It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost three years since Vermintide released and just like the hordes of rats in that game, word of mouth quickly spread of its interesting Left 4 Dead meets Diablo shtick. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is now soon to release and we got to give it a try during its closed alpha.
In case you didn’t play the first game let me give you the skinny: Vermintide plays pretty much exactly like Left 4 Dead but at the end of each mission you’re rolling for random loot that you can equip on your character. Unlike most games in the genre, players take the role of five unique characters that each have their own special abilities. A major change to the characters this time is that each person has three unique classes, putting the game at 15 classes compared to the first game’s five. It’s a significant change, especially when each class is different enough to not feel like there are any duplicates. Each class also has a set of talents they can unlock once you reach a certain level with that hero.There are four tiers of talents and each tier has three talents to choose from once you unlock it. It’s an extra layer of customizability and it’ll be interesting to see what sort of builds people come up with in the full release. My only issue with the new class system is that to unlock the second and third classes you need to hit certain level milestones with that character. If you’re playing with a particularly bad group of players who keep failing a mission then the grind to unlocking these classes can really start to wear out your patience. This is especially frustrating when you’re playing a character just to unlock their third class but you have no clue if you’ll actually like it until hours later when you unlock them.
Speaking of grinding, damn does this feel like more of a grind than the first game. The basic flow of Vermintide 2 is to play levels to acquire loot or materials that you can then use to craft into even better loot. Each character has their own unique set of weapons to acquire and unlike the previous game, where the items you’d get would be totally random, this time around the loot you get is specific to the character you’re playing. The loot system itself has been overhauled as well with loot boxes being introduced into the game. In the previous game you’d get “loot dice” for doing things in a mission like collecting tombs or simply finishing the mission; the type of loot you got was then determined by whatever you rolled from your dice. This time around you get a box for finishing the mission, and the quality of the contents within the box increases depending on how many collectibles you acquire during a mission and how well you and your team did. This is a huge improvement with my overall performance actually feeling reflected in the loot I’m being rewarded. Downside is that the game feels harder, but not in the way that it’s more challenging but more along the lines of where it feels like the game wants you to fail levels and repeat them over and over again to grind them out. You get a tiny amount of XP for failing a mission but no loot (unless you happen to level up) and as I previously said, the grind also translates to your characters as well. I would have preferred to have all the classes available from the start and just make the character levels apply towards unlocking talents. I dropped a good chunk of hours into the beta and only managed to unlock the second class of the dwarf. The amount of XP you get on failure is a joke considering the amount of time you could spend in a mission only to have a shoddy team goof it up at the end. I know many people might shout that I should only be playing exclusively with friends but the majority of adults in the real world have lives where it’s hard to get everyone’s schedules to line up properly so playing with random people is usually the only way to play sometimes.
The combat is thankfully just as meaty and satisfying as it was before. Hitting a rat in the face with the hammer delivers a deliciously squishy crunch while swords send heads and limbs all over the place in a medley of carnage. The gunplay also seems to have been improved with ranged weapons feeling a lot more viable this time around to the point where I almost wish I had enough ammo to mainly use some of the guns in this game. Keeping in line with the L4D influences, the special rat units are back with enemies like the Smoker equivalent, the Packmaster, or the Hunter equivalent in the Gutter Runner. The most infamous rat is the Rat Ogre (the Tank) who’s back and has definitely been to the gym because he’s bigger and got a health bar. Their health seems to have been buffed to ludicrous degrees too; fighting ogres in the previous game was a tough fight but now it requires complete cooperation with your team which can be difficult when playing with random players. Adding on top of the rats are the armies of Chaos and while I understand that lore-wise they make the most sense to team up with Skaven, sometimes it’s okay to throw the lore book in the trash. What I love about the Skaven is that each unique just oozes personality, with no unit looking exactly like the others and now we have these Chaos soldiers thrown in the mix and they’re just grey skinned dudes in brown armor who scream a lot. The Chaos soldiers even bring along their own special units with the chaos wizard being a particular pain in the ass that grinds the fun to an absolute halt. This is an enemy who can summon a massive tornado that sucks players into it and tosses them out for tons of damage; it moves fast and the radius for which is can suck you into it is pretty sizable. Considering how easily you can get surrounded by enemies, making it hard to move around, you can expect to get surprised by this attack pretty frequently. And if that wasn’t enough, the wizard teleports around constantly and almost every time I encountered one of these enemies they showed up in groups which made them even more insufferable. When playing through the beta, almost every player I encountered always echoed the same sentiment that they wish there were just more rats and less of these uninteresting Chaos characters.
The beta gives a tease at the tower that will be your hub in-between missions and it’s definitely making me miss the tavern. The tower is just too dark and gloomy, and unless the full game has a significant amount of NPC’s that will fill it up then it seems to be unnecessarily large. The beta also has some questionable design choices as well with some unintuitive UI elements being front and center. There are icons on the screen that aren’t clear what they are, only telling you that a browser is about to be opened, and some icons like smiley or sad emojis that when clicked did absolutely nothing. The crafting menu is also has me feeling mixed with some changes, like the streamlined menu, being a plus and others, not knowing what items you can or can’t salvage, just leading to confusion. The overall game UI is a massive improvement from the previous game though, with a nice modern feel to them.
Something I liked in the previous game was how each level felt like you were there for a specific goal and you were making progress in the stage as you went through it. With the three levels included in the beta, I had the exact opposite feeling. As gorgeous as the game is, these areas felt more or less lifeless as I slogged forward smashing enemies without any sort of or sense of purpose. Now I’m not expecting a game to drop their absolute banger of a level in their beta, but if these are the three levels they chose to represent the game in the beta then I’m not terribly impressed.
At the end of the day, the beta weekend gave me a good glimpse at what the final product will end up looking like and I’m both interested and disappointed at the same time. There are some smart changes to things like the loot system, but other more annoying elements that hold the game back.
