Survival's only winning condition is to made your way through all the waves and kill the boss.

As a rule of thumb, solo games are always easier to play through due to various indulgences given to survivors such as getting healed more, having less powerful and beefy ZEDs and overall less ZEDs to deal with and so on. In Survival mode players play either together (co-op) and alone (solo), before starting the game players can choose game length (either 4, 7 or 10 waves where 5th, 8th and 11th waves are being Boss waves) and game difficulty (Normal, Hard, Suicidal or Hell On Earth) which defies game's pace, amount of the ZEDs to spawn, damage and health variables and many other factors.

In this mode players equiped with various perks and weapons withstand the armies of AI-controlled enemies throughout the set of waves and face off one of the five 1 bosses and the last wave as an ultimate challenge. Survival is a Killing Floor 2's signature gamemode.