Oh god, that’s right, the new Killing Floor 3 trailer reminded us it’s out next week

Good lord, do games just sort of creep up on you these days, too? Killing Floor 3 is set to be released next week, July 24, and it’s suddenly sprung up like a burst pipe. I mean, did you see that the Pac-Man Metroidvania game launched today? You’d be forgiven for missing all of this, as platforms like Valve’s Steam have over 100 games dumped onto the storefront since July 17.

The new launch trailer is filled with the typical Killing Floor noisy butt-metal, puddles of gore, and a lot of zombies. Sorry, “Zeds”. In an era where co-op games are dime-a-dozen, and specifically, really hard to maintain an audience as major live service games like Fortnite and Rainbow Six Siege grip onto their players’ brains, it’s yet to be seen how Killing Floor 3 will survive the brutal landscape of the current gaming industry.

Co-op game ready to launch in a sea of co-op games

If you’re looking at the screen like, “Killing Floor? I remember that name!”, it’s probably because you remember when the first game would appear in nearly every single early 2010s Steam sale. Originally starting life as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, it quickly became the cheaper and deeper alternative to the ever-popular Call of Duty Zombies mode. It also came out around a time when zombies were the “in” thing, and Left 4 Dead ruled the co-op roost.

It also, notably, came out during a time when games didn’t launch like avalanches. Killing Floor 2 was well-liked, smoothing out its mechanics to fit best in the soon-to-boom PC gaming market. However, it just kind of dropped off outside the hardcore fanbase, becoming the successor in those super cheap Steam sale pickups. Gaming moved on, and now it’s circling around just a few games.

Co-op has never been bigger, but the real question is, can something like Killing Floor 3 pull players away from the current in-vogue games? A friendly climbing game this is not. I don’t expect it to be culled like a Concord or Steel Hunters.

Killing Floor 3 could be another marred launch due to performance issues

Developed by Tripwire Studios, Killing Floor 3 is another wave-based zombie shooter. It’ll be on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, but the community has filled me with some trepidation over it. Reading and watching videos about it for this article, the common point brought up is that this could be another rocky launch for a returning legacy franchise.

Payday 3, a co-op robbery-themed shooter, launched so poorly that the previous game, launched a decade before it began to see players returning. Similarly, recently released FBC Firebreak from Remedy, a more Left 4 Dead-inspired, beat-the-objective co-op game, rather than wave-based survival, didn’t run poorly but was received poorly due to just being thin on the ground.

Originally meant to launch in March 2025, after its original beta, Tripwire delayed the game until July because the fan reaction was that bad.

It, of course, still doesn’t bode well that the game is launching with a plethora of issues detailed in a support article. According to intrepid Killing Floor and zombie game YouTuber Venatix, a lot of these issues might still be there at launch and “stick around”.

Player reactions to the game aren’t mixed from what I can see. Killing Floor 3 is potentially another “hot to the touch” launch. A couple of users said it needs at least another year in development, while some think its general vibe is off.

Tripwire, in its support documents, mentions that the game is “CPU-bound”, as with other Unreal Engine 5 games facing similar performance issues. We’ll have to see how it hits, but if the stutter seen in some of the videos from the most recent stress test persists, it’s just going to be a bad time for a game reliant on being able to move out of the way at a moment’s notice.