Warhammer 40K: Darktide Preview: Warhammer Meets Left 4 Dead

ign.com:

Warhammer 40K: Darktide is really, actually coming out on September 13, making it one of the few next-gen Xbox exclusives that Series X owners have to look forward to this Fall. As such, it is quite likely to benefit from the extra attention from Xbox gamers starved for fresh content. After playing through one of this Warhammer-meets-Left-4-Dead mashup’s dozen four-player co-op missions, I’m pleased to report that Darktide looks set to be both worthy of that attention and approachable to players both familiar with and new to Warhammer, and/or anyone who’s played Vermintide 2.

The mission I played took 30 minutes to complete and was set in a tank factory, though the developers at Fatshark told me that most of the other missions are set in different areas of the hive, allowing for plenty of environmental variety. The fantasy-kissed steel-mill look served this stage well, though, thanks to impressive texture detail, distinct player character models, and a framerate that held 60 on the PC build I played even as hordes of monsters poured into the combat encounter.

I’m not kidding about distinct character models. Each player is unique; I tend to favor tanks in class-based games, so I felt right at home in the boots of the Ogryn, a hulking brute who literally towered over not just most of the bad guys, but also my fellow heroes as well. He wields a massive combat knife I used to cut down swathes of bad guys. I also used my Ogryn’s sheer bulk to shield my friends from the waves as they rushed us whenever I could, and his special move is a bull-rush whereby he sticks his arm out like a running back stiff-arming his way through a secondary, knocking any enemy in his path aside like a bowling pin. I tended to use this ability as a