This is sort of a summary of my thoughts regarding a game that is pretty old and no one plays because it is ass, cancer, bad, and generally not that fun for that long. But it's a game I still play, so I guess egg on my face for being handicapped.
This is actually a pretty long read I guess. Go in with the assumption I'm gonna talk shit about an 8 year old game made by a shitty studio with no creative or intellectual value left after they sold out and were acquired by a holding firm.
Killing Floor 2 is a Horde Shooter where you and up to 5 random strangers (and maybe friends of yours if you can find enough to play with a full group) shoot at bioengineered man-things called Zeds. They're not zombies, they're Zeds, totally distinct. A few different types of Zeds will approach you with malicious intent and difficulty-dependent variable speeds of traversal, and you will introduce them to a variety of projectiles fired out of many gun-things which are very tactical, and cool, and extremely realistic. So real and tactical and cool, very much like real guns, I'm not 11 what are you talking about?
The game's core conceit is that it shares DNA of course with the original, Killing Floor, a janky game with janky gameplay that managed to be fun because its hardest setting required methodical and coordinated play, twitch-shooting wasn't really all that viable, and sprinting around like a headless jackass from Cawadoody was going to get you eaten very fast. The original game had a variety of helpful features about it, such as three completely useless character classes, an over-reliance on flamethrowers and crossbows, and a meme culture that referenced one comedian from the UK's 1980's television. There was a dedicated button to throw 50 pounds (the english money kind) in a fat wad at your friends, and you'd end a game with LOADSAMONEH if you managed not to get OHKO'd by the really badly designed and badly balanced boss fight at the end.
Killing Floor 2 takes a lot of this sorta medium-skill, high-jank, positional and class based horde shooter and turns it on its head. Removing the ability to acquire high-performance guns in the early game that the original was famous for permitting, Killing Floor 2 kneecapped the performance of players along a very strictly designed "Tier System" in which price points arbitrarily gated weapons of various types off across "Tiers" of performance... these are of course not very well designed. From the classes (now 10 instead of 7) being often times redundant to an influx of weapons which make some classes just more fun and easy to play, design goals for this game were abandoned the moment they added microtransactions and $10 gun microtransaction DLC's. Since its launch in Early Access during 2015, the game's 8 years of life have been characterized by increasingly clear lack of fucks given to balance or design flow.
Killing Floor 2 has many problems. Chief among them is its identity as a "Hardcore" shooter with a softcore core audience that has left. Design issues with the game being too stressful and annoying pushed fans of the original out, and that's lead to a bunch of try-hard call of duty douchebags dominating the conversation about the game, such that I refuse to participate in the toxic-masculinity hotwing contest that is literally any public forum that the developers would ever see -- not that the original Tripwire Staff is working on the game anymore. It's been handed off to a life-support studio since the live service model it was built with only made a middling amount of money off of their core players who rarely peek the global player count over 3k week over week. For 8 years it's been like this, and no one seemingly has stopped and gone "What is wrong"?
I had many thoughts for a long time, but I've since identified my core argument from which all further critique will depend upon:
KF2 is a stressful, high speed game which offers so little margin for error that players must put hundreds of hours into it to obtain any degree of competence with its systems. A single death with send you all the way back to start due to archaic design which punishes failure so hard you might as well disconnect and close the game if you are killed past Wave 2. It is a game that can't fucking get its priorities straight: nerfing the precision play of Sharpshooter so badly the class genuinely is missing features, while giving the Demolitionist so much power it is better at headshots than the Sharpshooter (not making this up). This game has multiple Class-Defining weapons locked behind $10 DLC weapon packs, microtransactions which have no fucking value (just check the steam store for 0.03$ skins), and an utterly lethargic content drip which comes in a scant few maps and weapons each year spaced unevenly throughout the four quarters. Moreover, the game can't decide if it wants to be a movement shooter with groups of two or three man coordinated teams positioning dynamically throughout a zone of control or if it's a positional shooter where all six of you dig into an area and try to fight the hordes off through area denial.
It strives to be hardcore and fast paced, but can't get its load times below several minutes, and these design conflicts continue to come up the more and more I look at the game's Wiki, such that the gulf of skill requirement between difficulty levels gets LOWER the higher your difficulty setting is, paradoxically pushing low skill players to quit the game because they can't make the jump from Normal to Hard. Overly punishing, badly thought out, badly balanced and just archaic, Killing Floor 2 has aged worse than the original in-that its very design principles literally cannot be explained without pulling up the MAPS and talking about high-detail fuckery that sabotages the game at every conceivable step. I've wanted to do something where I discuss this game and its failures in detail, but every time I try to tug on one thread I end up tugging on another, but I'm gonna try and I'll be happy to fail. See you all sometime soon when I chase my thoughts together enough to get something recorded.