Killing Floor 2 Torrent is mainly enjoyed in Survival mode, with a simple set of rules that sends increasingly tough waves of creatures—known as Beasts—screaming and drooling at a bunch of players. Between waves, players can use in-game money on armor, ammo, and weapons.
It’s enjoyable in its careful moments, players sticking together, back to back, helping each other, trying to eliminate crawling, spider-like creatures and hidden acrobats as they burst through every entrance. But it’s also enjoyable in chaos, when a large Fleshpound scatters the team, or a faceless Cronenbergian monster grabs you from behind and you spin around to shoot its head off with a Desert Eagle. There’s a lot of shouting over communication channels.
The basic plan is simple: stick together, save ammo, have a good healer, know when to retreat, and know which areas of the map offer the most space to move around. But getting wiped out as a team, ending the game on wave four out of ten, is also straightforward. Your healer went down early, someone got cornered while reloading, someone got caught by a Husk’s fire attack, a special type of mutant with an arm cannon.
Killing Floor 2 is a fundamentally repetitive game. You’re facing the same challenge repeatedly, with attracting enemies and a few expected specials that will charge forward, swing their glowing arms around, and so forth. It lacks the progression of going through a Left 4 Dead 2 campaign, where a modder can play with the pace, change the scenery, and even add platforming sections. But there’s enough excitement in Killing Floor 2 2’s weapon mechanics and explosive carnage to keep it entertaining for hours, even if the enjoyment doesn’t vary much from one map to another.
The leveling system is another mixed success. Every five levels gained with a class—called ‘perks,’ but they’re essentially classes—unlocks a choice of bonuses. At level 5 as a healer, for example, I can choose to increase my health or boost my damage resistance. There are also basic stat boosts, like extra damage with class-specific weapons. The bonuses encourage playing on Normal difficulty servers to level up—which might be too easy for experienced FPS players to truly enjoy—and discourage switching to improve your team composition. I’m clearly not helping my team by going into a match with a level 1 gunslinger instead of a level 10 healer.
The melee weapons are also enjoyable, and I particularly like the katana. It’s not a complicated melee system, but not basic either. You can swipe left, right, down, and up by pressing WASD before attacking, perform light and heavy attacks, and time blocks with attacks to push back enemies. Slicing off multiple Beast heads at once with a well-timed katana swipe is impressive, especially if it triggers one of Killing Floor 2 2’s slow-motion moments, which happen when any player on the team does something impressive.
If you’re seeking an exact copy of Killing Floor, with its specific classes and balancing, Killing Floor 2 isn’t that. But it is a visual treat, and a challenging, enjoyable cooperative shooter with an active community creating maps. You can play it for the challenge against overwhelming odds, you and a few friends fighting off hundreds of monsters, constantly pushed to the brink of death. Or you can play it like I’ve started to when I’ve had a long day: listen to a podcast, join a silly 50-player server on a wacky player-made map that includes a literal staircase to heaven, and relish in the headshots.
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Killing Floor 2 Torrent System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10/11 64-bit
- Processor: Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTS 250
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 80 GB available space
