After years of Call of Duty and Halo, Killing Floor 2 is probably not the shooter for me. Alternately: after years of Call of Duty and Halo, Killing Floor 2 is probably the shooter I need in my life right now.
Tripwire Interactive offered press a hands-off demo during a recent San Francisco Killing Floor 2 preview event, and the impression I got from President and CEO John Gibson is that this is just the kind of itch the Atlanta-based developer is hoping to scratch among shooter fans. The sequel – which is currently in development without a release date – to the little Unreal Tournament 2004 mod that could, Tripwire is selling Killing Floor 2 as the shooter for fans who just want the guns to shoot right and the blood to flow freely, a throwback to the fast-paced Quake Arena era where a headshot was less important than delivering as much massive trauma as quickly as possible.
To that end, according to Creative Director and Senior Animator Bill Monk, the developer has created three very simple pillars for Killing Floor 2: blood, bullets, and blades. While demoing some of the gunplay across a pair of levels from the shooter (still in Alpha), Monk and Art Director David Hensley wanted the handful of journalist gathered in the San Francisco screening room to see the many ways the bodies of out of control Zeds can be annihilated by the game’s guns and melee weapons.
The blades, in particular, seem to offer the biggest change for the series, allowing players to not only have directional slices through the game’s enemies, but to block and reduce the amount of damage taken from enemy attacks.
While we were only allowed to see a handful of the game’s guns and one melee weapon (the katana), Tripwire hopes gamers will come for the carnage and stay for the co-op. It’s an interesting strategy for a company whose other big title, the ultra-realistic Red Orchestra, is a 180-degrees away from the exploding biomechanical horrors out of some techno fetishist’s version of Doom. The monsters – or “Zeds” as they’re known in the KF-verse – are more gross than shocking, but effective in terms of offering interesting targets for your many weapons.
The “blood” part of the three pillars if the new M.E.A.T., or Massive Evisceration and Trauma system. Tripwire boasts technical achievements in the realm of splitting enemy skeletons into double-digit segments, offering clean cross-sections of enemy bodies if they take a whack with the katana. This is really the kind of thing you’ll notice more often than not in the game’s slow-mo mode, but it’s a gruesome (and welcome) little detail. Blood from corpses now has realistic splash patterns along walls and floors, with the developer promising wet levels with persistent gore that will remain long after the first enemy has fallen.
Tripwire offered a live demo with a single player running around the three maps – a Horzine lobby, one of the company’s biotech labs, and the streets of Paris – which is unfortunate, because the studio is really pushing the game as a jump-in, jump-out team shooter. But I would have liked the opportunity to see how a group of players would deal with an oncoming rush of Zeds, or some of the strategies that the new perk system could enable.
Gibson offered a few words on the new perks, saying that the team felt there was a long grind between levels in the first game. For the sequel, they’ve raised the number of levels to 25 (up from 6), with unique loadouts for each perk. Describing it here feels like a thin substitute for seeing it in action, though.
I can’t give you a strong impression of Killing Floor 2 beyond what I was shown and what I was told. I can say that this ain’t art: Tripwire has been very deliberate about stripping out narrative content and simply making this a raw-as-hell shooter focused on varied murder scenarios. On that front, it seems like they’re on the right track. I’m just looking forward to the opportunity to check it out for myself.