TLDR: Frustrating, Unpaced, Buggy Gameplay

If you want a fun, hack and slash coop game that will entertain you for a few nights, go ahead and get it. But, you really can't take this game seriously.

Some fun stories to give you perspective before the review...

- 1 meter from exit, rest of team is dead, I turn around to see if there are enemies I need to block because I'm at 1 hp. In that 1 meter space, the game spawns a pack of rats that insta-kill me and lose us a 20 minute mission.

- I'm in a tunnel and I open a door. Suprise. There's a bile troll (one of the hardest bosses) and two chaos warriors. At the same instant a rat assassin jumps through a wall and disables the tank while a leech disables the mage a few seconds after. Tank goes down, but as we get the mage up the game thinks it would be a good time to send in a horde as well. As you'd guess we died. Very fast.

- In a boss fight as Kerillian, I'm doing damage with backstabs while it's focused on the tank. The boss turns instantly and chunks half my health bar with an unavoidable melee attack, then maintains agro on me as the tank fails to get it back on himself. The boss proceeds to hit me through pillars and walls, eventually downing me and the rest of my team.



Review
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Pros:
- Fun combat
- The roles almost have a purpose, and can almost synergize
- The Dwarf is hilarious
- It's satisfying when you win
- Diablo-style loot

Cons:
- There is no skill cap because you can't be good at the game
- Boss mechanics are unavoidable
- Agro system is non-existent
- AIDS spawning system
- Unpaced Gameplay
- Buggy adds
- Elite units can instant-teleport and disable you (unavoidable)
- Overall, just hard for the wrong reasons

What to improve:

Spawning System - DEVS. Don't spawn a horde, a chaos warrior patrol, a boss, and 2 elite units all at once. Guess what? You litterally cannot fight that. That's like... 20 tanky, high damage units. There are no mechanics in the game that allow you to fight that. So don't spawn ♥♥♥♥ on RNG timers and hope it doesn't pile up. Integrate a system that makes sure the mission events don't overlap ten fold. I can't even express how many missions I've been in where no matter how well the team played, the sheer amount of enemies was impossible to fight. How do you deal with two teammates getting disabled by leeches and assassins while the other two try to not only save them, but fight off a horde at the same time? better hope a boss doesn't spawn too like it usually does. That's not hard, it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ retarded.

Agro - What makes coop, role based games really fun is allowing the classes to not only pick playstyles, but allow them to RELIABLY contribute to the team. Take Shade for example, during a boss fight she needs to get behind and backstab the boss while the tank holds agro and distracts it. The devs probably thought that would be too EASY because the game is all about being HARD right? Well guess what, it really just makes for ♥♥♥♥♥♥, 0 skill, all luck gameplay. There's a 100% chance that as soon as you start doing your job and putting out heavy damage on the boss, that it will do a 180 degree turn and do unavoidable damage. During a long fight, that damage adds up and soon enough you'll be dead and out of the fight. If you can't do your job in a fight, how is that supposed to be rewarding? How are you supposed to avoid damage that you CAN'T AVOID? You need to implement a better agro system, where tank classes can reliably hold the attention of the bosses and use their kit to avoid dying. Until then, fighting enemies (primarily bosses) will remain a cancerous, luck based task.

Boss Mechanics:
Basically, you need to give people the ability to counter-play bosses. Yes you made bosses hard to fight and yes there is SOME skill involved in the fights, but what the game doesn't allow for is strategy. If you need to get into melee range to attack a boss, then there's a good chance that the boss will agro onto you from its previous target and land an attack on you in 0.2 seconds. It takes the human an avg of 0.3 seconds to react to something, so what you've done is just taken away the player's ability to play efficiently. What makes a game like darksouls great is that it's challenging, but you can overcome those challenges by learning and getting better. In Vermintide, bosses can outrun you, hit you through walls, disable you, attack with no chance to defend, etc. Plainly put, it's unfair. Same goes for the spawning system I talked about above.




In the end, if they made the game respond reliably to the strengths and weaknesses of each class, and allowed the players to control the situation, you would have an amazing game on your hands. As of now, there's very little you can do to prevent from getting overwhelmed by ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanics and spawning systems.

It's fun, but after a while it's the most obnoxious thing in the world.

Inb4 get good - I just explained why you can't.