Warhammer 40,000: Darktide review - a horde of minor flaws can be overcome by faith

If I were writing this a couple of weeks ago, when Warhammer 40,000: Darktide had only just launched and when reviews typically tend to go out, I'd have warned you to maybe hold off a little longer. I'd have told you it was a little too demanding for most PCs, that its store was miserly for a full-priced game, that it had a little too much jank and crucially, a little too few of those intangible, in-between features that can make or break a multiplayer game. Thankfully for Darktide though, I'm not. Now, a couple weeks into its life, there are still gaps and flaws and little quibbles that can get in the way of the fun - but crucially, the fun is there, it's a little easier to reach than it was a few weeks ago, and it really is a blast.

Some players will already be familiar with the formula. Darktide is a spiritual follow-up to Vermintide and Vermintide 2, developer Fatshark's previous two games set in 40k's old-timey parallel (or same-but-much-earlier?) universe of fantasy Warhammer. Instead of hordes of rat people, you're now mowing down waves of zombified plague-people, corrupted or otherwise made gross by the plague god Nurgle. Much of it really is the same: you play as a given class of your choice with three others, either bots or humans, and you fight off waves while completing fairly simple objectives. But there are departures, the most significant being the introduction of guns.

Darktide, unlike its ratty cousins, is really a hybrid between hack-and-slash and FPS, and its four classes reflect that, each with a primary and secondary weapon that generally represents a melee and ranged option and each, at least in theory, as viable as the other. The Veteran is the most gun-focused, a character that allows you to play Darktide like it's the zombies mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops, mowing down hordes while aiming down sights - emphasising longer-range with weapons that can charge up for high damage single shots, but still with the option of a tasty power sword if enemies get in too close.

Read more