Standing in the dark corridor of a dirty dystopia, slashing your way through hordes of infected mutants with a chainsword, dissolving them in a fog of blood and maggots, while a zealous preacher calls upon the God-Emperor to protect them and the soundtrack underlines this with a religious mixture of choir singing and booming organ music, you can’t help but smile as a fan of Warhammer 40,000. It’s hard to imagine a better representation of the atmosphere of Games Workshop’s grimdark universe. These are the moments when Fatshark’s latest co-op shooter – Warhammer 40,000 Darktide – truly shines.
In the spiritual successor to the studio’s popular Vermintide series, which itself is set in the fantasy sister universe of Warhammer 40,000, you’ll fight as part of an imperial prisoner battalion against the threat of Nurgle, one of the Chaos Gods, alongside three fellow Rejects. Different missions, such as assassinations, repairing important infrastructure or raiding an enemy arsenal, will send you into the darkness of a hive world where infected servants lurk.
The least of them are zombie-like mutants called Poxwalkers that are threatening only because of their limitless numbers. However, the Chaos God’s forces also include more dangerous enemies: lightning-fast bloodhounds, cunning snipers or enormous mutated blobs that spit sickening slime at you. These elite enemies pose the greatest danger on the missions and therefore also trigger the greatest thrills. The game manages to support this with great sound design: Each elite enemy has its own acoustic signal. A Nurgle suicide bomber, for example, announces itself with a steady ticking sound, and the howl of a chaos hound can’t be ignored.
What can you, a mere prisoner, weigh against such supernatural powers? To borrow a motto from Warhammer Fantasy’s pendant to the Imperium of Mankind: Steel, faith and gunpowder. You choose a character from four classes: Veteran, Zealot, Ogryn or Psyker. Your choice brings with it unique abilities as well as a few special pieces of equipment, but on the whole, the classes share a common pool of weapons. This arsenal is brimming with iconic killing tools that will make fans’ mouths water: Chainswords, bolters, lasguns, psistaffs, and more are available.
Using these instruments to deliver the God-Emperor’s judgment to the followers of Nurgle is both bloody and incredibly satisfying. Some of the weapons differ greatly in their uses, which provides variety and ground for different play styles. What they have in common is that it feels damn good to use them: The chainsword tears apart enemy hordes, the lasgun burns fist-sized holes into mutated bodies, and even a shovel becomes a deadly and fun weapon in your character’s hands. The core gameplay of Darktide – the combat – is really well done. Combined with the excellently designed atmosphere, which includes great visuals and a brilliant soundtrack, the fights lead to the strongest moments the co-op shooter has to offer.
In these missions you’ll earn experience points for upgrading your character, random weapon drops, rewards for special challenges called penances, as well as resources for the crafting system, where you can improve and tailor your equipment – in theory. Unfortunately, Nurgle doesn’t only have a large role in the game, the Chaos God also left his mark on the development process. Fatshark openly admits the fact that the pandemic marred production. In plain language, this means that Warhammer 40,000: Darktide will only be half-baked at release, missing key features:
- Crafting system (expected in December 2022)
- Single-player mode (expected in December 2022)
- Private lobbies (expected in December 2022)
- Crossplay between Steam and Game Pass (expected at some point)
The absence of the crafting system is especially critical, since it’s the central component of the game around which the endgame revolves. While you unlock your characters’ special skills as you level them up, truly complex builds aren’t possible until you can tailor and forge powerful equipment specifically adapted to certain playstyles. Currently, you have to rely on random drops after missions or the store, which changes its offers every hour.
This adaptation of builds is critical on higher difficulty levels, because not only will there be more enemies that are more resistant, meaner and stronger, but also fewer resources such as ammunition and healing items on the map. In addition, there are modifiers that make your life difficult – for example, a dense fog that almost completely robs you of your vision and thus provides many shock moments. Specializing in certain types of enemies, for example by focusing on armor-piercing attacks, and coordinating with the team is then the key to success.
The other major problem area is the technical state of the game – and again, Nurgle is probably to blame for this. The performance of the title widely varies: Some users can barely complete missions without the game crashing at least once, while fellow players run the game smoothly. Large mutants sometimes throw players into walls, where they then get stuck. Forming teams is often difficult because the in-game social system doesn’t recognize that friends are online or delays group invitations by several minutes. Load times are sometimes very high, even with powerful computers, especially to the game’s central hub. All of this is unfortunately detrimental to the core experience, which as mentioned is highly satisfying. Many prayers to the Omnissiah are necessary to rectify all this.
With four classes, a deep and varied pool of weapons, and a breadth of missions, which in turn provide variety with random modifiers and secondary objectives, the game offers enough content at launch to keep you busy for many hours – especially because the characters don’t share resources or levels. Those who want to play all four classes will have to level them up four times and farm resources separately. For casual players, this will make it difficult to fully try out all classes. If they don’t pick the right class for them at the start, this might be a hurdle to retain them long-term.
The identity of the individual characters is also an issue where there is room for improvement. The Ogryn, the game’s archetypal tank character, is uniquely defined thanks to his abilities and armament – he is the only one who can carry heavy riot shields, for example. The Veteran, an archetypal ranged fighter, on the other hand, lacks this a bit. His preferred weapon, the lasgun, can be carried by the other classes as well. In the freedom that the game gives you, the individuality that characters like Kruber and Saltzpyre brought to Vermintide 2 is lost a bit, which is a shame (but kind of on brand for the universe, especially the Imperial Guard). Perhaps some more restrictions, while carefully considering the implications for balance, are the solution to this problem.
The core gameplay and atmosphere of Warhammer 40,000 Darktide could hardly be better or more grimdark – what screams Warhammer 40,000 more than shoving a few lasguns and shovels into the hands of a couple of convicts in prison garb, sending them into a base of mutated chaos worshippers, and having them do the work of the God-Emperor there?
For Darktide to truly live up to this potential and for the gameplay to have the stage it deserves, Fatshark must clean house first and purge it of all of Nurgle’s influence. After that, there’s a lot of fun to be had purging the mutant and killing the heretic.
Written by Marco Wutz on behalf of GLHF.
