Warhammer 40,000: Darktide – Review
I’ve learned three things from playing Warhammer 40K: Darktide. To begin with, more people from Yorkshire should voice characters in video games. As a second point, Fatshark is the undisputed king of multiplayer co-op development. And third, a shaky live-service model can ruin even the best game. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is Fatshark’s finest mechanical achievement to date, a chaotic multiplayer adventure in which players hack their way through a plague-ravaged Hive City using chainswords, lasguns, and thunder hammers. There is spectacular action, exciting set pieces, and a stunning realisation of the 40k universe.
Score – 9/10
Tertium, a Hive City on the planet Atoma Prime, is where the events of Darktide unfold. Tertium is a vertical labyrinth of obnoxious gothic architecture, cacophonous military industry, and unimaginable suffering, like a giant urban wedding cake that has gone galactic stale. That’s before a plague hits and turns its already-disadvantaged millions into flea-ridden poxwalkers. As a prisoner on the Imperial Cruiser Tancred Bastion, this plague is both a boon and a bane for you. The good news is that you will likely avoid being put to death for whatever crime the Imperium has decided you committed. Unfortunately, can you guess who will be forced into playing the role of Imperial antibody?
As opposed to Fatshark’s previous game, Vermintide 2, there is no predetermined protagonist in Darktide. Instead, you build a recalcitrant character from one of four Darktide classes and raise them from the status of corpse-in-waiting to that of unstoppable killing machine. Veteran Sharpshooter, Zealot Preacher who bellows scripture as they charge into battle, Psyker whose weaponized migraine can pop enemy heads, or towering Ogryn Skullbreaker who can plough through hordes of enemies like a Land Train are all viable options.
Clearly, this could become an issue. Like Left 4 Dead before it, one of Vermintide’s strengths was how its bespoke characters added so much personality to the adventure – whether through commenting on the environments, chewing over nuggets of Warhammer lore, or simply bickering with each other as they slaughtered Skaven by the hundred. The way Darktide gets around this is by letting you give your custom characters a wide range of distinct personalities.
My Skullbreaker would spend entire missions raving about the food in Yorkshire with a dialect I can only describe as “splendid,” and my Preacher would address his friends like a Calvinist from nineteenth-century Scotland who rolls a marble around his mouth. Each terracotta character has its own unique take on the world, point of view, and reactions to the remarks of the others. Even though the matchmaking throws together three disgruntled Irish veterans, it’s still an impressively knotty piece of narrative design.
Characters are similarly flexible in terms of how they fight. Generally speaking, the Veteran and Pskyer are better at picking off enemies from a distance, while the Priest and Skullbreaker are suited to dealing with them up close. But there’s plenty of room for tailoring a more specific build. Skullbreakers, for instance, can get their hands on a massive riot shield that allows them to double down on their tanking role, or a massive grenade launcher that can wipe out entire armies with a single blast. A priest with a flamer can control a crowd just as effectively. With an assault rifle, however, they can switch between close and mid-range combat as the situation dictates.
In Darktide, ranged weapons are more prominent than they were in Vermintide, typically splitting their time between long and short ranges at about a 50-50 ratio (although that ratio varies between classes and builds). What matters is that all of Darktide’s firearms feel great in your hands. You can feel every thump of an Ogryn’s grenade launcher through your fingers, and a standard lasgun slaps out bolts of crimson energy that leave searing holes in enemy bodies. Particularly satisfying to me is the shotgun’s grating, metallic pump action, which serves to further emphasise the brutality with which it dispatches poxwalker hordes.
No matter what profession you choose, you’ll eventually need to rely on a weapon that doesn’t require ammo. Fatshark specialises in first-person melee games, and their approach to hand-to-hand combat in Darktide is unparalleled. Even simple tools like hatchets and swords provide a tremendous sense of satisfaction when used to dispatch a poxwalker. Unlocking the more legendary death-sticks from Warhammer 40,000 is where the fun really begins. Most notably, the chainsword. Using its special attack, you can bring the sword crashing down onto an enemy’s head and hold it there while the chain chews through their skull. This is in addition to its standard attack, which, when pulled back, can literally slice enemies in half. It’s spectacularly grisly, and useful for dealing with tougher foes.
Darktide’s combat features a variety of systems that, taken together, add depth beyond the impact of classes and weapons alone. Each character is protected by a “Toughness” shield that depletes before your health, and can be regenerated by moving into proximity with other players, encouraging you to stick together. If you’re being shot at, you’d better duck for cover or close the distance in case your opponent decides to go for the kill in melee. Of course, there’s also a wide variety of Specialist enemies to throw a wrench in your plans, such as snipers who can take you out with a couple of well-placed shots, hefty dogs that can pin characters to the ground, and formidable “Elite” foes like the sluglike Beast of Nurgle.
This combination of factors results in highly exciting and dynamic action scenes. At its most intense, you’ll be hacking through a literal screenful of enemies while harried from the flanks by Specialist foes, as composer Jesper Kyd’s magnificent soundtrack thumps and buzzes in the background. Importantly though, it’s not a constant onslaught. Whatever AI magic lies beneath Darktide’s surface, it is particularly adept at balancing moments of intense encounter with moments of downtime, allowing you to catch your breath, reload your weapons, and, if you’re lucky, admire your surroundings.
The scale of Darktide’s environmental design is truly epic. Each of the 13 missions takes place in a different region of Tertium, and each is as vast and opulent as the Warhammer 40k setting requires. You exist perpetually in the Imperium’s shadow. Even in the handful of missions where you get to step outside, you’re loomed over by the enormous buttresses of some monumental gothic folly. Then there are missions where you descend deep into Tertium’s bowels, through ramshackle shanty towns, serpentine sewer systems, and imposing subterranean fortresses. However, while visually impressive, individual missions are not as distinct as they were in Vermintide 2. Reasons for this include the sheer density of the Warhammer 40k aesthetic as well as others.
Moment-to-moment, Darktide is enormous fun. The problems reveal themselves once you escape from whatever pestilent cranny of Tertium you’ve most recently been sent to. Unlike in Vermintide, the missions in Darktide do not fall under predefined campaigns. Instead, each mission is treated as its own entity, with difficulty, number of specialised enemies, and other factors such as these chosen at random. As you complete missions, you earn experience and gold that you can use to level up your character and gain access to new abilities, gear, and visual customization options.
Missions and the broader progressions system in Darktide are both severely unbalanced. At maximum level (30), it takes two or three missions played at the appropriate difficulty to gain one level in your character. As a result, given that there are only 13 missions in the game, you will need to play anywhere from 60 to 90 missions to reach level 30. It’s true that the missions in Darktide can be completed multiple times, with slight variations introduced by the AI director or other factors. However, they were not designed to withstand the hours upon hours of gameplay required to level up even a single character, let alone four.
More issues have arisen because of the new layout. Fatshark has a hard time telling stories that span multiple levels because they aren’t divided up into acts. Darktide’s lack of a compelling narrative is all the more puzzling given the calibre of the creative minds behind it (Tertium’s creator, for example, is acclaimed author Dan Abnett). There are cutscenes every few levels where you meet a new character who basically tells you that you haven’t done anything yet and sends you back into the slaughterhouse. In addition, you don’t get the same sense of the environment evolving around you because there aren’t any narrative arcs between levels, which makes it hard for individual missions to stand out.
Darktide’s technical problems, which have plagued the game since beta and have persisted into launch, can’t be overlooked either. While stability has greatly improved, I was still experiencing at least one crash during each play session as of this writing. Fatshark has temporarily disabled ray-tracing due to a web of problems associated with DLSS.
The typical disclaimers for games with live service apply. We have only just begun our journey with Fatshark and Darktide. The development team is still fixing bugs and adding more content. But that doesn’t alter the fact that Darktide’s progression systems are currently more detrimental to the game’s overall quality than they are complimentary, and while there’s still plenty of fun to be had right now, the optimal version of Warhammer 40k: Darktide lies in the grim darkness of the far future.
