It has been more than a decade since the previous game, so it makes sense that Killing Floor III is bringing a lot of changes to the series. Unreal Engine 5 and the M.E.A.T. engine bring the carnage into the modern era, but there are some gameplay changes that have shaken up the formula. Crafting mods for your weapons, Specialist-specific abilities, and a more locked-in weapon selection have certainly made their mark.

The basics of the game aren't much different; Killing Floor III is a cooperative game in which you play on a team of up to six players and kill waves of "specimens." Specimens are horrible abominations of increasingly varied forms and numbers with each wave. It culminates in a boss wave where it's just your team versus one of the three bosses in the game. As you take down enemies, you earn dosh (you know, cash) to spend between waves. You'll spend some of your cash to replenish ammo, armor, or any consumables you've used. The rest you'll save up to spend on a fancy new gun.

Every specialist has four primary weapons available, including the one you start with. At the shopping kiosk, you can see all four listed, with each having three variants available. The variants have randomized attachments and varied costs, so a particular shotgun variant might cost more because it has a higher magazine capacity or some fancy ammo type. You can only equip two primary weapons, and you get some amount of trade-in if you're buying a different weapon for the same slot. This also marks a change from the more weight-based inventory system of the previous game.

After completing a mission, you get a selection of various crafting materials, but with so many types in the game, it isn't clear if there's a better way to get specific ones or if it's truly random. Back in your base, you can spend crafting materials to craft any weapon attachments that you've unlocked. Once crafted, you can see the results, which includes a random modifier, such as making the weapon do more damage if you are below 20% health. You can accept the results or recraft the attachment, but doing so wastes some of the materials. You can also remove attachments from one weapon and attach it to another that it is compatible with, even between the different specialists.

You can save loadouts for a specific weapon with a custom set of attachments to use in the game, and it will be available as one of the choices from the kiosk. The more attachments you put on a weapon, the greater the cost will be, so it may make a weapon tougher to get in the earlier waves when money is tighter. Some attachments are straight upgrades and increase the cost, while others may have a lower additional cost and raise one stat while lowering another. The whole system is nice in that it lets you tailor weapons to your tastes and play style.

I'm not as big of a fan of how limited the beta feels when it comes to weapon selection. Every specialist has four primary options, and the only secondary is the unique one that they start with. There are no "common" pools of weapons that any specialist can use, which is a level of flexibility that I appreciated from the previous game. With only four primary options that tend to follow a similar theme for each specialist, it feels rather limited when compared to Killing Floor 2.

The gameplay in Killing Floor III feels a lot different due to the addition of mantling/climbing, sprinting, dashing, and a slide mechanic. A lot of Killing Floor 2 could boil down to careful positioning choices, since you only moved at one speed and levels lacked much in the way of verticality. With the ability to climb and mantle, the levels in KF3 have a lot of variations in height. Dashing is critical to stay alive, and although it does have a short cooldown, its usage is otherwise unlimited. Sliding feels a tad gimmicky, but I suppose if you really want to slide feet-first into a group of zeds with weapons blazing, the game isn't going to stop you.

The new iteration of the M.E.A.T. (Massive Evisceration and Trauma) engine lives up to its name. Granted, it's difficult to focus on the results of your carnage when you're dealing with a dozen enemies at once, but you'll end up doing some downright unkind things to your foes. Internal musculature is modeled and represented, and apparently the game does a more realistic job of what it looks like when muscles and tendons are barely holding together what remains of an enemy's body. It's easier to see the results of your work when enough teammates kill enough enemies to temporarily trigger the slow-motion "zed time" effect for everyone, which is a feature that seems to have (thankfully) remained unchanged from the previous game.

If the beta showcased one thing about Killing Floor III, it is that it's a different game from its predecessor, and perhaps it's not even the game that fans of the franchise may have been expecting. Change is often good and expected, given the amount of time that has passed between the two games. I look forward to spending time with it after release to get a better feel for how all the changes come together.

Previewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti