Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Is the Shooter 40k Deserves

ign.com:

We don’t get big-budget Warhammer 40,000 games all that regularly. And when we do, they’re rarely action-packed shooters. That already makes the upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, from Vermintide developer Fatshark, a rarity. But, based on the 30-minute, four-player co-op session I played at Gamescom 2022, I think Darktide may be the rarest of rares: a genuinely good 40k FPS.

Anyone who loves Games Workshop’s grimdark future will know that it’s the specific details that make the setting what it is. A lasrifle, for instance, is not the pew-pew E-11 blaster that the Stormtroopers of Star Wars use. It shares more in common with the infantry rifles of World War 1 than it does a sci-fi laser weapon, and Fatshark has captured its character perfectly. It jolts in the hand with each blast, the laser scorching the air around it as it travels. Pulling the magazine from the gun causes sparks to erupt, a nod to it being a cheap, mass-produced killing machine.

All the equipment I used in the demonstration had this attention to detail. The hacking device, used as part of a choke-point defence objective that anyone who’s played a Left 4 Dead-alike will recognise, was a servo skull (a computer that’s literally made from the head of a former servant of mankind). As I defended that skull from waves of oncoming enemies I occasionally had to recalibrate it via a mini-game played on an Auspex scanner. Its green-glowing screen displayed lines of symbols that Warhammer fans will have seen printed on many a Codex and transfer sheet.

The first-person perspective of Darktide means all these recreations of 40k lore items feel much more detailed and immediate than they would in a tactics or strategy game, the setting’s typical genre. It’s