Recent reviews by Azon (brb)

Darktide at its core has great gameplay much like Vermintide 2 was. I want to say before I get into the criticism below that this game shows promise on the path to a good entry into the -tide series. The problems are the result of fixable technical issues, changeable minor design decisions, promised features that remain absent, and how Fatshark has handled some parts of the release. All of these DON'T require a radical redesign of the game, which is sometimes the case in the industry. This really means I DON'T RECOMMEND THE GAME YET.

The biggest problem is how broken it remains on release. As someone with a 3080, performance is nowhere near decent with frame drops at even small hordes. Server has had problems with disconnecting you, it's less so than before, but still annoying, requiring you to sit through more load screens. Loading times are not great unless you have an SSD (even then I know someone where the SSD made it worse), especially loading into the unnecessary main online lobby that serves as a poorer keep from V2. Even after loading into this lobby, it can take several minutes for the various menus to start functioning afterwards. Except for the cash shop which loads quickly every time. Crashing occurs less often than in beta, some people still have it happen regularly, but it varies from person to person. Optimization needs to be a large focus for the immediate future and Fatshark has stated they are working on it.

The cash shop, which features modern MMO predatory pricing, has been a much loathed feature. Although this may have been something that Fatshark was forced to implement quickly and efficiently to appease some higher ups' demands as I feel is the case in many other games.

Fatshark had promised a fairly large weapon roster on launch. Needless to say, the current roster is a fraction of that. Instead of admitting to the community that they would be unable to meet this promise on release, they quietly dropped mentions of this. Although they can't just scrub the visual marketing material featuring unimplemented weapons. I wish they would've just admitted that they didn't have the manpower or resources to deliver on this for release. Two of the weapons are slated for release next week as of this review.

Only a third of the crafting system is here. Something that even Vermintide 2 had fully on release. They're adding another 1/3 next week. Hopefully the system will be fully finished by the end of this month. I'll delete these lines whenever the system is finished.

A questionable design choice I found was the decision to have a mission select mode similar to Payday 2's release. Only certain missions, on certain difficulties, with certain modifiers are playable at a time. This can lead to some frustration when you want to do a certain difficulty, but want to do a different mission that what is available. This is especially true when needing to complete certain penances (challenges that may unlock cosmetic items) that require completion of certain mission types. Just gives us an option to let us select our mission, difficulty, and modifier like V2.

Speaking of penances, some of them are stupidly difficult to complete. Many require people to play in a sub-optimal or anti-team fashion. If you don't have a full group of cooperating people to complete some of these with (some penance are still difficult even then), forget about doing them in a legitimate fashion. Whenever a hard penance can be completed via an exploit, that is typically the community recommended approach to completing them, The have made some of these easier since the beginning of the beta, but decided to make a somewhat difficult one even more difficult, requiring an even rarer specific circumstance. These need to be reevaluated.

The new store system for buying new weapons is better than V2's random chests as a more reliable way to get the weapons player want. Although it can be frustrating as some weapons may not show up for quite a few store cycles, while you instead get multiple variants of the same weapon type. Especially true for psyker which often sees many all class weapons that don't fit the psyker as a player would want. I feel this system needs a slight tweak, maybe weighting class specific weapons a bit more against all class weapons.

That sums up my major complaints at the moment. This is a long review, but I really wanted to include the detail as the -tide games are something I'm passionate about. I want this game to succeed, which means the major issues people are having need to be fixed.

For now my recommendation is to wait until the game is in a more complete and stable state.

This is how the black plague happened...right?

The spookiest part is that this game sells for $2 full price.

Top Cho's score in a kill everyone situation. With isometric perspective and an art style reminiscent of Sin City.

Play as Nathan Explosion who is down on his luck after the show ended and decides to murder everyone just cause it'd be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BRUTAL!

Now go make the Columbine duo envious.