my other problem with the sound mixing and quality. Weapons don't sound satisfying on the trigger pull, and getting weapons to sound satisfying to fire is pretty much the whole game in shooters. Sure, there's a bunch of window dressing around that one aspect of the game, but how a gun sounds is the key element to how much fun it is to press the trigger. When that's lacking, practically nothing in the window dressing can make up for it.

There are more weapons, maps, specialists, perks, and everything else coming, but how much is tomorrow's promise worth today? In a game like Killing Floor 3, not much, thanks to the fact that you'll run out of things to do before the day is done, and then tomorrow, the new content that's promised won't be out yet.

It's been nearly a full decade since Killing Floor 2, which has been supported with a lot of content to work through in that time. Now, after some delay, Killing Floor 3 has arrived, asking a full-price entry fee with nowhere near the kind of content Killing Floor 2 has. If you're brand new to the series, then it's easy to get in now on the ground floor (pun intended), but it's difficult to think that anyone who wasn't bored with Killing Floor 2 wouldn't just keep playing that instead of jumping into the third act of this trilogy.

And there's all of this before mentioning the fact that the game does not run particularly well at the moment. Tripwire Interactive is surely going to be putting out patch after patch to fix things, but its 'Mixed' review rating on Steam, with a good chunk of the 4,000+ reviews that players have left citing technical problems and a game that runs poorly, which it does, is another sign of a game released in an unfinished state.

Killing Floor 3 isn't a bad game, but at launch, it's a shell of the game that it's promised to be, a promise made by the fact that its predecessor is filled to the brim and then some with DLC. In the meantime, what we have is a game that doesn't fulfil the one ask I have of every shooter, where you can see everything you need to see in an afternoon, and where the rest of the time you're spent running around chasing giant objective lists that boil down to busy work. It's all just fine, and even knowing that the technical issues will hopefully be the first ones to get sorted, the bar is on the floor with Killing Floor 3. With the technical issues, you could say that it's not even hitting that minimum. Come back in a year and/or when it goes on sale to see if anything has changed.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

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