Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (2022)

• Playtime: 127 hours

• Played: 2025

• Expectation: Mixed. This got praised but Vermintide 1&2 were letdowns

Intro

Darktide is a coop PVE shooter similar to Left4Dead. You and three other players/bots walk from A to B, doing simple tasks (e.g. flip switch, find battery) and killing hundreds of enemies. You can pick from 4 basegame classes (+1 DLC class and one upcoming DLC class) each with their own weapons and skill trees.

The Good

• It's fun to murder hundreds of baddies.
• Very amusing (automatic) banter between characters.
• Really feels like 40K.
• Classes are very distinct and have multiple options.
• Weapons also offer a good bit of variety.
• Solid amount of special enemies.

The Bad

• 99,99% of enemies are humans (plus some Ogryns and Hounds). There are no Space Orks, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tau, Tyranids, Daemons, Necrons, Sisters of Battle, Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Genestealer Cults, etc.
• Maps can be very confusing, especially when you drop into an ongoing game and doubly so because some maps are partially reused in reverse direction.
• Quickplay sometimes drops you in the same map three times in a row.
• Weekly quests can be annoying but are required to get the best equipment (lvl 500).
• Levelled items still suck.
• Missions with the "lights out" modifier are overly annoying.
• Once you stop completing penances (ingame achievements) every few games it feels kinda static.
• Instead of a proper menu there is a hub for trading, crafting, etc. and some terminals have an obnoxiously vague name.

Conclusion

I got bored with Vermintide after 3 hours and with Vermintide 2 after 13. Here it took 120 hours for me to be done with the game, and that's mostly because it got repetitive. Darktide has some annoying flaws but the core gameplay is so much fun. It feels so good to headshot dozens of enemies or to charge an elite enemy and drive your chainsword into it.

Easily the most fun i've had in a multiplayer game in the last few years.

Some friends of mine played this on release and basically advised me to stay away.

BUT in the past few months the devs made a huge overhaul of the characters and progression system. While I can't comment on those changes because I didn't play the initial version, i can say the current progression feels very fluid and rewarding. At around 12 hours of play time I'm now able to comfortably pass level 3/5 missions and i'm starting to get accustomed to my build, feeling eager to go at least toward 4/5 difficulty. The builds depth is really one of the key aspects of this game and every point spent in talents and mastery unlocks nice potential and customization for each class (or at least for psykers which I went with).

The atmosphere and map variety is really cool, they reuse some environments on several missions but that goes well with the overall atmosphere of the game. In those moments when you get hordes + elites running at you at higher difficulty and the music hits, oh boy does this make my blood boil.

Also I played mostly with friends and this is definitely the best experience, but I have to say quickplay is also quite well made and can help grind a little bit when no one is available. That being said it can get a bit tough in special missions if no one is in voice comms.

Overall I think it's $20 well spent (thanks steam sales) and I'll probably play a little more before monster hunter arrives and annihilates the entirety of my free time.

2 stars

swinging weapon and watching guys die from it is fun but it gets repetitive a little quick. i made my character abraham lincoln though and that was kinda funny

EDITED REVISITED REVIEW:

As it turns out, the game is much more fun once you get to higher levels and get to actually put together a full build. And with newer updates you get to customize aspects of your weapons and talents much easier, which does impact immersion in some cases but overall I think I prefer the quality-of-life. It's not much fun playing solo because in these types of games you have to rely a LOT on your team, but it's a blast with friends.

The voice acting is great, though I'd say the character interactions aren't as varied as the ones from Vermintide. Part of this, I believe, is because all the characters are human (except technically Ogryn, but even they are considered "abhuman") and so you don't get the inter-party racism interactions you'd come to expect from playing Vermintide. The closest thing you get in this game is the characters poking fun at each other for their different flavors of batshit insanity that you'd come to expect from people in the 40k universe. Still, really fun and well done overall - just not Fatshark's best work.

Mission variety can feel a bit lacking - 9 times out of 10 it feels like the level boils down to "Go here. Set up timer. Survive until the timer is done. Go here. Break these things. Go here. Kill the big bad guy, or horde of smaller bad guys. Escape." Sometimes you'll get something different, like the train level, or the ones where you have to find batteries for the big thing you're powering up, but most missions feel very similar, so it can get old after a while.

Gladly it's still getting updates, and hopefully they can add more fun and unique classes to the game that create some cool new synergies with others, or new weapon types for existing classes to try out.

tl;dr i'm not even close to the end goal. i only have, like, 3 warhammers. i've got 39,997 to go. fuck