Killing Floor 3

The best teammates in Killing Floor 3 know how to get the most from doors. Three games in, this series remains a bit of a gleeful throwback, a wave-based horde affair in which monsters appear sporadically while you move around the warren-like levels. Closing a door as a muddle of enemies approaches allows them to pool in one place. It also means that you can then open the door and be greeted by a tidy arrangement of targets, neatly lined up like Christmas carollers. Any singing, though, will be drowned out by the explosion from a well-placed grenade.

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The door trick is a memorable element in a game that often seems to need one. Killing Floor 3's road to release was paved with an underwhelming closed beta and a delay while player concerns were addressed. Those concerns included everything from uninspired monster design and the tethering of characters to classes to a disproportionate weighting towards futuristic weapons in the arsenal and glitches and hitches during play, presumably caused by the shift to Unreal Engine 5.

The design team, meanwhile, wanted to make a gloomier, grittier game this time. They wanted a more grounded experience, which called for a slower pace, albeit shot through with precision bursts of speed and agility in the form of dashes, mantling and knee slides. They've succeeded with this, to a degree, but the grimdark result now finds itself surrounded by zanier and more charismatic competitors in the forms of Helldivers and even FBC: Firebreak. With its gloomy military installations and underground labs, its chicken-skinned zombies and bloated poison-flingers, this venerable horror blaster suddenly finds itself slightly short on character.