Since the release of Vermintide, I’ve been dreaming of a similar game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, and Warhammer 40k: Darktide proves that monkey paws definitely do exist.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
Developer: Fatshark
Price: $40
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Warhammer 40k: Darktide opens with an interesting, and surprising setup: you get to actually create and customize your character’s backstory. From their birth planet, to how they got arrested, there’s a surprising amount of options for how you want to flavor your goon. The issue is, besides choosing between one of the three available voices, none of it really ends up mattering besides knowing in your mind the lore you made for your guy. Nonetheless, it’s still a nice little touch. After you finish making your dude you’re dropped in a prison cell aboard a ship that’s swiftly assaulted by the forces of chaos. You’re freed and join an inquisitor squad whose goal is to fight back chaos from the city of Tertium.
Unfortunately, like the background fluff you choose for your character, the plot in Darktide amounts to a whole lotta nothing. Missions have no real narrative element to them unlike Vermintide, and the only moments where the actual plot happens is during certain leveling milestones where you meet a new commander at each one of these milestones who says you’re not shit and you’ll have to work hard to earn their trust. It’s the *same* conversation at each one of these half dozen or so moments in the game. For some reason, there’s a throwaway plotline about a mole in the group leaking info to chaos, but you never actually get any sort of development into that besides someone repeatedly saying “might be a mole on board”, until the very end of the game where they reveal the random NPC you’ve never seen before as the snitch. It’s all treated like some grand narrative moment despite the fact that there was absolutely no buildup or development to it at all. Of course, this isn’t to say a game like this needed any sort of plot, but when you advertise that Dan Abnett wrote your game then a certain expectation is created.
But let’s ignore all those plot issues, gameplay is what we’re here for and unfortunately, it’s a hell of a mixed bag. At Darktide’s core, there’s a genuinely good, possibly even great game here that’s bogged down by various performance and mechanic issues. Before I get into its issues, let me break down the core of the game itself.
Darktide plays similarly to Vermintide in that it’s a four player co-op game based on completing objective focused missions. You’ve got four classes to choose from (Veteran, Zealot, Ogryn, and Psyker) and unlike Vermintide you can actually have multiple of the same class in a mission which is nice. You’ll level up, collect loot, spec out your dude how you like and you pretty much know the deal. The major difference however is that the missions are structured more like Deep Rock Galactic than Vermintide. Gone are the scripted, narrative missions in favor of Deep Rock’s style of being able to do any of the mission types within the same level (minus the level randomization Deep Rock does, Darktide’s levels are static). I love it in Deep Rock, but I’m a bit more ambivalent about it here.
Because of the narrative expectations I had going into this (which the game still tries to imply it has) the Deep Rock style doesn’t quite work here. Particularly when it comes to the characters interacting with each other. Whereas in Vermintide they’d have actual minor conversations with each other at points in the mission, here they just sort of take turns screaming some irrelevant thing at each other. On top of this, while the character customization is nice, having three separate voices per class (so twelve total) kind of makes it hard to point out who’s saying what during a mission besides the ogryn of course. Part of Vermintide’s fun was how clear the personality and voice were for each class and it feels like they missed the mark with that here.
Gameplay wise it plays like Vermintide, albeit with a more ranged weapon focus. You’ve got a suite of guns and melee armaments to choose from and they’re all for the most part incredibly satisfying to use. I’ll be damned if I don’t admit that when this game hits, this game hits. The levels are absolutely stunning, and the almost oppressive industrial goth catholic choir soundtrack by Jesper Kyd just fits so perfectly for Warhammer 40k. Additionally, the game is probably one of the best co-op shooters at actually encouraging players to play the game as a team. Each class has health and armor; health is finite but armor can regenerate when you’re in “coherency”. Coherency happens when you’re near your teammates, stray too far and you’ll be “out of coherency” and thus not regenerate your armor. I’ve played too many co-op games where folk would run off to lone wolf it and this is a great way to dissuade that behavior. The game also feels really meaty, whether you’re firing a gun or swinging a hammer; when you hit an enemy there’s a visceral reaction to it. Holding a position while hordes of chaos cultists charge you as you slice them to ribbons with a power sword or pepper them with a lasgun is the Warhammer 40k FPS experience I’ve been waiting for. When Darktide is firing on all cylinders, it is an absolute blast.
Unfortunately that’s where the fun begins and ends with this game. First off, the game is missing a lot of basic quality-of-life items like being able to create private games or choosing what type of mission you want to do at your chosen difficulty. Lots of in-game achievements (which are tied to some unlockables) require you to play a certain mission type at a certain difficulty, but missions are doled out on a rotation so you might be waiting a while for the mission you want to appear at the difficulty you need it at. This might seem like a silly thing to be annoyed about, but the game is full of things to get annoyed about.
Let’s say you just leveled up and unlocked the chainsword. Great, time to run to the armory and buy it right? Wrong. The armory, like the mission select screen, also works on a rotation. This means you have to sit there and wait for the chance that the weapon you want appears in the shop, and not only that but that it appears at the rarity level that you want. Once I went through multiple armory rotations (each refresh takes about an hour) before I got the weapon I needed. It’s incredibly frustrating to unlock access to a weapon and not be able to use it because you’re at the mercy of an rng shop. This feeds into the demotivating progression of the game in that when you finish a mission you’ll receive some gold, materials, and MAYBE a weapon drop. Good chance you might want to spend that gold on something new at the shop, shame the current refresh has absolutely nothing for you so you have to keep playing missions until the next refresh and pray there’s something worth buying there. This repeated process just makes it feel like you’re making zero progress across missions since you can’t buy better gear if the better gear doesn’t appear in the shop.
Additionally, the game features a feat system in that each class has a variety of feats you can equip that add modifiers to how that class plays and allows you to craft that class how you want to play them. My zealot might play differently from yours depending on how we specced out our characters. Unfortunately, most of the feats are *genuinely* useless and don’t synergize with the rest of them. This leads players to choose the actually viable feats instead. So now instead of my zealot playing differently than yours, they play pretty similarly.
Getting into Darktide’s performance, we’re well over a month since release and the game’s performance is still incredibly rough which is shocking considering how much better it was during its pre-release beta in November. Something broke in the day between the beta and the full release and it hasn’t quite recovered since. You’ll see game crashes, memory leaks, visual glitches, and more. I’ll say, some of it has gotten a bit better since then but it’s still distractingly broken. And it’s not an especially good look when your game is running this poorly, but you made sure to include a manipulative cash shop at launch while the game was still missing features it was advertised to have.
In its current state, the game feels so much like an early access title it’s a bit confusing as to why it wasn’t released as one in the first place; the public reception would have honestly been less negative if it had.
The Final Word
Warhammer 40k: Darktide is hard to recommend, even a month after release. There’s a good game here, but it’s burdened by issues I’m sure will be fixed after a few major updates; the only question is whether or not you’re willing to deal with it until then.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
