Killing Floor 2 - The Gaming Review

I've been playing this game since the very first day it was released on early access. Back then it was very bare bones and only had 4 classes in the game. I have had the chance of seeing it grow and change drastically over the years, finally culminating into the complete game we have now. I believe that game is worth buying.

This is a very enjoyable co-operative first person shooter. You and 5 other people try to survive against increasingly challenging waves of ''zeds''; cloned monstrosities set loose upon the world by the Horzine Corporation. The soundtrack is death metal and it's bloody as hell. It's a very cathartic experience.

There is an extremely large and varied arsenal of weapons to choose from split between 10 classes. The developpers, Tripwire, used to be infamous for their long development times and lack of communication with the community but they've definitely addressed that problem recently. Updates are frequent and fast, and they always release new images and previews to let people know what they're working on. Even though the game left early access, it's still going to be constantly upgraded.

The 10 perks can all be leveled up to level 25, which can take a bit. Furthermore, there are several difficulty levels that drastically alter the gameplay ( they change the zed behavior, making them more deadly) as well as custom maps. All of those things add tons of replay value to the game.

Is the Gameplay any good?

Core gameplay remains the same, so fans of the original will get what they expected with an added challenge as the difficulty has been ramped up thanks to the new AI and map design. There essentially are no safe spots and enemies seem to crowd you even more than in the original title. You want a challenge? You will definitely get one with this game.

Speaking of difficulties, the only thing you ever see in a game with difficulty increase is one or more of the following: Enemies have higher HP, deal more damage or there are simple more of them than on a lower difficulty. Now this game changes everything about this cheap standard as in Killing Floor 2 with higher difficulty, also changes the bahaviour of the AI and the enemies get entirely new attack sets that you never see them using on let's say "Normal" difficulty. The enemies, get more aggressive, attack more, get enraged more and tend to run instead of just slowly walking at you. This is a really unexpected and intriguing development in the game world.

If we consider the technical side, of course, there is a bug here and there to be found but visuals are impressive and you can't really complain about the performance either. However, be warned that this developer, as many others these days, do not support integrated graphics cards, so if you are on a laptop chances are the game won't work at all for you. Also, the game uses the integrated card by default so be sure to change to high performance in your control panel before playing it.

Now you might wonder why it is in Early Access if it plays so great? Well quite simply it is a finished product with a lack of content. There is quite a selection of weapons to choose from (almost 30) but there are only 3 maps to play on and even though the 4 perks (classes) that are present in the game work perfectly together, those are only 4 of the planned 10 perks in the game currently.

Is there much Content?

Content is still missing and there are numerous issues/bugs that have yet to be patched: the release of SWAT/Martial Artist or any information, Support Specialist is severely under powered and is outclassed by Gunslinger, Demolition has been nerfed to the ground even though you had to get Level 25 to make him useful in the past, the skill trees lack any variety/depth and do not make you feel like you're customizing your class to play the way you want to play, maps are filled with exploits making them incredibly easy to beat even on the highest difficulty, functionality of the game has drastically dropped and now the game is filled with hitches. With many more numerous issues that are too lengthy to add to this review.

They also introduced a cash shop in the game to a title which was already lacking so little content from the get go. Now while I do respect all the wonderful artist who sent their items in and have been approved, I cannot support them in this business practice as it detracts from the goal of the original games content and a finalized product. It's hard to support this game and its artist when updates only come around every 4-5 months which bring minor content that can be finished in no time. How can you expect one to buy skins/cosmetics to keep me entertained if I've completed nearly 90% of the content? There is hardly anything to go back to.

The addition of a VS mode has not helped in anyway in making this game fun for the community. It's a tacked on game mode which very little balance surrounding it. Because of this, balance issues will be distributed towards fixing this game mode that lacks any significance outside of being just a tacked on cliche'. Ultimately it's a game mode nobody asked for.

How challenging is the game?

There are multiple levels of difficulty to choose from. In most FPS games when you increase the difficulty the enemies receive an arbitrary Health & Damage increase (Borderlands, PAYDAY2), which results in boring unrealistic spongy fights.

In KF2 though, enemies become faster and aquire deadlier attack moves. This results in 2 important things:

1. Your weapons always feel powerful and devastating.
2. Zeds become a real horrifying menace, instead of superficial sponges.

There is an exception of enemy health boosting and you will find it in a multiplayer game:
Three of the big zeds (Scrake, Fleshpound and the final boss) receive a health boost which goes up the more players there are. This is justified though, otherwise it would be too easy to bring down these giants by casualy shooting at their general direction.

That said, the health boost is not that excessive as in other FPS games, in fact one player can still solo-kill one of these giants if his headshots are well placed and using the proper weapon. All other zeds maintain their original health pool though and you still get the satisfaction of purging enemy mutant hordes by the numbers. So in the end, if you are playing solo or multiplayer, the difficulty 'feels' that is properly balanced.

The Developers

Early Access games are difficult to formulate a solid review for, taken that things are still being made and could go from poor to exceptional and vice-versa at any given time. But, after almost a year, I feel Killing Floor 2 took this development route not for receiving feedback and offering a more lax update schedule, but rather establish a fantastical advertisement campaign bloated with ambition.

The developer straight up ignores the portion with the most player feedback (Steam Forums) regarding both mechanic suggestions and bug reports, having game breaking issues reported early on remain unaccounted for as well as worsening (parry bug on KF-Outpost and now all over the new maps) among other things. They have one (1) moderator and a community manager who might as well not exist to supervise the whole thing with well over +1000 customers while their "pray-to-get-into" private forums where people are somewhat listened to effectively creates a catering to a certain minority who might as well not play the game (they added collectibles to their maps due to "demand". who even asked for this?)

Updates take roughly 3~4 months, and with the content and tweaks I've seen I conclude the guys making the road map are either schizophrenic, listening to nobody in particular and making changes that make little to no sense, or simply have no idea where the game is headed; however, they remain so sure of themselves that it will be just so great, they even decided to put up a ready-to-go cash shop and gamble crate system for a game that is barely halfway done.

A quick list of Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Good Graphics compared to the first game.
• Great community of players.
• Extremely addictive!
• A decent amount of classes to choose from, each with different perks and 25 levels.
• Very well optimized.
• Extremely gory and fun with friends.
• Smart working AI
• Decent amount of weapons currently in the game.
• Currently 4 highly detailed maps. (2 smaller maps and 2 larger maps.)
• It's just a great game to throw time into.

Cons:

• Some community members can be uncooperative which can ruin the game.
• The last boss can shoot and damage you through walls at times.
• The Scrake AI can be tricked into spinning around and not attack you.
• Zeds still materialize out of thin air directly behind the player.
• Up to four sirens, husks, or scrakes can still spawn in tandem.
• Zeds can still block doorways, although this happens less often now.
  

My Issues with the Game

Killing Floor 1's level design was spearheaded by Alex Quick, and some of the maps he created (such as West London) were wide open, with plenty of room to dodge clots and groups of enemies. This helped balance the game by making it easier for the player to avoid being grabbed -- if the player was grabbed, it was their own fault. That's good level design.

But Killing Floor 2's maps are narrow, and spawn volumes are placed at chokepoints so that zeds can easily clog up doors and block a kiting player, killing them unfairly with sheer numbers or HP. It feels like the level designers don't understand Alex Quick's original intentions or the flaws of the system that they inherited. This problem is made worse by the fact that spawns are more random and unpredictable than they were in Killing Floor 1; sometimes two clots appear, other times two sirens and a bloat, and other times four husks. It's frustrating to be kiting down a hallway, only to have two sirens and a scrake spawn and block the only exit. It's RNG, plain and simple, and that's lazy programming. It's also poor enemy placement. And that's arrogance.

When it comes to camping, enemies like albino crawlers, sirens, husks, scrakes, and fleshpounds can zone players by design and can spawn in unusually high numbers, forcing players to kite through no fault of their own. On top of this, players often have to camp on top of a spawn volume, not by choice, but because spawn volumes are everywhere. This creates an additional risk -- if the spawn volume is within view of the player, or the player is standing on top of it, zeds won't spawn. But if the player is pushed a little too far away from the spawn volume, and they have to turn away from it to shoot a zed, more zeds can spawn close behind them, and they can quickly be overrun. This makes solo games too stressful to be fun. Killing Floor 2 manages to discourage both camping and kiting because of poor level design and spawn volumes that are too numerous and too random.

Lastly, the weight system feels like a lame attempt at increasing the game's difficulty. The more weapons the player carries, the slower their run speed. But the effect is so subtle that the player is unlikely to notice it or consider its impact on the game, especially since it makes no difference on the lower difficulties. And when the player finally enters Hell on Earth, they die -- a lot -- and are left wondering why the zeds are so fast and why it seems impossible to kite them. The solution to this isn't to shoot better or even find a better kite path -- it's to carry fewer weapons when kiting. If the player does this, they can reliably outrun the zeds and reduce the difficulty of Hell on Earth substantially. There's a lack of conveyance that makes it all too deceptive; it feels like the game is trying to hide this mechanic from the player so that they die.

Final Verdict

55/100

Killing Floor should be a game that challenges the player to shoot better, not a game that forces them to use gimmicks or pull up the maps in the SDK to figure out where the spawn volumes are and how to manage them. That's not the correct kind of learning curve. It's not fun. It's not challenging. It's just unintelligently designed, gimmicky, and random.

The Game as a series sits on top of a very simple premise for a video game: There are a number of monsters, you kill them, you get better gear at a checkpoint, you fight a bigger number of monsters next round and you repeat this until you get to the biggest of them. The first title in this franchise executed its basic premise using an almost perfect formula, mixing player skill as well as knowledge to provide a thrilling experience on all levels of play for something that would otherwise become a monotonous and repetitive task.

Sadly, Killing Floor 2 distanced itself from that formula, applied most of its budget in the art department, kept bad things about the first game, worsened others, and, instead of listening to feedback from people who actually invested their time to analyze the title, developers began to build it around its errors that catered to new players, mostly to keep their own egos intact. There are much better titles available with much more "Bang" for their Buck.

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