If you went back in time about 15 years, the total number of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 video games that existed could have been counted on two hands. Today, the entire list is staggeringly huge, to the point that I’m convinced there’s a new game released every week—they’re like the Amityville movies except there are actually some good releases every once in a while. Some of the more successful Warhammer video games on Steam were Vermintide and its sequel, set during the end-times of the Warhammer fantasy universe. Thus, it was only natural for a similar game to be made in the more popular Warhammer 40,000 universe eventually. Developers of Vermintide II, Fatshark, answered the call with Darktide. However, is it another instant hit, or does it not meet the standards of the God Emperor?

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

Approx 30 Hours
Version: 1.0.20
Co-op most often with just one friend
A few online matches with random players

Pros

Presentation of the world
Creature and character designs
Lots of lore and backstory for the lore hounds
Some weapons are genuinely fun with satisfying impact and sound effects
Some decent music tracks
A decent amount of complexity to the combat

Cons

The occasional crash or disconnect has happened
Two of the four selectable classes are too similar to each other in the early-game
Not much variety in the missions themselves
The grind is extremely slow and progressions feel stagnant
Can get wiped from a game extremely fast from some bad RNG
Microtransactions for cosmetics and other stuff permeate the grind to an almost insidious degree
Some quirks about the missions, combat, and environments are frustrating

The Rest of It

Story

As soon as you load into the game, you create your character. You can select a Veteran, a Zeolot, a Psycher, or an Ogryn class. From there, you go through a series of different options for developing the backstory for your character. This ranges from your homeworld to pivotal moments in your character’s life. In most games in which the background of your avatar wasn’t very important to the plot, everything would be summarized with three options on a single multiple-choice page. The fact that Darktide goes the extra mile of providing more background for your character than a Mass Effect game is a nice touch, even if the information isn’t really fruitful in the long run. It’s just some nice window dressing to get you more invested in your avatar and slightly affects what your character will occasionally say in the banter with others during missions.

Upon completion of creating your character, the story of Darktide begins. You are a prisoner aboard a vessel of the galactic empire, and you are regarded as a traitor to the Golden Throne. The warden of the prison barge asks you a few questions before the ship is boarded by warriors corrupted by the foul Chaos from beyond the Warp. In the confusion and, well, chaos, your character escapes their cell and joins forces with the officer who was interrogating you. You then become a member of the armed forces tasked with doing a lot of dirty work the empire wouldn’t want to waste its good soldiers doing. You go into hostile environments, kill the heretics, and cleanse the streets before returning to the base for the next mission.

In terms of story, there isn’t much of one I’ve seen so far. There are occasional cutscenes that are available for you to watch when you reach a certain level that gives you a couple of minutes of dialogue, but nothing significant to call a real plot. I have not made it through all of the story, so I might not have seen the big important cutscenes or story-based missions that push a plot along. Aside from the prologue mission, there haven’t been any missions that seemed to really focus on a story of significance.

This is all fine for a game like Darktide to do because the missions are meant to be replayed over and over with friends or strangers. However, it does feel like a step back from what was in Vermintide II. In that game, there were missions that led into each other like campaigns. These would lead to boss battles and other big moments. You could, of course, replay those missions, but it felt like there was at least a small through-line to the experience. Darktide doesn’t have that at the moment. Perhaps in future patches, they’ll add more, but for now, it’s a bit repetitive and empty by comparison.

Gameplay

Darktide and its predecessor Vermintide, are cut from the same cloth as Left 4 Dead. Darktide is a first-person shooter with a significant emphasis on melee attacks. Vermintide was much more focused on melee, due to the setting being a medieval fantasy world and your weapon selection being tied to the technology of the universe. Darktide, however, has access to futuristic weaponry, allowing for more long-range gunning to break up the pace. Regardless of the weaponry, both games revolve around you as a group of four making your way through an area, killing hordes of enemies and the occasional specialists in order to complete an objective and escape the battle zone.

Upon creating your character, selecting the type of warrior you want to play, and completing all the tutorials, you are allowed to explore the Mourningstar: a spaceship in orbit above a planet that has been infested with the corruption of Chaos. The Mourningstar acts as your hub, allowing you to change your loadout of weapons, buy new gear or cosmetics, upgrade weapons, etc. It’s also where you go to select the next mission. Each mission has a difficulty rating that ranges from one to five and is only available for a limited time before it is replaced by another mission. The missions all take place on the surface of this corrupted planet in different regions, ranging from dense cityscapes, to huge factories, to deserted military facilities. The objectives of the missions vary from assault, to reconnaissance, to assassination, but you end up doing the same thing in all of them for the most part. They all tend to have similar sub-missions to complete and usually involve holding a position while hordes of enemies attack. The exception to the rule is the assassination mission type, in which you’re guaranteed a boss fight at the end. Regardless of the type of mission you choose, you’ll likely see the same sorts of environments over and over rather quickly.

Darktide is a strictly multiplayer game, so you cannot play a mission solo. Even though the game will create bot companions for you if you do not have a full team of four, it will not allow you to be the only human on a team. If you do not have any friends available to play a private game, you can just jump into a queue and the game will put you into a team of other players, some of which may already be playing a mission. In the few instances in which I did this, I joined a team that had players who were all at least ten levels above my character, so the matchmaking is not really fine-tuned in that regard. I was able to join the games quickly, but I imagine that has more to do with how new the game is and less to do with the matchmaking ability.

After playing a few missions of Darktide, it won’t take long for you to notice the importance of team synergy and how classes affect the gameplay. While you certainly can have four Veteran sharpshooters on your team at a time and survive a mission, the different classes you can select drastically change how effective you and your team are. Veterans and Psychers are designed to stay at a distance and use their ranged weapons to do damage, but the other classes like the Zealot stay in the fray and tank the hits. While each class is designed to play differently, the Zealot and the Veteran are nearly interchangeable in the early levels of the game. Yes, they both have passive stats that make the Zealot more ideal for close combat and staying on the move, while the Veteran provides support behind cover. However, in terms of the weapons and skills they can use in the early stages, there’s not much of a difference between the two. The Psycher and the Ogryn are much different from the rest. Psychers have the ability to do extremely high amounts of damage to enemies with their psychic abilities, at the risk of hurting themselves in the process. Ogryns are hulking tanks with slow weapons that can do heavy damage and a lot of crowd control. You can have a lot of fun as either a Zealot or a Veteran, but I’d recommend having a second character as a Psycher or Ogryn for a more unique experience in the early game as you get used to the mechanics. I highly recommend doing so if you don’t have more than one friend to play with because the game will always give you two veteran bots when loading into a private game. The bots can hold their own in some regards, but since you can’t choose their support type, the experience might feel a bit stale.

The main appeal of Darktide is the Warhammer 40,000 universe in which it takes place. The overall experience is very akin to Left 4 Dead in its structure and gameplay loop, but Darktide is about giving you a similar experience within the popular science-fiction universe, as you face off against the forces of the evil Chaos gods, instead of simply mindless hordes of zombies. While Left 4 Dead 2 offered you the ability to use swords and crowbars to fight off the infected, Darktide lets you use the iconic chainswords and electric war hammers from its universe to cut and bash your way through the crowds of enemies. The reason I’m comparing the two so much is that, if you understand how the Left 4 Dead games worked, then you’ll mostly understand how Darktide works. The main difference is in the smaller details. If you don’t know how it works, don’t worry, I’ll explain further.

When you begin a mission, you traverse through different layers of the environment, which often involves dropping down into a section or taking an elevator. At different points during the mission, you’ll need to complete an objective. This can be something like carrying energy canisters to a machine to power it up, hacking a system with a timing mini-game, or simply pressing a button and holding a position while enemies show up. During these pivotal points of the mission or just traversing the level, you’ll encounter a variety of enemies ranging from weak cannon fodder to powerful beasts that act as sub-bosses.

The weak ones often come in huge mobs of enemies that you’ll have to chew through with your melee attacks or big explosive weaponry, but accompanying them are the specialists. There are some enemies that fit into a particular archetype like the ones that pin you down and force your allies to help you, explosive enemies that just blow up for big damage, or tank-like bullies that take a lot of hits to kill. There’s even a witch equivalent from Left 4 Dead called a Demonhost that you want to avoid at all costs. There are plenty of other enemies that are considered specialists who have their own unique weapons or armor that you have to take a more strategic approach to eliminate. The big thing about the combat that is different from other games like Darktide is that you have to consider where the weak spots are on the enemies. Since armor is a factor, you don’t always want to swing your weapon wildly and you may want to think about the type of weapon you want to bring before jumping into a mission. If there is no armor-piercing capability on your team, you might be in for a rough fight.

There is one detail that is quite apparent almost immediately when playing Darktide and that is the amount of grind involved in the early game. As you complete missions in Darktide, you gain money and experience points. As your character levels up, you gain access to new weapons and abilities and unlock different pieces of cosmetics that you don’t have to pay real money to acquire—more on that later. Your character will also gain access to other features of the Mourningstar, including the ability to further upgrade weapons, unlock quests, etc. With the money acquired during missions, you can visit the weapon shop that refreshes every hour or so, in which you can purchase weapons for your class that can drastically vary in their rarity and quality. The money and experience points you earn are only applied to the character you have selected, meaning that if you played hours as a Zealot and suddenly decided to switch to a Psycher, you would have to start all over again with that new character and slowly gain access to everything again. Likewise, the amount of money and experience you earn in a mission is based on the level’s difficulty, and playing low-level missions will often not get you enough to buy a new weapon outright.

While I understand that having only four classes, as well as only about ten different locales to play at the moment means that people will get bored quickly if they’re able to level up and progress too fast, the grind as it currently stands is also incredibly tedious in the early game. It makes more sense for the grind to get more and more intense at higher levels to stretch out the experience. I just think that when you’re still trying out the game and figuring out the mechanics, it would be better to allow players access to more weapon types from the start so they can get a better understanding of their preferred class and playstyle. It essentially took seven hours for my Zealot to finally feel like its own class after finally unlocking more unique weapons and skills. And from what I can tell, there’s not much to look forward to in terms of rewards at high levels other than cosmetics you don’t have to pay real money to acquire.

This then brings me to the big point against Darktide. While it doesn’t impact the gameplay in any way, it still feels gross. As you might suspect, there are cosmetic microtransactions in the game. However, I wouldn’t really call the transactions “micro” when looking at the price tags. The smallest amount of money you can spend to gain in-game currency to buy the cosmetic items for your characters is $12. That’s nearly 25% of the game’s cost on Steam! What’s worse is that the exchange rate for your dollars nets you enough money to not even buy a full outfit for your character in their online store. I looked at some of the outfits Darktide was pushing and if you wanted to buy the whole set for a single character, you would have to pay more than $12 to get it. I rarely engage with storefronts within games, so maybe this is an industry standard at this point. Regardless, at least there aren’t loot boxes, just overpriced cosmetics.

All that being said, the overall gameplay experience I’ve had with Darktide has been a positive one. I think there are some weapons that are incredibly satisfying to use. The Ogryn grenade launcher is a blast with how you can kill an enemy with just the impact of the round before it explodes and wipes out a dozen grunts in a mob. Likewise, the melee weapons like the chainsword, hammer, and mace all bring a great amount of impact and visceral destruction that evokes a satisfying bloodlust in the combat. Running into a group of enemies with a chainsword and tearing them apart in the name of the Emperor is always fun, even after I’ve played the same mission multiple times. I’ve had some harrowing experiences in Darktide just being crafty and having to stay alive in huge mobs of enemies. So despite all the repetition of what’s available and the grind required to progress, I’ve still had a lot of fun with it.

Presentation

If you are a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Darktide is likely to whet your appetite with how it presents the world. It does a great job of immersing you in the universe with big sky-boxes that show you dense cityscapes that stretch up the heavens and deep, seemingly endless chasms. You traverse through a variety of locales on the corrupted planet, allowing you to see enough to feel like there’s more to this world than just a big futuristic city. In addition to the locales are the small touches in the background environments that all add to the experience. If you take the time to look at all the details in the missions, the enemies you’re fighting, the weapons you’re using, and so on, there’s a lot to take in. In this regard, I think Darktide brings a lot of aesthetic diversity that other games in the genre lack.

The sound quality of Darktide is quite good as well. The noises that weapons make add a lot to the satisfaction of their use, but the sound is more important than just aesthetics. Sound is actually an important part of playing the game as well because certain audio cues will be used to inform you of an enemy spawning or an incoming attack, allowing you to react accordingly. As for the music, I’d say it’s catchy tech-noir synth that adds to the experience more than it detracts. There are some songs that you’ll hear during boss fights that are more dramatic orchestral tunes, but the primary soundtrack is meant to give you some good background music while you tear into the forces of Chaos. There aren’t many songs in the soundtrack, though, so be ready to hear them over and over.

TL;DR

I’ve had a lot of fun playing Darktide. I’ve mostly played it with one friend, but I have occasionally jumped on to some public matches with strangers and I still managed to enjoy myself in those situations. The core gameplay of the combat is viscerally satisfying and made better by the grim-dark future of Warhammer 40,000’s environment, weapons, and enemies. There’s a lot of extra detail that the developers put into the game to really give it a polish in a way that would satisfy any fan of the universe. That being said, there are still a lot of improvements that could be made. The somewhat unrewarding grind for gear and cosmetics, the repetitive nature of the missions with only a few locales and mission types currently available, and the low number of selectable character classes all lead me to believe that Darktide was released too early. As fun as it is, it feels incomplete, especially in comparison to the last game the developers released. If you’re dying to jump into a 40k game that lets you chew through mobs of Chaos soldiers with a chainsword, I can recommend Darktide. However, if you want a complete experience that is more like Vermintide II in the 40k universe, you might be better off waiting for the developers to make more improvements and focus on things more important than the over-priced cosmetic shop.