Recent reviews by Sowoviet Uwunion

Edit (9 October 2023): Game is fine now. Not *great*, but just enough to push it into Recommended territory. For posterity, former Not Recommended review from 13 December 2022:

This is an incredibly polarised review. I strongly, *strongly* recommend DarkTide to hardcore 40k fans. Especially Astra Militarum players. This is a must-play for imperial guardsmen.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend the game in its current state to anyone else.

The good: I've played a lot of 40k video games, including the greatest hits like the Dawn of Wars, the Chaos Gates, Mechanicus, and Space Marine. It might be recency bias, but I'm confident that *nothing* channels the 40k atmosphere like DarkTide does. The visual design, sound design, writing: everything aesthetic 100% nails 40k. This isn't heroic space fantasy like some of the Space Marine-centric games fall into — this is as grimdark as it gets. Its as if you're a single grunt from Dawn of War 1. The horror of both the Imperium and Chaos is transmitted perfectly (with the undercurrent of dark humour that permeates 40k, of course).

Gameplay-wise, most weapons feel authentically 40k and they are *amazing.* The lasguns aren't meme-flashlights, the bolters are small cannons, the chain-swords have weight and heft as they saw through mobs. All this means that the minute-to-minute gameplay is immensely satisfying.

So why can't I wholly recommend the game, despite my rapidly increasing hours-played count?

I had a great experience during the beta and was fully expecting version 1.0 to be great. But, despite what release day having come and gone, this game is still very much a beta. Far from improving things, full release utterly broke the game for many players. For one, my PC is far above the minimum requirements, but I'm getting 15 FPS at some points on the lowest possible settings. I'm fairly certain my GPU isn't even being detected properly.

That's not even mentioning the broken promises the devs have made, like having weapons customisable with attachments and having all currencies earnable through play. Broken promises aside, many promises have been delayed, with crafting not fully implemented and the weapons count not being what they promised yet. What most of this means is that there is zero endgame — grind a character to level 30 and all that's left to do is achievement-hunt.

This will sting the most for Vermintide players. Beyond the core combat loop, massive steps down have been taken since Vermintide 2. To name a few, there are only four classes in DarkTide while Vermintide 2 launched with fifteen, missions are randomly drawn, and the hub area has zero interactibility. This isn't even getting into how much more manipulative they've made the microtransactions.

I'm willing to suffer these things to drink in the atmosphere, and I think many hardcore 40k fans would be too. But if you're here to play a great video game: this isn't that [yet].

In sum: huge props to the creative teams — they clearly understand the world of Warhammer 40,000 like only the best Black Library authors do (which makes sense, since Dan Abnett is one of the writers). Jesper Kyd's soundtrack probably beats Mechanicus as the premier suite of 40k music as well. I have confidence that once all the issues are worked out months and years down the line, this will probably be the greatest 40k game in existence. It just very, very much is *not* at the moment.

A worthy successor to 90s CRPGs.

Still best space strategy around.

Clementine will remember that.

Stanley.

Does not mix well with schoolwork.

Created Fascist Canada.
∞/10

1st Try-Killed by sentient darkness (5 mins)
2nd Try-Killed by eyeball with legs (10 mins)
3rd Try-Died of starvation (ironically) (30 mins)
4th Try-Killed by evil tree (15 mins)
5th Try-Killed by sentient pig (20 mins)
6th Try-Killed by Screecher (awesome free mod) (10 mins)
7th Try-Not dead yet! (1 hour)

Civ V isn't better than Civ IV, but it isn't worse; its just different. I miss Mao Zedong though.