Let's Play Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is ridiculously good

I've talked about Warhammer video games before on here, mostly in the context of Gladius, a 40k 4X that I still maintain is one of the best Warhammer games out there. Now, however, it's got competition: since last Yule, the game I've been spending most of my spare time on has been Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

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Some years ago, Swedish developers Fatshark released Vermintide, which was like Left 4 Dead, but with Skaven. They later did a sequel, also with Skaven, and in 2022 they came out with Darktide, which is like Vermintide, but with Nurgle.

In other words, Darktide is an online co-op first-person shooter, where you play as an agent of the Inquisition, doing missions that give you various justifications for fighting huge hordes of Chaos cultists. And it's ridiculously fun.

There are four character classes in the base game: you can be an Ogryn, a psyker, a sharpshooter or a zealot. Since I have a theology degree, my choice was easy. Here's my zealot preacher early in her career, still slumming it in her prison getup:

The zealot is a wonderful character class. It's geared almost entirely for close combat, which mostly means butchering massive numbers of Poxwalkers and cultists. It's unbelievably fun. The zealot special ability is a dash at an enemy, which produces both an automatic mêlée critical and an inspirational Imperial warcry. There's nothing like charging into a blob of cultists screaming "CONFESS YOUR SINS".

Here I am, further along my career, in the Skyranger I mean Valkyrie, departing on a mission with my brother's Ogryn and our friend's sharpshooter. We all love Hadron, our friendly and helpful tech-priest.

There are seven different missions and five different difficulty levels, with all kinds of additional qualifiers thrown in. They're really all quite similar: you and up to three friends or online strangers, supplemented by decently competent bots as necessary, fight your way into a location in the hive city, do something like kill a cultist leader, purge a demonic infestation or whatever, and fight your way out. Some of the locations are quite pretty, and the different level sections are combined and reused intelligently. The 40k vibe in all of them is immaculate.

The most important thing, though, is how viscerally fun the game is. Once the mission gets underway, I get totally absorbed in negotiating whatever tactical challenge we're up against, and I thoroughly enjoy myself. The controls just work, the different character classed complement each other excellently, and the blow-by-blow fighting is unbelievably satisfying. The sound effects are excellent, the voice acting is good, and some of the music is excellent. For a long time now, what I've valued most in a video game is the simple experience of playing it: I'm not really interested in dramatic plots, incredible visuals or groundbreaking design, I just want to have fun playing. Darktide delivers exactly that.

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Of course, everything about Darktide isn't perfect. As I write this, it has a Mixed score on Steam, which, as I understand it, is largely down to some unfortunate miscommunications between the developers and the fans. Clearly some people feel they were promised things that they didn't get. This was all before my time, so there's not a lot more I can say about it.

One particular bone of contention seems to be the paid content. There are several kinds of in-game currency which you can use to buy and upgrade weapons and curios (which give you gameplay bonuses), and buy cosmetics for your weapons and character. The only thing you can spend actual real-life money on are cosmetics. For example, I bought my zealot's respirator for a very small sum of real money.

As someone who spent real money on portrait packs in Crusader Kings, I'm entirely happy with paying for cosmetics in general, and for my respirator specifically. I get that people are unhappy if they feel they've been promised otherwise, but hell, I like the cosmetics shop. You can also get cosmetics by completing in-game achievements called penances. As it happens, my zealot's current getup combines the respirator I bought for real money, a lower body cosmetic bought with in-game money, and an upper-body one earned through a penance.

While I'm okay with the cosmetics system, I have to say I entirely agree with the criticisms of the way weapons and curios are handled.

There are several different kinds of mêlée and shooting weapons, and I recognize basically all of them from 40k, so I have some notion of what they do. What I don't really understand at all is how they relate to each other. Each weapon has several percentage values, and I don't really understand what any of them mean. They also have overall damage values (apparently a very late addition!), but it's not entirely clear to me how much damage each weapon actually does as you use it. They also have various perks and blessings, but it's not necessarily at all obvious what they mean. It's just really difficult to understand if a weapon is good or not, or which of your weapons is better than another.

In practice, you have to try them. I'd ordinarily be okay with this, but it's made impossible by the fact that your main source of new weapons is random drops after missions. I have something like six or more different autoguns, I have no idea which of them is best, and frankly there's no way I'm doing comparison testing.

So frustratingly, you very soon end up with an absolute mess of weapons in your inventory, with more of them to buy in two different in-game shops, and it's very difficult to understand if they're any good. It reminds me of the total chaos that was your inventory in the first Mass Effect, with the key difference that there, it was possible to tell if one component was better than another. Don't even get me started on the item blessings and perks and so on.

None of this is a huge problem, at least for me, but it's annoying, especially when you're getting started. It's not just the weapons, either: there's a general lack of any kind of documentation. For instance, there's a penance that says "kill 10 elite Terrors". My progress bar on it reads 2/3, and I have no idea what an elite Terror is. Would it really have been impossible to explain these things?

Exposition is not a strength of the game in general. Like I said, I actually like the incidental dialogue a lot: I'm especially fond of my posh zealot, who I presume is trying to sprinkle in some High Gothic into her speeches, and it's brilliantly rendered as mock medieval. And how could you not love Hadron calling you a varlet? Unfortunately, none of this has carried over into the plot.

To be specific, the plot consists of a short cutscene every few levels or so. All of them feature one of the NPCs more or less telling your character that they suck, combined with a very underwhelming side plot about a traitor on the ship. It could all have been replaced with the Fast Show Guy Ritchie skit. I don't know why it's even there.

So yeah, Darktide has its shortcomings, but they're all outside the missions themselves. Once you're on the Valkyrie, everything from there on is damn near perfect.

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My miniature hobbying is being driven more and more by my video gaming. As my first Darktide-related purchase, I bought a Beast of Nurgle to join my Chaos Daemons. The Beast is the most memorable of Darktide's monstrosities, and looking at its 9th edition stats, I can only be grateful the Darktide version doesn't regenerate.

I wanted to go for something like halfway between the very dark and menacing Darktide look and the goofiness of the traditional tabletop Beast. I started with a base coat of Flat Brown and drybrushed some Camo Olive Green. As a sort of callback to the yellow-orange weak spot on the Darktide Beast's back, I painted the head-tentacles in Orange Red.

The tentacles were finished with Fluorescent Orange, and the body got another drybrush of Green Sky. I did the pustules and tongue in Light Green and Fluorescent Green.

I used some modeling putty on the base to create the slime trail, which is Bright Orange and Fluorescent Orange.

Here they are in daylight, the chungus.

I enjoyed painting my first Nurgle daemon, and it's giving me all kinds of ideas for more...

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So, I think Darktide is an amazing game. I hope Fatshark sticks with it and expands it, because there's so much cool stuff that could be added. I'd really like to see a new kind of monstrosity. With all these Nurgle cultists about, it'll be a real shame if we never meet any Plaguebearers, and a Plague Marine would be an awesome boss. I feel like 40k suffers from marines being the "default" army, because it makes them so ordinary. Dropping a single space marine into a game like Darktide would be a really good reminder that they really are not in any way ordinary, and Chaos marines even less so.

On the loyalist side, new character classes could certainly include a machine cultist of some description. One of the classic roles in party-based games that's missing from Darktide is a healer, and a very thematic inquisitorial character would be a Death Cult Assassin. I could also see an opening for a heavy weapon trooper. Also where are the Jokaero?!

So far, though, I've been playing Darktide just about every day in January, and even without any new content, I'm not done yet.