Killing Floor 3 review

I am but a simple creature; my idea of a good gaming time with friends is yapping about how our days have been while blowing monsters to smithereens. It's a good way to take the frustration out. So in that respect, Killing Floor 3 does a great job. It places you and some friends into the heart of a horde of zeds with various weapons and says, "Have at it."

Killing Floor 3 is exactly what you would expect. It's you and a bunch of guns against hordes of bioengineered monsters. The matches are made up of five waves, with a boss fight at the end. Regardless of whether it's just you playing solo or with a team in multiplayer, things can get quite hairy in the latter stages.

Luckily, you can stock up on ammo and meds after each wave, upgrading your weapons with different mods that you've crafted between matches. It can take some time to find and craft the weapon that works best for you. I tried to prioritise handling and reload speed as these are two stats that I found the most lacking with the base weapons provided.

But otherwise, Killing Floor 3 is a very easy game to pick up, like most shooters, any practice you have at hitting heads will translate well here. Although learning how to crowd control the swarms of zeds is an important skill.

It also feels as cool as it sounds to blast zeds to bits. Tripwire has used a new gore system, which it's calling M.E.A.T., that basically lets you dismember zeds in various ways. The graphics complement this as you can spy every single chunk of brain and skull flying out of a dead zed's head. At one point, my team tore the legs off of the last enemy to slow it down, just so we could all complete our objectives before the next wave began.

Unfortunately, even the coolest action sequences can get a little old. Waves may contain different grunts every time, but they can still become very predictable, easy to handle, and therefore boring.

There are some optional story missions, which you can play by yourself or in a team, that can add a little more variety to matches, but there's only about 4 hours' worth of content there—you can blast through it pretty quickly. The missions see you work through various tasks—usually involving searching through corpses—and finish the run on a survival mode, lasting up to five waves of zeds. These aren't particularly memorable, but the gist of it is that Nightfall Operations is saving the world from a bioengineered disaster one corpse rummage at a time.

But progression in Killing Floor 3 isn't centred around a story that you need to complete—instead, it's largely achieved through levelling up each strategist.

Who's who

There are six strategists to pick from, each offering a different major skill, like medic, sharpshooter, and the underappreciated firebug, who is just someone running around with flamethrowers.

I've been maining Commando because I just can't get enough of Foster's lush English accent. His autofire drone gadget, Hellion, which can take down a bunch of zeds and a Fleshpound, is a big help when you're outnumbered. The Sharpshooter, known as Luna, has also been great fun. I underestimated her at first—it's so often the case that in games, long-ranged fighters suffer in close-ranged scraps, but she can hold her own just as well as any when up against a swarm of zeds.

Firebug, Engineer, and Medic are also solid choices for multiplayer combat, even if their firepower can't match Foster and Luna. The most interesting and quirky character, though, has to be the Ninja class, Nakata. Slicing monsters up with a neon blue katana and hitting headshots with kunais is just too cool to pass up on.

These characters aren't just good on their own, they also come together to make a solid team. I encountered a variety of compositions during my multiplayer sessions. It seemed like the dream team would have at least one Commando to dish out a ton of damage, a medic to keep everyone up, an engineer to get all the turrets and such working, and a Ninja to deal mountains of melee damage and deflect oncoming attacks.

When levelling up the strategists, you get to pick a new passive perk out of one to three options every two levels. One might offer a max ammo increase, while another lets you destroy enemy weak parts for gadget activation energy, making it faster to access Commando's Hellion.

There are passives up until level 30, right now, so maxing out a character's skill will take some time, approximately 25 hours, and then you have to do it for five other strategists. But as you unlock and upgrade more perks, your proficiency increases, which will give you further bonuses like increased fire rate or reload speed.

The long haul

Even when you've managed to do that, there's still the difficulty levels to master. Normal is pretty much a walk in the park if you're playing in a team, prime head-empty yap sesh with friends territory. But it can get a little dicey in the latter waves in solo.

Then there's hard and 'Hell on Earth'. My multiplayer matches are set to hard, as this gives you a little edge in the fight without it becoming all-consuming, but I only ever set solo matches to that difficulty when I want to really test myself.

While there'll certainly be Killing Floor veterans who are able to jump in at Hell on Earth straight away, and somehow last through all the waves and the boss fight, that certainly isn't me. After beating a round on hard, I got way too overconfident and decided to give the hardest difficulty a shot. Everything was going well for about two seconds, and then a wave of zeds hit me, accompanied by a bus load of Husks that turned me into BBQ, loads of Bloats that covered me in irradiated gunk, and Scrakes, which would hook me back in every time I managed to make some distance from the horde.

It didn't go very well, and it was pretty gruelling. But that's a good thing. I want a high skill ceiling for Killing Floor 3, it gives me more of an incentive to play and practice with the goal of beating a level on Hell on Earth in mind.

It's all about just finding what works, both by yourself and in a team. One of my favourite tricks, which has quickly become my go-to way for dealing with one of the bosses, the Impaler, is to kite it around a tight circle. I sometimes use a tank or maybe a big cryovac, but as long as it can't charge you down from a distance, you'll save yourself from getting hit by what is essentially a speeding truck. The Impaler also has missiles which it can launch from its arms, but if you're constantly standing behind something, it won't fire them at you—checkmate, loser.

But running around in circles does absolutely nothing to quell the rage of the Queen Crawler. This mire-infused boss is like a big and angry ant that'll charge headfirst into you and shove you into a corner or off a ledge. She also deploys a ton of little hatchlings, which'll become the most annoying thing on earth as they gnaw on your ankles.

Instead of trying to create any space between yourself and the Queen Crawler, it's just best to pummel her with as much damage as you possibly can. Trust me, she can close any gap you manage to make in seconds, so the only port of call is a battle of attrition, trying to kill her before she ends you.

The skill ceiling may be high, but there is an issue in the interim, after the first 10 hours or so, progression slows down slightly, and this is where games can get repetitive and boring. Like any multiplayer game, playing with friends can help this massively, but without that, Killing Floor 3 does fall into a bit of a lull.

It's also not the most creative shoot 'em up game around, and it doesn't do a whole lot to separate itself from the multiplayer FPS crowd. It's not something that grabs me and makes me want to play it every spare second I have, but in moderation, I still enjoy what time I do spend with it.

It's a great way to pass the time with friends who also enjoy executing monsters as much as you do, and if you're ever at a loss for what to do, you can always test yourself with a new strategist or a harder difficulty setting.

Looking ahead

But it also seems like part of the empty space in Killing Floor 3 has been left on purpose. Tripwire has already announced its post-launch plans for the game. There's going to be a rearmament update with new weapons and mods, and a Season 2 that adds a new map, new zed, and a specialist called DJ Scully. Then, 2026 will see two more seasons with more maps, bosses, and an assignment campaign.

Killing Floor 3 isn't incredibly inventive now, but hopefully, as Tripwire adds more content going forward, it begins to experiment more with the premise and shake things up a bit. I'd love to see something like a colosseum mode where you just get plonked into an arena with some friends to face all of the bosses at once. But maybe I'm just twisted.

If you're on the fence, it may be worth waiting a while until more content is added further down the line and when there's maybe even a sale on. I don't think I could convince my friends to spend $40/£35 right now on a game they aren't sure they'll play a great deal.

But if you're a fan of Killing Floor and everything the previous games had to offer, then you should check Killing Floor 3 out—even if it's just to enjoy the same chaotic fights with better graphics.