Recent reviews by Redbeard

I've got over 350 hours in Darktide now and I think it's safe for me to say, imminent backlash notwithstanding, that the game is actually good. It was definitely released in an unfinished state. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

• The voice acting and dialogue are really great.
  
• The gunplay is good.
  
• Melee feels good.
  
• There is a pretty complex item system that will keep you busy trying to get that item you want long after you've got 4 level 30 chars.
  
• The game looks great on my syste, and my frame rate is reasonable, largely thanks to AMD FidelityFX 2.0. I've only got a GTX 1070.
  
• You may pick up curiosity about the Warhammer 40k canon if you aren't already a fan. I knew nothing about WH40k before I played Darktide and now I have a fair bit of lore knowledge, which enhances the experience of playing Darktide through improving immersion and making you able to understand the WH40k memes and culture.
  
• The community is surprisingly good. I've not met a proper troll yet. Everyone is generally cooperative in play, and even willing to help when you want to do penances (achievements).
  
• There's a fair bit of "free" cosmetic gear that you can unlock via penances, and they actually look good.

Cons:

• There are a handful of UI bugs that you will run into that are somewhat annoying.
  
• The store/crafting stations' UIs clearly aren't doing much caching and can take several seconds to load.
  
• Some of the penances are just ridiculous and contrived such that you need a team to do them. For example there's one to kill a monstrosit (boss) in under 5 seconds. There's another to kill monstrosities only with the Psyker's brain burst ability, which is just silly.
  
• The game is clearly unfinished. There are literally buttons with the text "Coming soon" on them.
  
• The game was released just before Christmas for obvious reasons, resulting in a long period of zero contact while everyone was playing Darktide and the dev team was on vacation over the Christmas & New Year break.

Overall, I think it's a very good game and very replayable. Readers ought to understand that a large number of the negative reviews are protest reviews and the players posting many of these probably do actually like the game quite a lot, they just hit hard by the zero-contact vacation period and its effect on the available content. Their progress is also grinding up against the incomplete crafting system. If people were reviewing with how they've actually felt playing the game, its rating would probably be positive.

That's all I've got off the top of my head. Hope someone finds it helpful.

Running around looking for nails is so boring, and nail crafting is expensive.
Fishing is just sitting there waiting to push a button.
Mining is also just running around searching.
Malnourished? Better find some kelp. Too bad you already ate it all.
You can't close an empty chat box by hitting enter again.
Various keys trigger the console even though you're just trying to chat.
Sometimes you'll throw an item for a teammate and it will just vanish.
Sometimes your boxes will appear to have just emptied for no reason, only to refill again seconds later after causing some panic.
Infection comes easily and makes no sense.
Building is very janky and you can do some very weird things with it.
Dev is too busy adding vehicles to fix any of the jank.
Animals can and will warp up sheer cliffs to get to you.
Human animations and meshes are extremely low quality.
Your shadow is delayed relative to your actions.
Floors can vanish under things and the things will not fall.
Visually, foundations appear to care little for where the ground is.
Mouse sensitivity seems to change randomly. No idea what's causing that.
The checkboxes in the menu are inverted relative to how they should be.

The game is like a student project that somehow became popular. It has been out far longer than required to fix these issues. Save your money. Go play another survival building game.

• Best cooperative gameplay since you died 3,4724,980 times playing Battletoads on SNES with your brother.
  
• You can dance and drink. You can dance and drink simultaneously! 🍻
  
• Mining feels good. It feels right. It feels solid. 🍆⛏
  
• Cosmetics are super happy fun times for all and definitely something to keep you playing. 💈⛑
  
• Actually challenging unless you crank that difficulty but hey then you only have yourself to blame! 🙃
  
• Boss fights = Fun. 👿
  
• Huge amount of variety in levels (Biomes, really) and enemies. 😁
  
• Multiple progression paths: Perks, player level, class level, cosmetics, item upgrades. There's so much to do. 🤩
  
• Soundtrack is actually good and contextually appropriate. 🎶
  
• Running into events and bonus loot is a joyous experience! 🏰
  
• Dwarves? Dwarfs? Dorfs? Anyway, they speak funny and mek joek. 😄

• Occasionally the controls aren't so smooth. You go to use your pick-axe, but you can't. You try to shoot, but you can't. KINDA ANNOYING. I thought it was my laptop with some kind of key rollover issue but I get it occasionally on my desktop computer too. � 
  
• There are clear dominant strategies with regard to perks and weapons. A lot of the perks are a bit crap, and usually the unlocked weapons are clear upgrades over the original weapons. 🤷‍♂️
  
• Nobody uses voice chat in public games. 😢
  
• Sometimes the level geometry is just impossible for some classes to navigate, and sometimes you run into huge areas that only end up being red herrings insofar as your objective is concerned. You feel a bit misled after spending half an hour in such a massive space when you finally leave that expanse behind and find a tiny tunnel that progresses your mission. 😑
  
• ....... 🤔

10/10 would kill a Crassus again. 💰🤑💰

Slain is absolutely a hidden gem, with brutal levels and challenging souls-like combat. It's definitely worth the cost. More people should play it!

The only con I can think of is that it's a bit short.

I thought this might be one of those relaxing games, but there's no way to pause! What if you want to check what that Discord alert was? An annoying game, if anything..

play it u crumpet

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

👍

Yet Another Battle Royale game, this time unfortunately coming right at you just like Yet Another Shockjock Punchline from the boring people at Cynaide and Happiness, adding one more shovel to the definitely moist heap that you think might be just a little warm to the touch but you're not quite sure if it qualifies, of beige muck hoping to scrape some more cash out of the bottom of that poor, sorry, downtrodden barrel.

It's laggy, generic, the gunplay is boring, and it's terribly laggy.

It's isometric though, which is the first I've seen for the genre, and the menu looks nice (unlike the game itself). Too bad whenever you go to the keybindings menu you'll have to Alt+F4 because the UI completely vanishes. Guess you'll need AutoHotKey if you don't want to reach over and hit 7, 8, 9, and 0 to activate one of your items while trying to fight another player's manifestation of arcane lag-wizardry.

Give it a miss.

can't stop won't stop