Shoot and smash the hordes of chaos with friends | Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Review

From the makers of the amazing Warhammer: Vermintide series comes another game, now set 40,000 years into the future: Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. This only means stuff like Guns and Chainswords are now available in your arsenal. The gameplay style that started with Left 4 Dead, the first person melee combat perfected by Vermintide, is now circling back to using guns again with Darktide.

Right off the bat I’m gonna say that Darktide feels like a reskin of Vermintide, and that’s not a bad thing. The Vermintide series is phenomenal and “porting” it to the 40k universe was pretty much expected as soon as the Vermintide series took off..

Basically the whole gameplay of Darktide is you and three other players are placed in a semi-linear map, set within the vast Hive City of Tertium, with multiple objectives to complete. While mobs and hordes of deranged human beings, influenced by evil forces, swarm upon you.

You play as a very lucky wrongdoer, a criminal of sorts, by chance, enlisted by the Imperium to do a suicide squad type of mission along with other unfortunates. This is essentially the entire premise of Darktide. Unlike in Vermintide or Left 4 Dead, where you have a selection of distinct characters to choose from, here you can have customizable characters, with four different classes available with their own different skills and abilities.

Darktide’s gameplay has an amazing dynamic between gunplay and melee combat. Both are executed splendidly, but the melee combat still shines. The gunplay did not completely depreciate the value of melee combat, it merely enhanced it. The high-voltage dynamic of using guns then suddenly switching to a big ass Power Sword to mow down mobs upon mobs of enemies is never a dull moment to me. I did find that some guns are a bit underwhelming to me in terms of stopping power, especially up close. It lacks weight to it, hits are stiff and lethargic, It needs more kinetics.

The addicting gameplay loop on the other hand, remains the same in Darktide. Start with basic gear, then acquire more decent gear thanks to grinding with a bit of RNG, then acquire even more better gear. After the end of each mission, you get loot boxes and currency in order to get better gear or try out others There is a contract system, where you can take contracts to finish a selection of quests to get an additional guaranteed gear at the end. The first few hours of the game are undoubtedly the most boring parts, but as you grow your powers and gear, the fun kicks in.

Now it's fun and you’ve clocked in multiple hours now, but another problem emerges: Map and mission variety are definitely the weakest points of the game. They are pretty monotonous and too similar looking. It gets repetitive pretty much quickly when you pay attention to it.

Fortunately, Darktide is fun enough in co-op mode that you tend to forget the repetitiveness. The fun factor and the gameplay loop carries this game heavily. Hopefully, as with what happened with their previous titles, they can add more varied content in the future and make it deeper.

Aside from the aforementioned suicide squad type of premise and outside the long and drawn out prologue + tutorial, there’s no comprehensive plot at this point, with the developers intending to flesh it out via as a live service element, serving as a overarching meta plot to continue evolving alongside future content and patches.

Optimization wise, it performed badly on my decent 6 core 12 thread setup with an RTX 3080, and I occasionally experienced crashes which hurt my enjoyment, especially since it's a multiplayer game and you’re playing with other players. Even just quitting the game sometimes will still display a crashed error.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a great 4-player co-op action with a great mash-up of gunplay and melee combat action, with an addicting gameplay loop that gets better in time. Only hampered by its repetitive nature in map and mission variety, and its poor performance and optimization; it is still a worthy game to try out, especially with groups of like-minded friends looking to play the next Left 4 Dead or Vermintide archetype game.