Nil Admirari

Basically, Tripwire covered every part of every map in blood from the beginning. The colors that make up the floors, ceilings, etc. are all animated on top of the blood. The Zed’s gushing corpse is simply peeling back a layer of animation to expose the bloody core of the level.

“To my knowledge, this is the only game that has ever done this,” art director David Hensley said. “We wanted to do it in a way that caused no memory lag or frames-per-second issues, and we succeeded.”

One Zed was killed by a grenade, which sent him flying towards the demo’s player (controlled by Munk). The player then used the AA-12 automatic shotgun to blast the creature into five or six pieces.

“We call this Zed juggling,” Gibson said.

PC Gamer also spoke up.

Tripwire hasn’t released any gameplay footage of KF2 quite yet, so you’ll have to rely on my words to describe the moment-to-moment carnage I witnessed. I saw a few waves of KF2 played live, through which it was apparent that the basic rhythm of KF isn’t fundamentally changing: you backpedal, you kite ugly enemies, and you thin the hordes of genetic freaks as efficiently as you can. What was new was the way that KF2’s fidelity stimulated new moments and decisions.

Grenades, for example, now release a few chunks of shrapnel that ricochet, and these fragments can bite into KF2’s new dynamic lights and breakable objects. A thrown grenade is still an effective band-aid for the horde of Clots coming your way, but the explosion might also kill the only light sources in a hallway or a basement. I like the idea of having to make that snap cost-benefit analysis about how a single frag grenade could make a piece of the level more dangerous by darkening it; it’s something that didn’t exist on the ancient Unreal tech of Killing Floor the first.

Most significant, though, are the changes made to melee. Tripwire only had a katana to show (and mentioned a sledgehammer), but rather than the sword operating as a one-dimensional weapon, there’s a surprising amount of nuance. Left mouse is light attack, and right mouse is heavy, but more importantly the direction you’re moving at the time you attack on WASD dictates the motion of your attack. The katana’s heavy, horizontal slash is one of the most impressive real-time animations I’ve seen in a game: I watched the sword effortlessly tear the entire upper body off a Clot, sending it across the room while the legs stood frozen in place. You can also hold block (to reduce, but not fully eliminate melee damage) or try to time a block perfectly against an oncoming melee attack to briefly stagger that enemy. Already I’m imagining a front-line melee player, who’s mastered the technique, stopping a Fleshpound (which Tripwire said will be blockable) in its tracks so his teammates can get in some easy shots.