Recent reviews by Moon

I wish I could recommend this game as I did enjoy aspects of it and I am indeed a Pathfinder fan in general. I pre-ordered and was greatly looking forward to playing. Now that I am playing it has been a mixed bag (hence the mixed reviews you see out here at the moment) but I am finally at the point of simply not wanting to continue.

I will approach this review from the perspective of someone that has played a fair bit of Pathfinder PnP (pen and paper) and will recount some of my own journey to you now. Let me also say that I do not min-max or "power-game" but I do at least try to create some fairly combat-capable characters all the same.

At first things seem really good. Character generation is _very_ faithful to the PnP game, with a good amount of classes and feats etc represented. Skills are a smaller and more condensed subset of the PnP game but this didn't bother me too much. The game has several options for difficulty ranging from "story mode" to "unfair" and the ability to customize and essentially create a difficulty tailored to your specific tastes.

While I believe that options are a good thing the canned options are a bit odd. "Normal" mode has enemies doing 80% of damage to your characters and very much nerfs things like critical-hits in your favor. Why they chose this as the default I am really at a loss to say. In my opinion there really should be a "PnP" mode where standard rules for critical hits etc apply without having to tinker with all kinds of settings in a effort to get apples to apples with PnP rules. I chose "challenging" because it seemed like the logical progression where enemies do full damage and critcial hits are lethal. This was my first mistake, although it would take me a while to figure that out.

You see, unbeknownst to me, "challenging" also buffs the enemy stats like AC and Ability scores. I'm sure if you're experienced with PnP this is already sounding alarms bells but it gets worse because the base stats for creatures/enemies are _not_ what you will find in PnP (not even on "normal" mode). It will be extremely shocking when your party runs into creatures that you instinctively know you have a decent chance of fighting based on your PnP knowledge only to find out just how badly mistaken you are when yet another TPK (total party kill) comes your way. Stat bloat for enemies is a huge problem and you will see many reviews complaining about this.

The story overall seems intriguing and there are some interesting pre-made characters that you form a party with fairly early on; but there are practical issues with these characters in terms of how well they do in combat. I also ended up with _no cleric_ for quite a while. Again, this should have alarm bells ringing. Now, you can "hire" a mercernary at a certain point in the game but it costs way more that I could afford at the time and so I had to struggle along without a cleric which is just miserable frankly as resting takes _forever_ to restore hit points etc. Loading screens for things like resting and travelling are _very_ long indeed and you will see complaints about screen-loading all over the place in these reviews.

I ended up starting with a Magus (my main), a bard, a barbarian and a fighter (tower-shield specialist). All three of these characters are pregenerated although you get to level them up manually after 1st level if you want to and so you have some say into how they progress at least. Problems: Barbarian starts with an over-sized sword which she won't give up (as in you literally can't take it away from her but you can at least convince her to use other weapons). This over-sized sword is a -1 to hit because of that... bad, very bad at Lvl 1. Tower-shield fighter would normally be good because you do get a nice, by PnP standards, AC but the creatures base attacks etc are so bloated that the nice PnP AC turns out to be not nearly as effective as you'd like in the early game. The bard is good - no complaints there.

So, while I did enjoy the story (as far as I got) adventuring was a combination of some fun and some aggravation. Stat bloated enemies proved to be a challenge and frankly a pain to fight with quite a few reloads just waiting for better dice rolls to overcome the odds. At times I did mow through some fairly light-weight creatures only to encounter some ridiculously overpowered "boss" with crazy stats that just mince your party in no time at all. Tremendous centipede comes to mind... watch out for that one ;)

Combat is Real-Time with pause at any stage. It tries to take things like initiative into account but movement can happen pretty much at any time it seems. So, you might get that fireball into a moving target and miss completely. Sneak-Attacking is way over-powered because you can "flank" by simply having more than one person fighting you, regardless of whether one opponent is on either side of you or not. I consider this a huge issue. It's difficult sometimes to keep track of what your characters are doing (or not doing) at times as you can't really "queue" commands per se and sometimes they seem to "forget" what you just told them to do. Fights tend to degenerate fairly quickly into an uncontrolled brawl but at times you can at least position tactically with a polearm character behind a tower-shield character if you have the patience to fight with the engine to do so.

Travelling can be frustrating as it seems an enemy is ready to pounce out every 100 meters. Sometimes you will just randomly encounter a god-like being that destroys your group. You also do not have the option to run away (once engaged in combat) - not ever. If you're unlucky you can even encounter a group that attempts to take one of your party members as a hostage/slave. At the time my party was not strong enough to fight them and so there goes one member. I had to reload to an earlier save as losing this person crippled my already struggling group. This was not fun and I've already read one account of this causing a fellow player to stop playing right then and there - I don't blame them, it sucked.

The balance and feel I would say is off. Once you progress to a certain point you get to "Kingdom manage" but I just flipped the switch onto auto-pilot. The kingdom management seemed dull and also requires you to potentially give up party members for a while as they become "advisors" and need to deal with problems... I didn't want to sacrifice my adventuring group for that. So - I cant comment too much on that aspect of the game except that it certainly did nothing to garner my interest - let's put it that way.

The game also currently has some major bugs. Some are show-stoppers although to the developer's credit they are patching as fast as they can. I just feel it's too little and too late for this gamer. In the future maybe I will return to it but that doesn't seem likely.

(Also, some basic weapons like slings appear to be missing as well which is just bizarre.)

It saddens me to give this one the thumbs down guys but I've uninstalled the game today and don't forsee re-installing unless there are dramatic changes.

As many reviews have already mentioned, the developers have taken a path to completion that is meandering into territory that is unwanted. Traditionally Killing Floor has always been about a solid class based co-op experience (PvE) and now there is a focus on PvP (humans versus Zed) which in my opinion is problematic - especially at this stage of development - because it has the potential to impact PvE in terms of class/perk abilities i.e. balance decisions as well as taking away developer time that could be used to complete the core game instead (updates are slow).

It seems like at some point during development a decision was made to try incorporate features from other titles such as CS:GO and Left 4 dead which again, in my opinion have no place in the KF2 arena. These features are key/crate purchase systems and the Player verus Player aspect of L4D with humans versus special infected. Instead of focusing on what made Killing Floor 1 at least somewhat unique with systems like the door welding and the gritty atmosphere, Killing Floor 2 is trying to be everything to everyone and that's simply not going to work.

What they did try to take from Killing Floor 1 is currently broken. Door welding (a tactic to barricade yourself from the hordes for a while) is meaningless because of the Zed teleportation "feature" whereby Zeds too far from players will be teleported to a nearby location to the players where no-one is currently looking. Think that corner was safe a second ago? Well look away for a second and surprise - in your face pal - as a Zed suddenly occupies that space and wastes no time in hacking people - that thought they were safe - to death. Not fun and so many people have complained about this it appears that Devs are not going to address it any time soon - if at all.

Weapon choices are very limited. The perk/class abilities are not all that interesting and really could use a complete overhaul to allow for more combo-play to encourage team-work and up the skill ceiling a bit. It would be much more interesting for perks from one class to directly link-up with perks from another class to deal more damage to enemies or create some other useful defensive effects.

As a PC gamer I am also not pleased to see obvious consolization creep into this title. Chat wheels instead of the key-bound menu drill down from Killing Floor 1, welders only appearing when you are near a door, auto-aim medic healing darts etc. These all impact the PC experience negatively.

So, I rather like the music and graphics in this game - at least those are good in my opinion but not enough to save it.

It is my opinion that you'd be much better off buying Killing Floor 1 at this point even though it is quite a bit older now - the gameplay is so much better.