Game 84 - Warhammer 40:000 - Darktide - Week 166 - Mar 23

arktide 

Let’s get down to the brass tax. This is one of the best Warhammer 40:000 games I’ve ever played and hands down the most immersive and best FPS 40k game I’ve ever played. But overall that’s a low bar – set by a string of low-mid quality games especially in the last decade. The fact that people argue the best Warhammer 40k games are from over a decade ago and a single developer (R.I.P. Relic – Dawn of War I & II, Space Marine) should say it all. The game absolutely nails three areas, but fails in many other areas that ultimately stopped me from coming back.

The visuals are on point. Walking through the desolate industrial halls and roads of Hive Tertium you can’t help but look up. Your attention is constantly drawn up and above the foreground into the towering backdrops whether that be a grand standing cathedral or towering spires. It’s so good in fact that it feels detrimental in some ways – lacking the variety of prior FatShark games. The adherence to a Hive and only a Hive interior removes from the replayability as you eventually get sick of seeing the same levels over and over. More on that later however. As a 40k fan – the hive itself is phenomenal and I really wish the developer would make a Half-Life style single player shooter.

The gameplay – my god does it feel good. They nailed that moment to moment gameplay mowing down hordes as they run into your hail of gunfire or wide sweep never stopped being satisfying. The eviscerator chainsword does exactly that, cleaving off multiple cultist heads or revving up to dig its teeth into an armoured Plague Ogryn. The flamer oozes pure petroleum of death that is oh so addictive and makes you feel like a pyromaniac with an urge to burst out in laughter sending the enemies of the Emperor to their fiery doom. I’ve never seen a flame thrower in a game done so right. Like dropping  a keg of oil on a hallway it covers entire areas creating choke points and obliterating foes. All other games should take note. The lasgun feels weak but plentiful, accurate and deadly if you hit the right spot, just like it should. Finally the Bolter. From Godwyn himself the holy weapon of Mankind rips people apart, limb from limb exploding into the dust it came through. My god its glorious wrath makes you feel like the emperor's fury himself incarnate as you send out mini rockets to smite cultists. It'll outright stop many of the special infected in their tracks (such as the dreaded hounds). It’s easily the best bolter in a game yet and I would LOVE to see a Deathwatch game from FatShark (perhaps for Darktide 2?)

Bolter. Chainsword. Flamer.

The sound track is fucking phenomenal. Jesper Kyd has done for Darktide, no Warhammer, what Mick Gordon did for DOOM. This is the definitive Warhammer 40:000 sound. Industrial, synth but with gothic orchestra and organs playing. It’s unique, it’s phenomenal, it’s grim dark. There’s nothing like an incoming horde ramping up to organs blaring and holy piano keys smashing to the sound of the Imortal Imperium as deliver justice to the enemies of the Imperium with Flamer in one hand and Chainsword in the other. Disposal Unit is another highlight with it’s cult like chanting and tempo, which feels like I’m performing a ritual dance to a neon lit bonfire. Darktide Main Theme and Data Interference are also bangers worth shouting out.

The soundtrack captures the glory of man perfectly from its humming industrial worlds to its god inspiring cathedrals - man truly is god in this universe. 

Now for the bad. For starters the game was buggy as hell at release and should not have been dropped in that state. Especially with a perfectly functioning cash shop (no bugs there). Secondly the progression loop is terrible. The loop is as follows. Do a mission – get a bunch of meaningless resources (because they’re not explained) and maybe get some loot. Go to the random shop and hope a good weapon is there. Nothing? Repeat. Sure, they updated it later so you could get whatever gun you want at its base level. That’s nice and needed especially for beginner players but there’s next to no end game incentive or progression loop. No clear path towards legendary gear or even gear sets. I have no idea why they scrapped the Vermintide 2 dice system. Not only was it amazing to push through with the grimoire (which now feel meaningless) for that extra dice roll, but the loot you got seemed much better in V2 even at launch. Others will tell your even V2 took a while to get off the ground – but it was no where near this bad – a clear step back for FatShark. Also why armour doesn’t have stats beats me – it could have easily replaced curious and had set effects. Which leads to the other point – all the armour sucks and there’s barely any. You have a paid cash shop with amazing armour in a buggy unfinished full priced game from day one. Scummy AF and anyone review bombing or boycotting this game is more than justified considering FatShark has learnt nothing from the last two games or industry mistakes in general. 40k is so rich for potential cosmetics and they have less than Deep Rock Galactic which is limited in its creative scope by both size of its staunchy characters and facial hair, but still manages to outperform this game in that department. Challenges also suck. They’re quite difficult and unreasonable such as pickup 12 grimoires (which I’m still not sure works). Not only this but you need to finish them all in a week. So if you have a life they'll all reset before you can finish them. And I still don’t know what the resources are used for because the game explains nothing. In other words they're useless.

Lastly the story and writing is dreadful. The plot shows promise at the start with an absolutely stunning intro cinematic. Your characters starts in a classic prison break scenario (Vermintide 2 had this as the tutorial too) showing off some nice voice acting and a threatening gang of renegades here to free their leader who would of course be a boss later on. So you manage to escape, save an acolyte and are now a criminal ready to repent as part of an enigmatic and masked Inquisitor’s legion of acolytes on their quest to retake the hive. Sounds pretty cool right? Well the plot is as follows. You gain trust by completing missions, inevitably talk to a retinue member who now respects you, repeat steps 1 and 2. Eventually you’ll hear about a rat and traitor. Towards the end this culminates in you getting called to the Interrogator’s chamber among many other unknown (supposedly the people I’ve played with) acolytes. The Interrogator waves around a gun at you and the guy next to you who you’ve never seen but looks nervous. Am I meant to feel threatened? I never did anything remotely traitorous? Is this meant to feel like a witch hunt – the wrongful persecution that happens in the Imperium oh so often? If so it did no such thing with zero agency and the game did a terrible job setting it up. The ending like the story overall falls flat. 

It would have been a little more interesting if they put the characters you played with, seeing your best friends among the crowd as you’re judged would have been nice. But not by much.

Like the story the character creator is about the same. Cool at first but the dialogue is just mid and I found myself ignoring it completely by the 10^th level. Compare this to the zany mix of characters from Vermintide 2 that were always interesting to listen to. A clear indication of the strength of written characters vs. non-linear ones. Also why does your character never speak in cutscenes? She/he speaks in-game so there is no reason not to do it. Is he silent protagonist or a spoken one? It’s just awkward and feels stiff with your character just standing their getting monologued. The mission selector is a hub in the centre of your HQ and is way too random. The map pool is already limited but it caters to certain difficulties as well so you’ll play the same maps over and over and over and over and over…. Normally I’d love this if the maps are will designed (think Dust 2) but they all blur together which hurts replayability. I know a hive is meant to be this way but they should have done something to add more variety. Maybe an Arcade with botanic gardens rotting to nurgle I the Noble district? Or a trudge through the sewer systems ala Resident Evil. One other thing that's sorely missed is the scoreboard. All in the name of "promoting cooperation over toxicity". For me personally this is a ridiculous justification. The scoreboard pushes me to perform the best and work with my team more, not the opposite - these games have never been Call of Duty and a lack of cooperation and skill at harder difficulties will send players hurling back to Challenge 1 and 2 missions where they belong. Removing scoreboard won't solve that...

Aesthetically pleasing, functionally useless.

All these issues and lack of features than both the spiritual predecessor Vermintide 2 and the trailers and gameplay previews culminates in an overall unsatisfied feeling and made me long to go back and play V2. And the fact that the cash shop is here day 1 in a fully paid game with full functionality makes the meta game feel like its designed to push you into the paid store. It’s a shame because the core gameplay is so much fun – it just has no meta-game to keep you coming back especially after you hit level 30. The game creates a marvel unique to 40k like no other in its core gameplay, Hive and soundtrack to accompany it. I really do hope they make a story shooter because if you disregard the bad non-linear writing in favour of Vermintide 2’s intentional characters and story, they have all the hallmarks of a great game. Maybe in a year or so they’ll have something to come back to by then.