Some games are exceedingly drawn-out affairs that lead the player down a rabbit hole of hundreds of hours, mastering skills and following plotlines or side quests in massive worlds that many gamers will never truly experience. Fatshark’s newest title Warhammer 40,000: Darktide shows you everything it has in 10 hours, and then you spend many more playing it just because it’s so damn enjoyable. It’s far from the perfect game, filled with weird bugs and crashes, but I’ll be damned if those issues felt so minor I am happily still putting time in after playing 40 hours in the pre-order beta. Read on to see why Darktide will be the new hit for the working gamer.

Gameplay

In the tradition of its award-winning title Vermintide 2, Fatshark took a simple concept, changed it, and tinkered with specific factors involved. A co-op shooter in the style of Left 4 Dead, fighting through hordes of weak enemies with a few special ones tossed in as you complete objectives, Vermintide 2 replaced zombies with rats and chaos warriors, added a dash of magic and interesting ranged weapons, and absolutely nailed the perfect feeling of melee combat with weapons, subclasses, skills, and plenty of gore. Chopping apart man-sized rats was a joy, and the flurry of awards the game won was proof of that. For Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, the concept was the same. Instead of rats, its plague-ridden chaos wretches in a hive city teeming with BILLIONS of people (endless hordes of enemies). Instead of bows and magic, it’s laser rifles and psychic powers. Instead of focusing primarily on meaty melee, the game has a solid close combat foundation that is fleshed out with various special melee attacks and amazing ranged weapons.

Playing as a Veteran sharpshooter means you have strong ranged damage at the cost of melee prowess, but you can pick off enemy gunners and elites with precise headshots that leave slews of corpses. For fighting off the hordes you have powerful and righteous Zealots, punching through enemies in the God-Emperor’s name and wielding flamethrowers and two-handed chain-swords (just as fun as they sound). Psykers blow up enemies’ heads with heretical magic, and Ogryns round everything up by being big boys who are great at soaking damage and knocking hundreds of enemies to the side in a rush. Each class is unique and fun, and there is a personal feel to every way you can specialize each class with your choice of melee and ranged weapons. Personally, I fell in love with the Veteran, using a power sword that can be charged with lightning and a charging laser rifle with a bayonet. Comboing hordes with pushes, dodges, attacks, and specials are possible for every class, but the style feels completely different based on the weapon. Knives are fast and precise, axes are slow but do heavy damage to single enemies, and swords can slice across a large area but do less damage. Until you unlock the chain and power weapons, each with specials that can tear huge Ogryn enemies in half with a few swings.

Of course, the concept is simple enough. Starting in a hub area, players can go to stores and crafting areas to utilize their hard-won loot. They then queue up for a mission of their choosing from the central console, differentiated by location, objective, and difficulty along with a few interesting events that can make the missions more difficult but more lucrative. Then as a team of 4, players chop and blast their way through the enemies and objectives until they manage to extract, with failure leading to a mere consolation prize of experience and funds. However, it doesn’t hurt too bad. Sometimes those higher-difficulty missions end so fast it isn’t too much of an issue simply go for another one, and the missions rotate at fairly quick intervals. A single run typically takes 20 minutes or so, so they can be quick adventures. This mean’s this can be perfect for gamers who typically only have an hour or two to game, and you won’t be missing too much.

The progressions are based on experience and winning nets more. Reaching the top level of 30 for a class can take very little time (compared to some games) and being rewarded experience even for losses helps with the time crunch of this game. In my opinion, Darktide does something very well that you don’t see too often in gaming. It’s a game with a lot to offer, but not a lot to experience. With only 5 zones and 7 mission types, you quickly know how missions and special conditions will play out once you spend a few hours doing missions. It doesn’t matter though, because cutting through hordes of enemies or fighting it out in intense firefights with some of the more powerful units is always satisfying once the smoke clears and you are surrounded by the cursed remains of the heretic scum. For the Emperor- oh wait here come more. That feeling of constantly being in battle means those calm moments are so much more rewarding, and on higher difficulties can be a true breath of relief.

Audio And Visuals

Big guns make big boom, as my Ogryn friends might say. The sound effects throughout the game are fantastic, with sizzles from the laser rifles getting more brittle as the ammo runs out, the crunch of weapons against enemy flesh or armor, and even the voice lines between characters and from enemies often catching me off guard with their quality. Some of my favorite moments had the team of 4 in an elevator, and the rejects commenting on another’s previous statement or a specific character telling them to do something. The voice lines are different based on the background of your character, so each player character could say many different things in response to the others. Zealots preaching, Veterans with dogmatic wisdom, and Ogryns being confused by large words were moments of levity in brutal battles clogged with yells, death, and plenty of dismemberment.

Part of that fun audio is also the music. Something about tearing apart enemies when an intense metal instrumental starts pounding in time with the gunshots and explosions made it feel much more visceral and fun, and I often found myself getting incredibly pumped during a boss fight when the music kicked in. Of course, this is all elevated by the pretty great visual quality. Chunks of enemies aren’t as gratifying if they aren’t pretty, and Darktide has pretty chunks and visuals in abundance. Gorgeous vistas will suddenly appear, and often I would stop to marvel at the beauty of this massive hive city with its Gothic Architecture, suddenly somber in the realization this was home to billions of humans being corrupted by Chaos. The only way to save the planet is, of course, much more slaying.

Replayability

As with many of my reviews, replayability comes down to enjoyment. If you are an exploring type of player, who likes finding secrets even after 100 hours of gameplay, this might not be the game for you. However, if you enjoy finding a solid rhythm of gameplay and letting that carry you, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide will be your next saving grace in a realm of AAA titles that are monstrously large and cluttered. Simple, mostly streamlined, and enjoyable, this is one that is only limited by the effort Fatshark continues to put into it, and based upon their previous record with Vermintide 2 I can see this being vastly enjoyable for years to come.

What It Could Have Done Better

Before release, Darktide had a pre-order beta period of about 2 weeks (17th-30th) that they used to fix bugs, server issues, and include the community in some potential changes. As the beta went on, more was added to the game until the full release. Over that time I saw it go from a buggy game that crashed every mission and featured loads of disconnects to a mostly stable game that is launching in a better state than most AAA titles today. However, it still isn’t perfect. Crashes and bugs are quite regular still, even though I need to stress it is MUCH better than the early beta period.

Positively, the crashes and issues aren’t game-breaking, as reconnecting to a game is quick and your slot will be held if you crash. I recently crashed out and was back in the game in less than a minute, so it wasn’t something that I would say detracts from the experience. However, games should be stable, and mostly stable isn’t quite there. Along with that, weird spawns for enemies can be incredibly frustrating or goofy when a large horde or a few specials seem to clip out of a wall or spawn 5 feet behind you, and while typically not impossible to defeat they can definitely throw an unexpected wrench into the flow of the game.

Fixing some of these issues and potentially solidifying the spawn rate might help these frustrations, but they also definitely made the game more wacky and wild. Being rushed by 9 mutants over the span of 1 minute was panic filled and full of screaming in the Discord chat, but my fellow testers and I still laugh about that experience. So maybe even with the goofy weirdness that could be a bug, it’s simply an unintended feature.

Verdict

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is fun; unabashed, goofy, chaotic, and brilliant fun! Chopping through hundreds of enemies is a blast, getting caught and murdered by scores of special enemies is fun, and being able to laugh all the way through with your buddies is the best. This is a game that is fun alone, but positively phenomenal with a crew to play with. If you don’t have one, I would recommend checking out the Darktide discord, as I have found many of the randoms I was paired with were just as fun-loving and goofy as myself, with very few toxic gamers in the mix. Overall, it’s a blast, and if you have the means I definitely recommend picking it up.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is out now on PC via Steam, with plans to release to Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One in the future. Check out the release trailer below and let us know your thoughts in the comments! I hope to see you out there, rejects!