Killing Floor 2 – Halloween 2017

I wish I had gotten into Killing Floor sooner. I love zombies, I love shooting things, and I most of all love working as a team. Killing Floor 1 and 2 have all of this, along with great difficulty and a fun selection of free cosmetics. And so I am happy to do my first Killing Floor 2 review on the new Halloween update. In it we have a new map, two new weapons, a new system of daily challenges, a “Dosh Vault” feature, and a brand new boss!

The new map, Nightmare, is a very strange map, even for Killing Floor standards. I can see many references to horror movies such as Aliens, Evil Dead, and of course It. Every level of the map is a descent, leading players to a new location (or possibly a repeated location) every time they complete a wave, each location even more disturbing than the last. From a spidery cave to a dark war zone to a monstrous hodge-podge of body parts morphed into a walkable landscape. It’s insane fun, though with cramped space it can be difficult to avoid certain enemies. What makes these map so interesting though is there’s a lot of story in it through the environment, especially in the second to last area. I won’t say much, but there’s some connection between one of the clowns from the summer event earlier this year and some World War II soldier. Either ways, it’s weird.

During a dive into the world of monsters and madness, it would be best to gear up with some dangerous weapons. Good thing this update game with just that. The two new weapons to be added into the game with this event include the Seeker Six, a Demolitionist rocket launcher capable of shooting up to six mini rockets at enemies, and the Hemogoblin, a strange Medic weapon that fires tubes that upon penetration slowly drain away an enemy’s health. Both are incredibly fun to use, with me being able to lock on and decimate weak Zed with a barrage of rockets and draining the big guys of their blood while I watch them shrivel up (no joke, the models get skinnier as they lose blood from the tubes). Both perks were in great need of new gear with how limited they were before in weaponry. These new weapons will definitely spice up the playstyles of those who use these perks a lot and challenge people with new ways to play.

Speaking of challenges, while Killing Floor 2 has had weekly challenges before this update, now we have daily challenges as well, ranging from doing X amount damage with a certain weapon to killing a number of certain Zeds, to completing certain maps on a specific difficulty. All of them are fun, but I will say the map difficulty challenges should offer different levels of awards to match their difficulty. The same amount offered by beating a map on the highest difficulty possible is the same as doing a total amount of damage with a basic weapon. Not a very fitting reward after fighting the forces of hell. Hopefully that will be fixed later on, but even with that small error the new challenges are fun and keep players coming back! They change more than one time a day, so there are plenty of chances of earning their rewards.

So what do these new challenges reward players with? Dosh! As in money. But Dosh is used in game to buy better weapons and gear, so what can THIS dosh be used on? That I don’t know yet, but so far, nothing. Instead when you reach certain checkpoints of dosh, you earn yourself a special loot crate with unique items! Seems fair enough, but maybe in the future we can have a way to spend that dosh or fully completed sets of dosh instead of it just letting it sit in the vault. Even with this inability to use this vault dosh, it’s a fun feature! I hope they expand on it more!

But what’s even more fun than making money from killing Zeds? Killing really big Zeds! Like boss Zeds! And we got a new one to join the Patriarch and Hans: The King Fleshpound. Having not had the game during its beta and most of its lifetime, the King Fleshpound was a feature I never knew of until this update, so I was surprised to hear that this was not the first time we saw this abomination. Friends who play the game told me how they were concerned on the difficulty of this boss, saying when it was available for a certain period of time it was extremely difficult. This seems to have been looked at by the developers though as the Fleshpound seems enjoyable to fight on all difficulties. Maybe a bit too easy for the moment to defeat, but still a dangerous adversary. It has the normal Fleshpound moves such as smacking humans with rotating blade hands and charges, but also has a unique laser beam attack that can slaughter players unlucky enough to be in its way.

This update, all in all, successful. The new features function well, the new content offers plenty of new activities to players, and most importantly the players themselves, having gamed with them during one of Tripwire Interactive’s community game night, are greatly enjoying the update. It’s a strong event so far, with laughs, cries, and just plain madness. Delicious, clown-faced, spidery, flesh pounding madness. So if you have Killing Floor 2, go play it! And for those who don’t have Killing Floor 2, it’s 50% off on Steam right now, making it $15.00 USD. And it’s 15 dollars of a long-lasting purchase!

Coming next: Something I have been really needing to post up, a review of a grand, classic film about saying hello to your little friend.