Recent reviews by Exploding8

Honestly I feel like people are just bandwagoning when it comes to the negative reviews for this game. I've been a fan of KF since KF1 and I remember just as much negativity around KF2's release, and a lot of it sounded very similar. Yeah, KF3 has a few changes, but it still feels like Killing Floor at its core gameplay-wise, and I've been having plenty of fun with it so far. At $40 I'd say I've already got my money's worth out of it. My only worry is how Modding tools will turn out down the line - I hope they don't neuter them in some way to keep people buying the battle pass. A lot of my favorite times in KF1 and KF2 were in custom maps with custom numbers of players and such, so I hope they'll provide support for that kind of thing again.

The only negative thing imo is the Supply Pass, which feels tacky as hell like with most Battle Pass type games. But Killing Floor has always had tacky ass DLC so its kinda easy to look past it. Its all cosmetic and they seem to provide plenty of cosmetics in the "free" / base version of the Supply Pass so it hasn't bothered me too much yet.

My favorite thing surprisingly is the Weapon Mods system - it provides a nice sense of progression and an opportunity to experiment to tweak your experience with each class. For example, the Medic's starting pistol felt a little weak, so I added Hollow Point bullets to it and now it can 1 hit kill clots with headshots on Normal, which feels way better. Things like that feel pretty cool and add a great sense of progression and opportunities for experimentation. The overall aesthetic is way better than KF2 imo as well - the mix of modern tech with Sci-Fi ♥♥♥♥ felt sloppy and unappealing in KF2, but here it looks a whole lot better and more consistent as a base aesthetic. The grittier aesthetic of KF1, which was less Sci-Fi and felt more like a classic zombie / occult aesthetic was still my favorite, but we threw that away when we moved to KF2 a long time ago so its hard to fault KF3 for not going back to it.

The Roadmap they posted looks good and seems to address a few of my other criticisms with the game (no text chat, perks locked to characters, modding tools), so hopefully they stick with it. It feels like a good base game with opportunity to grow a lot like with KF1 and KF2.

All that said, I've heard people have issues with performance. Personally I'm on a 4090 so I may be brute-forcing past a lot of that while sticking to High settings (haven't tried Ultra partly due to those complaints), but the performance has been fine to me, some hitches here and there but KF games were always a bit janky and this feels about on par with KF1 / KF2 in that respect.

Overall, if you were a fan of KF1 and KF2 you'll probably enjoy KF3 just as much.

Ignore the negativity around this release in reviews from Critics, if you're a fan of the Original STALKER games you'll feel instantly at home here. Playing on Veteran difficulty this IMMEDIATELY feels like the true STALKER experience, Mutants are terrifying forces of nature that are hard to pin down and will kill you extremely quickly if you don't take them down fast enough, Anomalies are instant death, Radiation is killer. Human enemies go down extremely easily if you can get a headshot in, even with a starter pistol, but they are just as deadly against you so you gotta be careful with your approach / cover.

Basically, keep your finger on that Quicksave button, Stalker. Just like the originals.

Performance wise, I'm on a 4090 so I may be brute forcing my way through issues, but I really haven't seen many. There's a stutter here or there from being on UE5 but it hasn't been super noticeable so far, and honestly it feels familiar coming from the Originals which had their share of jank. The first settlement I noticed a marked decrease in performance even with my 4090 but I hear turning settings down from Epic to High can help without really any noticeable loss in graphics. I also hear capping it to 60fps can improve the experience so going to try that.

So far my only real annoyance has been HDR - there doesn't seem to be a way to calibrate settings for it within the settings menu so I've had to adjust it on the fly which is pretty annoying, and I can't tell if I like the settings where they're at since there's no easy way to compare and contrast. Also you need to have it set to Fullscreen [Exclusive] otherwise its disabled, which isn't communicated well at all.

TL;DR: This feels like a homecoming for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans. If you have a strong enough rig to brute force your way through performance issues, absolutely grab it.

Its like those old cart collections, but if like 70% of the games were actually good instead of only one or two being worth playing. I've sunk 11 hours into it already and I've only really gotten into House Party, Night Manor, Pilot Quest, and the tower defense game, all of which are fantastic games on their own, and I've taken a peak at about half of the others and see a bunch more I want to focus on like Mortol and Max and Mini.

The games can be brutally difficult like games from that era were though, so keep that in mind going in.

Its a game for people who play something like Fire Emblem Awakening and craft narratives in their heads when their best fighter stays behind to fight off a horde of enemies while the rest of their army escapes. Instead of being head-canon, Wildermyth revels in using failure as a vessel for actual story telling. Even whole chapters can be failed, yet the story goes on. Instead of dying, heroes can become maimed, lose limbs, hindering their effectiveness in battle somewhat but making them that much more unique and memorable in the process. Out of combat procedural story decisions can permanently alter characters as well. Almost every important gameplay decision is accompanied by some level of procedural story telling. Its a great example of utilizing the strengths that are unique to videogames as a medium to create unique stories that players can get invested in.

For example, by the end of my first campaign, I had a party with a broken-hearted sorcerer with a hook for a hand, who was friends with a partially petrified but absolute badass ranger, lead by a peg-legged jester of a warrior and her husband and daughter. Through the course of the campaign the sorcerer would reveal his tragic long lost love story only to his dear friend the ranger, and those two would end up being long-running heroes as the leader of the party retired early to live out her days with her family. The two vets helped coach a whole new generation of heroes, including another badass warrior woman who gained a mischevious creature as a pet, and would go on to barely survive as she defended the party against an onslaught of enemies, losing an eye by the time the final battle of the campaign was ended. All those characters can go on to re-appear in future campaigns. The way the story and characters evolve through failure makes it so much easier to get invested in their adventures, as every encounter could have dire, but not game-and-story-ending consequences for your band of heroes.

All that said, if all you care about in videogames is gameplay, then it might not be for you. The combat is enjoyable, but not nearly as difficult as, say, XCom. If you're experienced with tactics type games you may want to play on a harder difficulty to start. The game is at its best when you're not quite sure if you'll succeed in a given encounter. Or, more accurately, when you're not sure how much you'll need to sacrifice to succeed.

TL;DR, if you're a fan of emergent narratives and stories in videogames, or the improvised style of storytelling of some D&D campaigns, then the game is probably right up your alley. If all that isn't particularly interesting to you, the gameplay might not be enough to keep you engaged the whole time.

This game has had an amazing redemption and is honestly one of my favorite games of all time now. Absolutely worth playing.