Killing Floor 3's monster design might just be the best in the business
Creature feature
I've spent a lot of time shooting military goons in far-off countries. I was about to make a joke that over the past 30 years I've digitally offed enough people to depopulate Luxembourg, but only 668,606 people live in Luxembourg, and I'm fairly certain I killed more people than that in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare alone. Sorry, Luxembourg.
Anyway, the point is that however much I adore shooting things in games, sometimes I find myself yearning for a more original enemy to square off against than the usual mix of military goons. Enter Killing Floor 3, which I previewed for PC Gamer this week.
Killing Floor 3 is a charmingly old school wave-based defence game that pits you against a bunch of mutant monstrosities. But as technology has evolved, Killing Floor 3's Zeds—that's what they're called here because god forbid anyone ever says the word zombie about their undead bioweapons— have evolved with it and I think they're going to be one of the more interesting looking video game enemies you'll fight this year.
Killing Floor 3 has a touch of science fiction to its world and the baddies contained within, which means Killing Floor's brand of body horror is now flecked with biopunk. Cyborg weaponry and huge plates of armour adorn the formerly fleshy monsters and, what's more, it has an actual impact on how the game actually plays, too.
Take the terrifying Scrake. The Scrake, at its core, is a seven foot tall monstrosity with a chainsaw and a willingness to use it. The big lad with a chainsaw is trying to bisect you in Killing Floor 1 and 2, sure, but in Killing Floor 3 he gets an armored facemask to protect his beautiful smile, and one of his hands has been replaced with a grappling hook, all the better to drag you into range. The enemy hasn't really changed much to his position in the previous games, but he's more of a threat now and can impact the fight in interesting ways.
See also the Husk, another hulking lad that used to sit at the back of a crowd and pepper you with long-range fireballs. Now, he has a jetpack so he can rocket around overhead, taking sniper positions or unusual angles to rain fire down on you from above. Of course, the jetpack is now a glaring weak spot, and careful shooting can blow up the jetpack and the unfortunate Husk that's bolted onto the thing.
If Killing Floor 1 and 2's combat had a problem—and I think they're close to perfect games, honestly— it was that enemies would all come at you from around the same direction or the same angle. You could quite easily as a sharpshooter line up a crowd of monsters before dispatching them with a flurry of headshots. Some enemies were faster or represented more danger, sure, but largely threats came from the same rough height and you didn't have to think too much about what was happening.
Killing Floor 3's version of the spider-like Crawlers are able to crawl on walls and ceilings. They can and will use this to flank you, and I've often backpedalled into a corridor to find a horde of crawlers that had snuck past me and was ready to really ruin my day.
Every single one of these enemies is smartly designed and fun to fight. Less fun to fight but no less smartly designed are the bosses and while Killing Floor 2 did have a couple of different bosses, they weren't super remarkable. Killing Floor 3 will introduce you to monsters like The Impaler, which Tripwire's creative director Bryan Wynia described to me last year as "a gorilla crossed with an M1 Abrams tank, with a giant blade mounted in its face". My time in the recent beta had me throwing down regularly with some sort of Queen Crawler, a huge insect that at first carries an egg sack and fires eggs at you while summoning up extra monsters against you in a tide, but then ditches the egg sack and becomes a fast-moving whirlwind of blades.
I think some of these stellar creatures are the result of Wynia's own work in the movies, where he creates monsters for the big screen. The entire Tripwire Interactive team is dedicated to making the most of their tech to make high-fidelity blasting and the whole of Tripwire seems to have a "if we can do it, why don't we try it" mentality that has led to some really gruesome looking monsters.
Of course, for all of the energy the team at Tripwire Interactive has put into building better monsters, they've put just as much work into ensuring they come apart cleanly too. Heads in Killing Floor 3 don't just pop, they flower open, deforming as shotgun shell collides with noggin. You'll rarely have time to appreciate it, such is the intensity with which the Zeds attack you. But as you get towards the end of a wave you'll start to notice the walking wounded, Zeds with scorch marks and burns, bullet wounds and even missing limbs.
Deformation is persistent and it seems to have a real impact. A monster without a limb can't attack you with that limb, obviously, but you can destroy armour to make Zeds less durable or shear off a weapon to stop it from being turned against you. This is splatterpunk at its finest, because there's actually a reason for you to make a mess, turning your enemies into chunks not just because it's fun, but because it might help you survive in the long term.
Killing Floor 3 is releasing on March 27 on PC, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S, and I'm very much looking forward to playing it with a few friends. And, you know, talking of gibs…
Gibs
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