I have a love/hate relationship with Killing Floor 2. As a major fan of the first game I remember trawling Twitter to try nab a closed beta code before bots could scrape them all and I was hooked from the moment I played.

Years later, I look back on this with a bit of sadness. It was one of the only games I was dedicated to enough that I actually joined the official game forums. I was excited for everything the devs were promising.

Early on they said the game would never get any kind of paid DLC. That was a lie.
They said the game would be one of the most moddable on the market, from the ground up it was being designed with mods as a core tenant. That was somewhat of a lie, modding does exist but it's less accessible than the first game and they had a convoluted voting system for mods to be officially added.

They promised a new perk which took many forms and was eventually retooled as "survivalist", which took the best elements of every other perk without the negatives, AKA busted.

The game today is a shadow of itself. Development was outsourced to another studio a while back who made subpar additions. A big marketing element was the fact weapon animations were filmed at 200fps so that during slow motion you could see the sights wobble, or the bolt warp, etc. This other studio added guns with flatout broken animations.

The best maps in this game are still the ones it launched with. The community made some great ones but the official maps never got any better.

Today, it has a bloated and flatout broken (as in, servers for this do not work) in game item economy. It works via Steam marketplace but not in-game.

The gore system is fantastic though, Nvidia Reflex is cool, the persistent blood stains still wows me and the multiple points of dismemberment is still impressive.

It goes on sale crazy cheap now so it is worth playing for the guns and the gore but there are better co-op shooters that have come out since this game's launch.

As an aside, one of the studio heads made a ridiculous post related to abortion rights and was utterly shocked when asked to step down. It doesn't affect the game but I feel that the talent and charm of earlier Tripwire games is long gone, and can't help but feel a bone headed move from the studio head may indicate the kind of work environment at the studio that could have caused that. Entirely speculative on my part with no evidence but he did the studio no favours, except maybe winning attention from terminally online losers who wouldn't have played their game anyway.

I love the idea of playing this game much more than actually playing it but it's a fantastic game nonetheless.

The tech here is really impressive, the way things break, burn, smash and fall apart makes a little spot in my brain glow bright red from satisfaction. The most fun I had was loading up a city map and using the AC-130 mod to commit war crimes.

The actual game here is primarily a puzzle game. You have objectives like "steal X item" with a strict time limit once you start, you'll be arrested and sentenced to voxel jail if you fail. I'm glad the developers took the time to find a way to utilise the tech they had and make an actual game, they could have just as easily launched it as a simple sandbox.

The early levels are great fun and really activate your almonds, making me feel like my brain is ENORMOUS. The later levels feel less satisfying to beat as the game progresses. I stopped trying to achieve the secondary objectives and just wanted to finish the game by the end.

I was surprised by the extensive use of vehicles in this game but they handle well and situations like dropping a safe through 3 floors and having it smash through the roof of a van to drive away with are real highlights.

The music is fun, it matches the tone so well. I feel like Eric Andre in his Cat Burglar skit when I run around the map spraypainting the route I am going to take before I accidentally blow up a building wrong and get flattened.

Apparently the studio was bought up by a new publisher who has them working on subpar DLC packs, I haven't touched any of that but the base game is well worth the price of admission.

Multiplayer would go so HARD in this game.
Steam Workshop support is also a major plus.

I wrote a review for this already, originally written for Steam but I want to return to this as I have a lot to say.

There is no other experience like Squad. Teams are comprised of squads with set roles and headed up by a Squad Lead (SL), fireteams may be contained within. Matches are 50v50 on large maps focused on controlling key points. SL's need to coordinate their squads to complete objectives or support attacks, they also must communicate with other SLs to make this work. Voice chat is a necessity for this game.

On the scale of Arcade Shooter to Milsim, Squad leans much further on the Milsim side, not as far as something like ARMA but not as arcady as something like Insurgency or Hell Let Loose.

I don't know why Milsim developers seem to think that slow animations equate to realism. Everything you do can be measured with a calendar. Following a recent update known as Infantry Complete Overhaul (ICO) even aiming down sights requires 3 days notice. I play anti-tank 90% of the time which requires aiming for specific points on vehicles from hundreds of meters away, the openings for these shots can be only a few seconds and with this new update I don't even try anymore.

The entire intention of the update was to promote teamplay and slow the game down. However, the kind of players who went off on their own haven't been affected, because in all honesty they are turbo nerds who put more hours into this game than anything else in their lives, the kind of individuals who say "over" at the end of sentences through VC.

Most games you die to enemies you never even see. With ICO you and an enemy can walk right up to each other, spray like crazy and both walk away like it is a spaghetti western. The recoil and sway is utterly ridiculous. For a game that prides itself on realism all I can say is that it has completely shit the bed when it comes to representing the fighting ability of the average soldier. Sprinting for more than 2 seconds renders your soldier unable to cope with the physicality of being alive.

ICO isn't going away and the most hardcore elements of the community love it, again because they are turbonerds who believe their hardcore military man shooter should contain zero fun and should only be played by people willing to refer to them as 'Sir'.

I miss the highs this game used to offer. Holding a point with a squad of 8 guys against an onslaught, having a single medic be the backbone of the team. Landing a perfect RPG shot to take out a full helicopter. Sneaking behind enemy lines to locate a FOB so command can mortar it. Hell, games where I got zero kills and just did logistics runs back and forth from main were still fun.

Nowadays this game just makes me sad. You can still find some elements of fun but it takes a lot of sacrifice. Playing Squad requires a minimum of an hour of your time, between server queues, match set up, early game and the length of matches, if you decide you had a bad game which provided no fun it came at the cost of your entire evening.

The developers are also frustratingly focused on the wrong things with this game. Please god fix the broken server browser. Please add more official servers. Stop splitting your playerbase across two broken games and keep them on one broken game instead. Please fix the endless audio issues. Have you guys never heard of optimisation? Can you fix the bug that prevents spawning after waiting 90 seconds on the rallypoint? Can you fix the janky vehicle physics?

I don't encourage anyone new to try this game. I just miss what it used to be.

Also the community sucks. Yes please play Yugoslavian war music through your microphone at full volume for the entire game set up phase, hilarious and never been done before. Please do a fake Russian accent every opportunity, it kills me with laughter. I love when you scream racial slurs over and over every time you drive past, it's groundbreaking comedy. Oh yeah, you should definitely not unlock any Squads so that people joining the server cannot literally play the game and get kicked for being AFK due to something out of their control. I thoroughly enjoy getting TK'd because you insist on playing heavy armour but can't identify friendlies from enemies. Yeah bro, Squad was totally as quick and arcadey as Call of Duty before the ICO update and anyone complaining obviously doesn't know how to play, I am sure that earned you a purple heart with your military RP clan.

Yes I am mad, cope, seethe, etc. but I guess a game that forces you to communicate directly with people seriously highlights how obnoxious they can be. Given the small size of the community and server list you do run into the same clowns often.

I picked this it up during my playthrough of the base game. I was so captivated by that I was sure I would love any additional content. Honestly, it doesn't add much to the game unless you've already completed it and are searching for new challenges or reasons to dive back in.

I enjoyed the Travel Medallion and the horse gear. However, when it comes to the Trial of the Sword and the Champions' Ballad, I wasn't as enthusiastic. While I do appreciate the story flashbacks, the gameplay loop didn't do it me. I might revisit this expansion in the future when I'm looking to return to the game, and maybe then, I'll have a greater appreciation for it.