Killing Flooris built on a pretty simple premise: kill zombies, get money, buy guns, and kill more zombies. It’s all about earning points and slaughtering infected until you overcome the final boss. There’s not much to it, but there’s something so satisfying about tearing through hordes with your friends and watching the numbers go up.
So, it’s bizarre thatTripwire Interactive has fumbled this new sequel as badly as it has. Killing Floor 3 only needed to refine what came before it to be a winner, but instead, it removed key features like welding and launched without basic functionality like text chat and server browsers, while of course finding space for live-service guff like battle passes and grind-y crafting. It’s no wonder everyone is so outraged.
The length of matches is also laughable — five rounds and a boss wave. No other options. For comparison, the first two games had Medium and Long settings (seven and ten waves, respectively), while Killing Floor 2 boasted an Endless Mode, where you were challenged to survive as long as possible until you were inevitably slaughtered.
The healing syringe has also been made less useful, and perks are locked to specific characters.
Round-based arcade shooters are not complex. They might have unlockables, like skills or weapons, to keep you coming back for more, but boil them down to their basics, and they’re all about feeding mindless enemies into a meat grinder of bullets.
There’s a reason that Call of Duty: Zombies is still thriving despite how little it has changed in the last two decades. The fundamentals are eternal, and so long as you nail those, even just one map is enough to tide people over for dozens and dozens of hours. Killing Floor 3 has eight, and yet it’s haemorrhaging players because of its egregious live-service elements that took precedence over core gameplay features.
Even the worst of Killing Floor 2 was mindless fun underneath everything because you could forgive the cracks when tearing through Zeds was so gratifying. Killing Floor 3, though, is irredeemably disappointing. What should have been easy Dosh for Tripwire, building off the back of two cult hits, only proved to be a complete disaster.
As It Turns Out, It’s Surprisingly Easy To Mess Up Killing Floor
It’s pretty obvious why Killing Floor 3 is such a mess, even if arcade shooters like this should be a guaranteed thing, especially from a developer with as much experience as Tripwire.
Despite being delayed, the game was clearly rushed out the door before it was even close to ready. Add to that that instead of features from previous games, we get a bunch of live-service nonsense, and you may as well announce that the game is going to be a disaster …which Tripwire kind of did.
Discord was inundated with concerns, and so apologies and post-launch promises were issued before it had even been released. It was abundantly clear that Tipwire was aware of the backlash it was about to face and the sorry state that the game was in.
As so many players point out in their reviews, this was entirely avoidable. Killing Floor 3 could’ve saved face had it just launched in early access without the live-service padding. Tripwire could’ve funded the rest of development through early adopters, while also garnering feedback ahead of its full launch to prevent the controversy it’s now facing. As it stands, launching in an unfinished state has only made the MTX even more shameful, and the game’s reputation is now firmly in the mud.
It’ll be an uphill battle to win the community back over, though it’s certainly possible,as we’re seeing Payday 3 slowly prove. But it should’ve never gotten to this point. Killing Floor is an incredibly basic concept that should be borderline impossible to flunk. Yet here we are, at the beginning of what could be a years-long campaign to get it into a half-decent state.
