I played regularly from the early access beta to around 2018. This game is another case of the live service model becoming a complete train wreck after being steered far off course by the development studio.

Not long into Early Access, Tripwire announced that the game would be getting lootbox item cosmetics and an ingame cosmetic store. Much to the chagrin of the community at the time, it was assured that this was to ensure the revenue could be spent on providing meaningful content (weapons/maps) into the future. Not long later Tripwire seemingly squandered a ton of cash developing a mediocre (54% positive reviews at time of writing) VR only game that nobody asked for and seemingly even less bought. Meanwhile, the base game for KF2 continued to get content, some additions good (endless mode, new bosses, new weapons) and some bad (PvP mode that nobody asked for, boring and unfun robot enemies, paying god how much to hire Gary Busey to voice Santa Claus for god knows why). This all lasted until 2019 when they announced that going forward, new weapons were going to cost money anyways because I guess they didn't make enough from the pretty poor showing of tacky crates and cosmetics. When the first instance of this released in Halloween 2019 and a single individual weapon DLC costed 1/3 of the game's retail price (10$ each at release), myself and all my friends dropped the game instantly, presumably following a majority of the active players at the time as well.

It seems that in the time between then and now the failure of Tripwire to maintain the community's interest showed in a decline in quality. A ton of the (too expensive) DLC weapons suffered dramatically in animation quality when compared to the base game, to the point where some of the guns animations are just embarrassing. Now that the game has ended support, it's dirt cheap (like 3$ on sale) and the bundle with all DLC weapons is as well (about 20$ on sale). I picked it up on this account just to see where this game ended up, only to be bombarded by 400+ new items bloating up my inventory, that I never had any interest in nor will I ever use. KF2 remains somewhat solid enough in it's current state, not because of it's years of support, but rather in spite of it. The game is worse off now than it was in 2017, that's for certain.

It's really a shame - this game had a ton of potential and it was completely squandered by frivolous spending by the studio combined with shattering the player bases' trust one too many times. To boot, KF3 looks like ♥♥♥♥. I can't imagine Tripwire has much longer now that it's been acquired by Embracer Group (bringers of well known catastrophes like Payday 3 and Saints Row 2022) so its a rather safe bet to assume Tripwire will suffer the same fate in due time, and with it, the shutdown of the (already extremely spotty) item servers for this game as well.

Go play the original Killing Floor. It's dirt cheap during a sale and it's got the grindhouse charm that was left behind when they made KF2.

turn off ur brain and straight jork it while playing

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