Review anarchistica 3/5 · Nov 8, 2022
Fun game ruined by levelled items
Playtime: 12h57m
Intro
Vermintide 2 is a 4-player co-op brawler/shooter in which you fight enemies while making your way through a map.
The Good
- Five classes.
- Three subclasses each (except two for the mage).
- Lots of different weapons.
- Quick early progression.
- Decent variation in enemies.
- Combat is quite fun for the most part.
The Bad
- It's often far too vague …
Playtime: 12h57m
Intro
Vermintide 2 is a 4-player co-op brawler/shooter in which you fight enemies while making your way through a map.
The Good
- Five classes.
- Three subclasses each (except two for the mage).
- Lots of different weapons.
- Quick early progression.
- Decent variation in enemies.
- Combat is quite fun for the most part.
The Bad
- It's often far too vague where you have to go. I've even seen people go backwards along the track.
- Teammates can decide to make the game harder without input from the others (by carrying tomes and grimoires).
- Repetitive chatter with some lines always playing in certain locations.
- The elf constantly calls everyone "mayflies". That gets old really fast.
- Really annoying salvage system that only lets you salvage unused items for the current class.
- Weird performance problems that make borderless windowed run at 1/3rd the fps of fullscreen.
- Only a handful of useable items. Seriously, there's even only two types of bombs.
- No static guns or traps or whatever to help with hordes (like World War Z has).
- Only one active skill per class.
- Most passive skills are dull. "Wow, 2 temporary HP if i kill an enemy in melee, how creative".
The Ugly
- No filter options (e.g. ping, region)... in a multiplayer game.
- Most of the special units disable a player, requiring them to be rescued. These units can basically teleport right in front of you, making them even more annoying.
- Respawning enemies that always spawn behind you.
- The minecart level is so dark you can't see anything in some areas even with gamma and brightness maxed.
- If you lose you get no reward.
- Other players tend to rush but single player isn't viable because you lose if you die (wtf).
- The bossfight at the end of act 1 is extremely long, tedious and anti-fun.
- Daily/weekly/event quests only seem to unlock pointless cosmetics.
- There's an intro video that requires you to hold a button to skip. Wow.
- Even worse is how the option to disable this is under "interface" so i didn't even find it when i looked for it the first time.
The Truly Awful
The item system is a huge part of the game and it is just awful. It has the same terrible item levels as e.g. Destiny 2 but items are much harder to get. The stats are extremely bland numbers stuff on every non-legendary item. You usually get "+x stamina", "+x speed" or "+x power against y". This is a "looter shooter" with boring loot. And having levelled items doesn't even make sense for this kind of game. Can you imagine how annoying TF2 or L4D would be if you couldn't just use the items you wanted because their level is too low to be effective?
Conclusion
Vermintide 2 is a game that could've been really fun. The core gameplay is fun and there's enough variation in starting options to keep you trying out new things. But the pointless levelled item system, poor multiplayer design and other smaller flaws really drag it down. I used to love Mordheim and i really wanted these Vermintide games to be good but they somehow managed to mess it up twice.
5/10
