I Play New Games About Once Every Never, But Killing Floor 3 Reeled...

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.

Okay, I do play some new games—Arc Raiders has my attention right now, for instance—but not too often. I'm someone who tends to return to the same handful of evergreen multiplayer games, the World of Warcrafts, the Hearthstones, the Counter-Strikes, the Overwatches. But occasionally there's a new game that catches my cautious eye: The Finals, Escape from Tarkov, and Stormgate, to name a few. This year, that game was Killing Floor 3.

Actually, it was on my radar prior to this year, because Killing Floor is a series of games very close to my heart. The original wasn't the first game I played on PC—that award goes to either Call of Duty 4 or Team Fortress 2—but it was close.

Killing Floor came out in 2009, when I was 14 years old, and I got hooked on it. I wanted a friend to play it with, though, so I convinced my console gamer friend to buy a gaming PC by giving him my old Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT when I upgraded my graphics card, and split the cost of the game. He got hooked on it too, so naturally we were both very interested in the successor games.

It's been a decade and a half since the first game, and I was very happy to find that the basic formula hasn't changed at all with the third iteration. These are the games I like: ones where the core gameplay is so solid and compelling that there's little need for shaking it up in any fundamental kind of way. I mean, just ask Counter-Strike.

You might mistake Killing Floor for a horde shooter just like any other if you're uninitiated, or haven't spent much time with it. But there are fundamental differences that make it incredibly unique. The difficult but consistent and perfectible headshots, the difficult but perfectible kiting, the consistently exploitable enemy type weaknesses, the lethality of getting surrounded, the clutch zed (slo-mo) times, and so much more. It all makes for a game that feels like you can consistently improve at it.

That's what I think a lot of people who are new to the series miss: It's not a game with tons of flashy and over-complicated systems, but its core gameplay allows for consistent mechanical improvement. And, perhaps even more importantly, those improvements are satisfying. There's nothing more satisfying than nailing headshots with a

Source: PC Gamer