Killing Floor 2 Preview

The levels are varied, with Tripwire taking some of the best community attempts and working closely with designers to bring them to the complete game. Killing Floor was set entirely in England, but Killing Floor 2 has spread its wings wide and set itself across most of Europe, meaning there's a bit more variety - a burning Paris, underground research labs or even creepy manor houses or a dark forest are all in attendance.

The maps will hold the detritus of your battle until you leave the map, meaning that on levels like the snowy research centre, you slowly paint the entire map with the gore of your conquests like a psychotic Laurence Llewelyn Bowen. Learning the maps is fairly quick and easy, and you'll want to do it as quick as possible so you can pick where to defend. If you get it wrong, there's a decent chance the safe room you've created with your welded doors and choke points could become your tomb when an unnoticed vent spews enemies right into the middle of your best laid plans.



Unfortunately, the combat can get a little repetitive - despite the healthy amount of weapons, maps and classes each battle inevitably plays out the same way: the toughest creatures all attack with Melee, meaning a quick death if they get close to you - the answer to all of these is to get everyone to shoot the hell out of them as quickly as possible. The more mundane monsters all attack in their own special way, but despite the different problems they present, the solution to them all is to kill all of them - whether with bullets, bombs, fire or a sledgehammer with a shotgun shell mounted in its head.

A multiplayer mode pitting monsters against survivors is here, in its first iteration in the most recent patch, and it's pretty dire. The balancing isn't where it needs to be and as a result you'll be stomped fairly regularly by players until in the final round one of you is able to control one of the two end of game bosses which will then slaughter all of the survivors. It feels more like a shoddy mod than a fully fledged game mode, but hopefully this'll be fixed in the future. For now, I've just tried to ignore it.



The combat is the biggest weakness to the game. There's no shortage of creativity here and with a full team of friends it's very hard to begrudge it anything, but there's a sense that compared to Left 4 Dead 2's special infected and the unique way you had to fight each individual one, Killing Floor 2's combat is mechanically quite boring. All the progression, good maps and fun weapons in the world can't get past that, and it's something that I hope is addressed before the game gets a full release. If not though? This is still a great time, but one that perhaps needs to be experienced with friends on voice chat for full effect.