Recent reviews by Kermer

Finally you can be on the winning side of war on drugs.

I think I played everything from L4D through Vermintide to this. I'll mostly compare this to Vermintide 2, which you can often get for around 5$ to check if this is the kind of game for you, as I think if you liked one of them, you'll like the other.

Better core gameplay (combat) than Vermintide 2; Content updates are slow; Pretty but quite hardware demanding game;

Overal this is sadly the biggest reason I prefer Darktide over Vermintide 2, as many other parts of the game, Vermintide 2 wins in my opinion.

While there are some ranged options, most of the time you'll be fighting melee combat, especially in higher difficulty content. Only exception being Psyker and his staffs. DON'T BELIEVE VETERAN'S LIES, IT'S MELEE CLASS AS WELL!

Melee combat feels much better than in Vermintide 2 - stagger from the weapons feel appropriate - heavy chunk of metal (ogryn's slab shield) can stagger even the toughest non-boss enemies, while a knife won't do much to stop those charging enemies. Introduction of sprinting, but with stamina shared between your block and push actions, adds additional layer of thought on how you have to handle encounters.
Most of the weapons feel unique with their pros and cons against specific enemies, while also allowing slight tweaking through weapon "marks" and "crafting" system (why crafting is in quotation marks? - we'll get to that in a moment).

At core both games are fairly the same. You start a mission, go through linear maps with some variations do some objective and extract. Most of replayability comes from enemy types, spawn locations and map modifiers. In Darktide frequency of content updates and content of them is quite underwhelming sadly.

Game got released at the end of 2022 and in 3 years we basically got 3-5 somewhat decent updates:

• Extended skill trees - much more variety in how you build your characters.
  
• Auric missions - same missions, but with additional, harder modifiers + few cosmetics as penances (achievements)
  
• Havoc missions - once again, same missions, but with different modifiers and some cosmetics.
  
• Mortis Trials - 2 new kind of missions, where you're more stational and enemies come to you, with some rogue-like skills gained during run.
  
• Few new missions - I think across those 3 years we got 4-5 new missions.

They also like to "balance" skill trees quite a lot, which forces you to redo your characters' skill trees every few months.

Vermintide 2, even though it's 7 years old already, seems to get more updates...

Nowadays luckily it's just a simple 1) upgrade your weapon's level, 2) upgrade it's rarity, 3) select perks and blessings, at the cost of some resources. Initially what it was was total mess, with RNG cherry on top, probably it was added because "every game needs a crafting system" or something.
You just grind some Ordo dockets, plasteel and diamantine during the missions or events for it.

Vermintide 2 brings 5 characters, each with 3+1 careers (classes, last one is paid DLC). Darktide has 4 classes (Ogryn, Psyker, Zealot and Veteran). While this seems like a way less and when Darktide first released it actually was, skill trees in Darktide are now gameplay changing enough to somewhat compensate for it - each of the class kinda have 3 sub-types.

Dialogue between characters feels more entertaining in Vermintide 2, as connections and difference between each character is more defined.

I personally also like the fantasy settings more, but Darktide as you'd expect is much better looking game, which brings me to...

Don't expect it to run on 2018 built PC. Optimization is not good, but it's playable.
Darktide is very pretty, but at the cost of performance. I'd say RTX 2060 is like very minimum to enjoy this game, but no matter what you have, expect to occasionally drop below 60 FPS. I personally use RTX 3080 eGPU, running on almost lowest settings and very often end up below 60 FPS.

Either Warframe, Destiny 2 or even OUTRIDERS provide better gameplay in my opinion.

Somehow I keep coming back every few months to this game...

10/10

Democracy prevailed!

This game was meant to release in February 2024. Instead we got underwhelming and slow updates and in May they announced that they're redoing 💩ton of stuff (basically scraping part of the game) and removing crossplay.

After over 6 months of patches, they still couldn't fix simple inventory UI performance issue and instead added artificial items limit, so that you can't get any loot if you don't like to spend HOURS holding dismantle button.

Maybe one day this game will become either good or what it promised to be, but highly doubt that.

https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/steamstore/news/app/1171690/view/4174350531696890458

tl;dr: Wait till it's out of Early Access and get it for free. It's generally Warframe with different combat mechanic.

It's early access. There's a lot of bugs, server stability is fairly bad, so you'll surely get booted out of mission or not get some rewards at some point. There's not a lot of content atm, if you stick around for 100h+ then you're really dedicated to the grind.

The gameplay loop is solid. You grind missions/bosses to get specific materials in order to craft different weapon or wayfinder. Then you level them up, unlock their skills, make them stronger, rinse and repeat.

Combat many compare to Monster Hunter. Enemies indicate attacks fairly well, you got your movement, light attack, alternate/heavy attack, combos, dodge (with iframes) and more. Each weapon category feels different and fun to use, currently you have: sword & shield, two-handed, daggers and ranged. There are also some variations within those categories. Shield have block and counter, daggers have parry with iframes on certain attacks, two-hands are basically what you would expect from souls-like game.

Progression - after unlocking weapon/wayfinder you still need to level them up, which makes them feel stronger overtime, which is cool, however after leveling few of them you'd want to skip this (very grindy) part, which is not available in current state of the game. After leveling you character and weapon to max level (30 atm), all that really left for it is grinding specific missions in order to drop echos and accessories for them (basically your typical looter-shooter games stuff), which some people like and others don't.

Open world and quests feel like they were forced into the game in hope to make this feel somewhat like a MMO (spoiler: it doesn't feel like it). You do the main quests in like 8h and then you only visit it to farm 2 world bosses which were put there instead of their own instanced mission like every other. Story might be interesting to some, but halfway through I just got bored by sheer amount of text they put into those dialog boxes and just started skipping the rest.

Weapons are not balanced at all. From weapons within given categories, to whole categories. You might have fun with sword & shield for a while, but then you realize how much damage and utilities you lose vs other weapons, with not much to compensate with. Generally if you want ranged weapon, you take Tempest (shotgun); if you want 2H, you take Titan's Bane; if you want daggers, most are good, but Night's Edge is better; if you want sword & shield... you go play 2H or daggers.

There's not much of variety between runs. There are two types of missions - expeditions and hunts. Hunts are simply boss fights, with no variations between re-runs. Expeditions are "dungeons", with some of the rooms, mobs and events randomized. However the randomization is pretty weak for them and expeditions within same biome (you get 3 expeditions per biome) are very similar. After running given expedition 3 times you roughly know what kind of rooms it can have and how they'll be placed. Imbuements are supposed to help with this a bit, but truth is you use them just to complete certain missions or gain certain materials, as most of them only add annoyment instead of challenge.

Stuff that currently is here (2023-09-10), but should be fixed during EA period, such as:

• Servers stability - prepare to be disconnected at any point of the game
  
• Loading times - when you farm bosses, you kill boss in like a minute, than you're stuck 2-3 minutes between various loadings before you're back in boss mission.
  
• Progression - XP gains are ridiculously low atm, it'll take you at least 20h to level up 1 -> 30 (if you only do the XP farming).
  
• Items/inventory - if you play for like 30h+, you'll get enough echos and accessories that everytime you open your inventory game will freeze for couple of seconds, which gets worse overtime. You'll be opening those menus quite a lot.
  
• Too many bugs to list them. Some of them straight up time-wasting, some of them taking your cosmetics/other rewards away, just quite a mess.
  
• Not a lot of content. I'd say reasonable person would be done with this game within 40h in it's current state. Rest is grind-lovers ^^

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Killing xenos is actually quite entertaining and shooting non-humanoid AI is kinda refreshing.
Most of the classes skills are actually interesting an fun to use.
Different difficulties make the game enjoyable for both those who want to just chill and shoot some xenos as well as those who want to feel like they're actually fighting bloody aliens (one grab could end your life!).


Game is still buggy in many places, lacking features that you'd expect to be there for a coop game (they added quick play, after what, like a year after release?) and generally badly designed gameplay-wise, but they keep adding more, often buggy features and skipping fixing phases entirely.
Given how the updates timeline goes, you can quite surely say this won't change.

Optimization is non-existant in this game. If you're running mid-spec PC even getting stable 30 FPS is not guaranteed, you'll usually jump between 80 and 5 FPS, depending on what you're looking at on the screen. Illogically Increasing texture quality might give you more FPS. I wonder if RTX 3060+ can even get stable 60 FPS on FHD here.

Even if you're interested in this game, I wouldn't recommend spending more than 10$ on it.

• No any sort of matchmaking balance - it's often team of newbies vs team of veterans.
  
• Struggles to keep 60 FPS on lowest settings (probably need RTX to have anywhere near smooth experience).
  
• Gameplay is nothing special, it's mostly PvP anyway, with really occassional harassment by the AI.
  
• Combat mechanics are acceptable at best. Tried every character and both melee and ranged combat felt off.

This game was never on my "want to play" list, mostly because I'm not much into a RPG, story-driven games (I haven't even played any of the Witcher games).

Even the free to play launch meant nothing to me. I started playing in November mostly because I didn't have anything to play at the moment and wanted to give this highly rated game a go.

I do not regret that choice. I felt in love with it quite quickly, as it is simply a really polished game at this point, which is unluckily rare in these times. Everything just works well - no performance issues, I don't remember to encounter any bug during the 60h, every piece of gameplay just seem to be in the right place, not to mention the cool idea of allowing to access inventory, quests and other during the loading screens. Just feels like they took their time to polish it and this is something I'll always support, especially in the times when you can litter the games lists with basically anything.

Knowing that all this was available without any charge, I felt kind of obligated to buy a DLC to support this well made product ;)