Fight undead gingerbread on a moonbase in Killing Floor's new Twisted Christmas event

I love having new excuses to hop back into Killing Floor .

. Tripwire continues to sprinkle absurd themes (like Summer Sideshow, or Hillbilly Horrorsin October) into its wave-based survival game, and each is a pleasant, casual context that tempers some of KF's inherent, backpedaly hecticness.

Going live sometime on Tuesday, December's special event is Twisted Christmas III: Evil Santa's Moonbase. It features low gravity monster-killing, a dwarven battle axe, new character and weapon DLC, and an in-game scavenger hunt. Tripwire invited me to play the new content in advance, and I've shared some footage of our match below.

http://youtu.be/idui9cJtnMg

Tripwire told me that Twisted Christmas III was put together over the past three or four months. President John Gibson says the promotional events continue to boost interest in Killing Floor, which hit a millionin sales back in February 2012. “The sales are cool, but really it's just fun for us to developers to step out of our game. To say, 'Hey, let's make a guy with a gingerbread cane as a spike on his arm,'” Gibson says.

Compared to previous KF promo levels (like the terrific Portal 2crossover stage), the new Moonbase map felt a little confining to me, especially considering the new verticality provided by lowered gravity. But the weapons were fantastic: the Zed Eradication Device feels obnoxiously powerful and cool—it's a split between a high-end DOOM weapon, Ghostbusters' proton gun, and the Aliens motion tracker.

To unlock the ZED for purchase (permanently, for all team members), you have to work together to find 16 weapon parts scattered through the map in a single round—a metagame that should provide another excuse to replay the map. I also liked the Dwarfish axe, a handsome melee weapon that can knock enemies back, and the resulting physics usually sends them flying awkwardly, hilariously into the ceiling. Shotguns also propel you through the air if you fire them mid-jump. “The automatic shotgun basically becomes a jetpack,” one Tripwire dev commented during our match.

Twisted Christmas III runs until January 3. Watch the official event trailer below, and visit Tripwire's helpful Twisted Christmas IIIpage for a look at the new weapon and character DLC associated with the event.

http://youtu.be/L2JHYGvo4F4