Killing Floor 2 Review

Blasting my way through the seemingly endless horde of clots, flesh-pounders and bloats; my friends at my back. Their support much needed as Snow cuts bloody swathes through the encroaching horde with his MP5, playing as one of the SWAT classes, Demoralize follows suit with his shotgun and throwing grenades like they were hot potatoes; sending gibs everywhere as frantically timed dynamite detonates at the feet of a charging flesh-pounder. Then lastly, but far from least is me, the medic. Firing away with my assault rifle, I am more than capable of taking care of myself but also throwing out health for my teammates in order to keep us all alive.

As the waves comes to a bloody and corpse-ridden end, we take a moment to allow for the cutscene to play to introduce us as to which boss we will be up against. Silently, we all pray for the patriarch; arguably the easiest of the two bosses due to its limited abilities and potency to simply spit out bullets and rockets. Instead, much to our dismay we sight Hans Volter; the more painful of the two bosses due to his variety of abilities which focus more on crippling your team rather than outright killing you. Area of denial gas grenades, shields that reduce damage, smoke grenades and finally the ability to heal himself by causing damage to your teammates whilst surrounding himself in yet another shield. A single tear rolls down my cheek as we prepare for the inevitable end.

And so is the story of many of our Killing Floor 2 matches, all of us having picked up the game at one point or another and with my two teammates having put in significantly more time than myself with both of them having achieved high levels in multiple characters whilst I only have the one high-levelled class.

Killing Floor 2 is a FPS co-operative shooter which focuses on wave survival against a variety of enemies: as you kill the various types of beasts, monsters and arguably zombie-like foes you start to collect money, with this money you can invest in better weapons, armour and resupply yourself. After all, the one time you don’t want to run out of ammo is when a large horde of zed are barreling down on top of you.

The combat system is majoritively focused around class-based gameplay whom gain benefits for using weapons associated with their class and often have their own unique grenades to help them with getting more kills. For instance, the demolition class has a fantastically powerful stick of dynamite in replace of a standard grenade whilst the medic’s grenades heal allies as well as poison foes. Making him twice as utility, more than once I have bounced a grenade off of a wall to reach my friend around the corner in a desperate final attempt to heal them and to take out at least a few clots that pose a clear and present danger.

As you level up with your classes, you gain the ability to select perks but whilst there is only a very limited choice; more often than not you find that they can have a huge impact on your gameplay. For instance, as medic I could easily use perks to spec myself into either a solo tank with huge health and a fairly decent DPS, but I usually take a perk load out that allows me to buff my teammates to all hell! With my weapon in hand I am able to hand out speed boosts, damage boosts and all sorts of other fantastical buffs!

There is a variety of maps to play on, the most popular, from experience and slightly from my own personal opinion and that of my teammates is Paris! Each map has a variety of different areas, in the case of Paris you have the underground as well as the streets, tight enclosed buildings and so on. Honestly, after a while you begin to develop a bit of meta, naturally over time we have started to rotate to certain areas depending on the wave number and which difficulty setting we are on.

I find that whilst the game is great fun, it does become somewhat repetitive after a short while as tactics become rinse and repeat. There is only a limited amount of maps and weapon choices, but hopefully the steam-workshop will be able to see that soon! Maybe we can expect to see some more community maps added to the base game and maybe even a few new weapons? I am not entirely sure about the last one but we can always hope, can’t we?

There is a PvP gamemode, however I have honestly tried to avoid it to the best of my abilities. Features two teams of six, where one team must survive and the other plays more advanced forms of the zeds, having a wide variety of abilities to use against the survivors. My main gripe with this gamemode is that you frequently have players that will play the zeds and nothing else, they practice over and over again until it reaches a point where more than frequently you will find yourself in a game where as soon as someone on the zed team gets a certain type of creature, usually a siren, it’s all over for the survivors.

But that doesn’t take away from the core enjoyability of the game, whilst I may only play a game or two once a week or even once a month I do find myself unable to even consider uninstalling the game, frequently I have hovered my mouse over the uninstall button before sighing and booting it up, proceeding to dedicate another hour or two into the game as I return into the gorey heaven that is Killing Floor 2!