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Killing Floor 2 (PC) Review





 I WANT to recommend this -I really do. I’ve been a long time fan of the Killing Floor series  (I even make maps and mods for them) starting with the mod on Unreal Tournament 2004 - . This latest installment of the game series has fantastic gore, satisfying and numerous weapons, fun villains, nice graphics, a cool leveling system, and overall very satisfying gameplay. But due to it’s flaws, I recommend picking up a used console version of the game, or picking it up during a humble charity bundle when available,  because I can’t really condone giving money to tripwire anymore.

These flaws are as follows:

-Loot boxes. This is one of the big ones. I was excited when I saw that I could dress my character up in this game, as I felt that was a cool new customization option to have. Sadly, this only serves as a platform for tripwire to manipulate users from. You can earn a limited amount of cosmetic items through dosh vault crates that you earn through gameplay, as well as earning cosmetic items during holiday/seasonal events, but all the rest is locked behind a paywall. The game “rewards” you with usbs and lootboxes that you have to *pay* to open and see what is even inside - which might not even be something you like, or might be something you already have. This could have been a cool feature of using the dosh you earn through gameplay to access some sort of trader shop in the menus to unlock cool outfits and weapon skins, but instead tripwire has used it to make the game feel sleazy, unimmersive, and manipulative.


-Increasingly greedy DLC prices. I personally don’t mind dlc as a general concept. They are addons to a game you can purchase where you know exactly what you’re getting. But compare the prices to the dlc from the first Killing Floor game….

In Killing Floor 1, you could get 4 new weapons for 8 dollars. In Killing Floor 2, you’re charged 10 dollars for one weapon.
In Killing Floor one, you could get Reggie the rocker, a playable character with unique dialogue for 5 dollars - in the second game, it costs 10 dollars for the same deal with characters like Mrs. Foster.

Combined with the loot boxes, this makes the game feel very slimy. I want to feel like a badass playing KF2, not like I’m trapped in the room with a cartoon stereotype of a sleazy businessman.

Gameplay-breaking bug(s): My experience during the seasonal event, Neon Nightmares, was particularly frustrating. The blood blender trap in the newest map bioLapse, has (or at-least had, when I wrote this review)  a bug where it won’t always kill the zeds that get tossed into it. Using this trap was required for one of the events challenges, and also prevented me from the finishing a match on weekly, due to the fact that I was the last one alive, and didn’t have the firepower to take down the scrake (his health was regenerating too quickly) - so I launched him into the blood blender only to have him not die and get trapped down there, thus making it impossible to finish the wave. The entire event managed to pass by without tripwire fixing this bug in the map.

Lastly, the inclusion of large amounts of christian metal on the soundtrack hurts the atmosphere of the game for me, and it is also another reason I no longer give tripwire money, as I don’t want my money going to such bands. That said, the tracks contributed by zYnthetic are fucking great, and I wish they’d just had his work as the main soundtrack like he was for most of the first game.

Some 2023 Update Notes: Since I’ve originally written this review, they also added a “witch hunter” costume (yay for promoting the murder of religious minorities), and the tripwire president was asked to step down after making a twitter post attacking bodily autonomy rights for American citizens. It was nice to see the rest of tripwire hold him accountable, but it just further cements why I no longer give any money to this company. A lot of people in KF2 community nowadays seem to just constantly beg for a Killing Floor 3, and if such a thing ever exists, I really hope the IP changes hands to something other than tripwire first. My favorite game about sassy British people blowing up monsters deserves so much better than this trash company.

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