Recent reviews by Tulos

Good class, and good items.

However the actual new area & storyline adds only a scant 3-4 hours of actual content, and similar to the last DLC takes place on a world from the base campaign so feels somewhat samey.

Would have loved more like a 6-8 hour experience, or a fundamentally new area or something.

Nothing in her ie bad, there just isn't enough of it...

If this were any other developer we'd all agree the games pretty mediocre outside of a few strong narrative beats along the main quest line.

It feels unfleshed out, unfulfilling, and uninteresting anywhere off the main path.

It doesn't look good enough to justify its poor performance, it doesn't feel modern despite being brand new, yet simultaneously throws out much of what made past Bethesda games notably good.

Basically it isn't awful, but neither is it great nor remotely what I would expect after years and years of AAA development. It's just kid of mid and thus disappointing.

Darktide features an excellent representation of WH40K lore and aesthetic, realized in phenomenal detail. The game has very good gunplay, and continues Vermintide’s legacy of top tier melee combat.

Almost everything else in the game is poorly thought out, poorly intentioned, poorly realized, or wholly unfinished.

While Fatshark managed to have a functioning in game storefront featuring all the predatory fomo / currency obfuscation tactics we all know and despise from free-to-play and mobile titles (despite this being a $40 USD product) - they were evidently unable to actually finish out some of the core systems of the game - as evidenced by big “coming soon” banners across fully three quarters of the crafting interface.

And this unfinished state is after over a year’s delay. One shudders to think how unfinished it might have been if it had launched on the original date.

Performance is poor, but being worked on. Seems to affect certain hardware mixes moreso than others. Game is somewhat buggy - I’ve had many crash-to-desktops, and it’s certainly something in the game because 2-3 of us will drop simultaneously with some regularity.

For some reason Fatshark has invested very heavily on RNG factors for just about everything. Your chance to get any specific gear is RNG, as the kiosk (in game credits - not real money) where you pick them up has an hourly rotating inventory. The chance for that gear to be a weapon you want is RNG. The chance for any of the that weapon to roll good stats is RNG. The chance for gear with good stats to have to good perks is RNG.

The reality of this system is that - say you want to use the Zealot’s flamethrower - you’re level 30, and you haven’t even seen a flamethrower in the store since you were level 10 and it was a terribly rolled grey item with no perks whatsoever. I guess just… keep praying to the omnissiah? Because I sure as ♥♥♥♥ haven’t seen the damn thing show up in the last two weeks.

One would think playing the game to acquire your arsenal might be more entertaining than idling in the hub and checking the kiosk ever other hour.

Even the way you choose what mission and difficult to play is RNG - because the missions on offer, their difficulty, and the "conditions" (mutators) that affect that level are all random and rolling over every so often. You literally cannot choose the level you'd like to play and then adjust the difficulty and modifiers. That isn't a feature of the game. Absurd.

While Fatshark has said they’ve heard our concerns here, I can’t think it will be remedied any time in the near future given how integrated this lousy kiosk is into how the game currently works.

Crafting just… isn’t in the game yet. At the time of posting, > 2 weeks since launch, we can upgrade weapon tiers and I think just as of today upgrade the tiers of a single perk.

This still all means you need to find (again, under the current terrible RNG acquisition method) a weapon you want, with good base stats, and relevant perks - before you consider actually upgrading said tiers.

The four available classes seem interesting at first, but in practical terms kind of wind up being a little uninteresting. There are at this time no subclasses. There are 5 talent tiers, and each has 3 options. Most of them are very minor variations on a theme, with one option generally being the obvious best one. Rarely can you lean on these to really “put together a build”. Some talents work marginally better depending on your kit - but again, acquiring that kit is completely up to chance - so it’s mostly meaningless.

The level design is beautiful, but for the 14 or so missions, it feels like you’re spending all your time looking at subtly different parts of the same 3 areas. They really do all blend together. There’s grim dark factory / grim dark rich people part of town / and grim dark mad max desert factory. Again - gorgeous - but boring and samey in practice.

Character progression is uninteresting while levelling, and then stops entirely at 30. The game still tracks you “gaining a level” past 30, but nothing happens. You aren’t rewarded with gear or crafting materials. All forms of progress are per character, so spending time on a level 30 doesn’t help progress any of your other characters, even just via gear or crafting materials.

The "story" is laughably bad for the few cutscenes in which it exists at all. It's unclear to me what legendary Black Library author Dan Abnett actually contributed.

I could go on, but suffice to say the game has myriad issues at this time. Fatshark has demonstrated in the past a willingness to overhaul and fix up their games, and I anticipate this will be a pretty decent title in a year or two - but it very obviously wasn’t ready to launch - and what’s there right now is only worthwhile for 20-30 hours, and that's as a fan of both the IP and their previous titles. Maybe that’s enough of a value proposition for your time and money, but I’d anticipated far better. For some reason they’ve decided to reinvent the wheel for so many systems that people were already familiar with from past titles and enjoyed how those systems worked - largely because they were well thought out and finished, but also because they were dramatically more friendly to the player than what’s on offer in Darktide.

Hope they can improve on what’s here, and give the focus on recurrent monetization (again, on a $40 USD title) a break until things are in better shape.

Don't particularly enjoy the game as it currently stands.

Combat has little feedback and feels unsatisfying. Certain characters are demonstrably much much much easier to play but simultaneously much more powerful / effective. Balance is all over the place. Onboarding isn't great. Skill descriptors aren't great. As the big rock guy I definitely routinely had skills mis-fire / not work as intended.

Broadly speaking I just wasn't really having fun or enjoying my time with the game. I didn't give it a ton of time / a huge amount of a chance, because it wasn't entertaining to do so. So... why would I?

May 5th, 2021 EDIT:

After having spent more time with the game, grinded out more endgame, and seen just how item economy, item balance, class balance, enemy balance is, coupled with all the broken or useless mods / mechanics I've changed my stance.

The game has good parts, absolutely. See below. However it's currently incredibly bogged down by bugs, mechanical issues, balance issues, and more. The grind is insane. No target farming whatsoever. Terrible drop rates. Weird time-attack gating. Progression where you can accidentally lock yourself into an impossible progression. Through a variety of mechanics you're simultaneously incentivized and punished for pushing your limits. It's absolutely bizarre.

The devs patch cycle also sees them patch something on a Friday - which means when they inevitably introduce new bugs and break things that were working, they all head home for the weekend and the game is busted until they're back.

To be clear - I'm not pro overworked game developers. But I am pro not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up your game right before the weekend. Give yourselves the breathing room to put out fires when you accidentally light them.

My previous, more positive, review is below:

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At launch the game was plagued by large periods of service outage in which you could not play the game, single player or otherwise.

Having said that from day 4 on or so things have been pretty reliable and uptime seems consistent at this point.

As for the game itself: The story is terrible schlock, but hopefully you don't play looter shooters for the story.

The classes are diverse enough and interesting, the build options are diverse enough and interesting (though at end games some things are far far more optimal from what I've seen, I'd like to see power balanced a bit more and suspect they'll be patching this over time). The mod & gear system is pretty phenomenal honestly - I'm really really impressed with the system and how it works.

I've only just pushed into endgame expeditions and they're decent. You definitely know what you're in for - it's just more shooting stuff, moving to the next area, and shooting stuff. But that's the core of this type of game and ultimately it's pretty enjoyable.

I'll say that difficulty is pretty spiky throughout the campaign - things will be trucking along fine, you feel like a total badass, and then all of the sudden you can't handle ♥♥♥♥♥♥ chaff enemies and you don't really know why or whats changed. I'd love to see that curve sort of... adjusted - though, yes, you absolutely can drop the difficulty at any time. I just don't enjoy how often that felt mandatory.

All in all - fun game. I do enjoy it. I do also think it's probably more worth ~$45 CAD than the actual AAA price they're asking for.

Why I can't recommend this game:

1. The grind/difficulty curve is bizarre. Right off the bat you're doing little grindy fetch quests to get materials to build things to process materials to build new things with new materials and so on and so forth - that's all fine, and to be expected with the genre. But as soon as I get off the first planet and head to the nav point i'm directed towards, I land on a planet almost entirely devoid of carbon and oxygen - two elements that you immediately need to progress any further in the game. How are there no checks and balances in place to prevent this from happening? Don't send me to a planet with almost no carbon at a point in the game where carbon is a necessity to progress. Same goes for oxygen - you need it for life support - yet the amount I can gather from the few ♥♥♥♥♥♥ plants on my hellscape of a planet is basically only enough to keep up with basic burn-rate of existing and moving around - certainly not enough to actually use to progress through the story/tech trees. Absurd. You need to safety gate people from this kind of worst-case scenario - it's stupid and frustrating and makes you game look worse than it probably can be.

I'll acknowledge this is probably just a run of bad luck. Most people probably aren't sent to some total ♥♥♥♥- pile of a planet devoid of the super basic starter elements you'll need to make any progress - but it's dumb that it was allowed to happen to me, and has put me off the game.

2. This game, 4+ years on from launch, runs HORRIBLY and suffers from some of the worst pop-in I've ever seen in any game yet. ♥♥♥♥ will just suddenly load in beside you after you've been standing there for 10+ seconds already. It's not even distant stuff, it just seems to load in in chunks even if you're literally beside the stuff. This is running on an SSD on a relatively high end modern system. Seriously unimpressed by performance.

Ultimately, the game disrespects my time and is unrewarding to my efforts. I don't need everything handed to me ez pz, but this is ridiculous. And again - maybe that's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG luck on my part, but the game shouldn't give you such ♥♥♥♥♥♥ odds right off the bat. It hasn't earned my interest enough to make me fight to play the game yet. Throw the curve balls further in, not right off the bat.

Absolute drivel.

After fighting login issues to get into the lousy game during the free weekend, I got to experience terrible performance (~35 FPS with a GTX 1070 on medium settings 1440p, regardless of scene), dough-faced monstrosities of character models, some issues with dialogue trees (hitting skip in a conversation lead to the npc just staring at me, and me having no conversation options. I had to leave, come back, and re-initiate the conversation. Skipping dialogue worked fine the second time).

Lousy weightless combat. Awful menus. Barely tolerable PC controls. Weird mouse smoothing. Can't (at least obviously) find an option to turn off Vsync.

There might be fun to had here, but it probably isn't worth fighting the game to find it.

Coop Campaign runs extremely poorly. Desync issues, heavy framerate hitching, screen tearing - all of these issues are exacerbated if you're not the "host", but it is pretty bad even FOR the host.

Not sure if it's just netcode, or what's up - but it's unplayably bad at the moment.

Hold off for now. See if 343 can fix their issues and buy then. I'm awaiting a refund at the moment.

Game is excellent. For the most part they've taken all the good of Vermintide 1 and expanded upon it. More classes, more RPG elements, more enemy variety, more weapons and so on.

For those not in the know, this is essentially an objective-based mobile horde-mode PvE game a-la Left for Dead series. Only with much more customization in terms of items, classes, characters, leveling, abilities, traits, and passives.

Runs great. Looks great. Still early days so there's some small issues that Fatshark needs to iron out - and it seems most of the community would appreciate some more hard data on things like player health, what power level actually relates to, raw "damage" numbers and less vague item and class descriptions.

That said, at its core, the game's about bashing rat-men and chaos warriors and it does that phenomenally well. The feel of all the weapons and the meaty impact (and accompanying sound design) really sell the whole experience. Really in a class of it's own as far as the feeling of melee combat is concerned - nothing else comes close.

Great game. Fair price. Only wish my friends played it.