First Glimpses of Killing Floor 2

Killing Floor 2 brings gore, blood and guts in the first glimpses of the long-awaited sequel to Tripwire's co-op FPS Killing Floor. 

Seen as part of a PCGamer exclusive, art director David Hensley has revealed our first look at the game, which is designed around a trifecta of gratuitous violence: Blood, Bullets and Blades.

Gore, according to Hensley, was the priority when designing Killing Floor 2: "When we started designing the game we decided gore was going to be the most important feature[...] We wanted to outdo Soldier of Fortune's* gore." To this end, Tripwire designed a whole new system for gore, called MEAT (Massive Evisceration and Trauma), with an nearly absurd nineteen dismemberment points, ranging from cutting enemies in half to blowing off fragments of their skull to reveal brain matter. Adding to this atmosphere of wanton violence are permanent bloodstains, which will stay on maps for the duration of a match. 

It's clear for the developers Killing Floor 2 is something of a labor of love; in order to improve the game's slow motion shots, they animated their guns at up to 242 frames per second (the standard is usually somewhere around 30-60fps). The game has been carefully designed., however, to be violent to the point of absurdity, not nausea; enemies more closely resemble sci-fi B-movie rejects than other human beings.

Of course, the main appeal of Killing Floor 2, as with its predecessor, is the co-op mode and the opportunity to wreak havoc with your friends in the name of stopping the mutant horde. KF2 modifies perk abilities to spice up multiplayer, which unlock in pairs players must pick between, forcing them to strategize. The levelling curve has also been improved, and caps at level 25. Developers focused on ensuring that endgame play (once a player has reached the maximum level) is as satisfying as possible.

Another important consideration for the developers has been ensuring Killing Floor 2's accesibility to modders; after all, Killing Floor started out as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod. "We'll design a system and then go 'oh, that's not going to work for modding. So we'll redesign it to make it easier for modders to access," explains Hensley. The gore and animations will be especially open to modders, who can easily assign different effects to damage types without having to touch the game's code itself.

So far, no release date for Killing Floor 2 has been given, although developers plan to release the game on Steam Early Access in the future.

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(*Soldier of Fortune was a controversial PC game from 2000 whose graphic scenes of violence and torture had it rated as pornographic in Canada and restricted in Germany.)