Enjoyable visceral combat that takes advantage of 40K weaponry in well crafted environments with great music. Just needs to fix technical problems and add what feels like or is some missing content.
Takes the four player FPS action of the Warhammer Vermintide titles to the 40K setting. Former prisoners attempting to prove their loyalty fight a Nurgle cult uprising in the hive city Tertium. Instead of having a set character with one type of lines and voice, as in Vermintide, you create a character with each of the four having three personality type options with each having a different voice actor, set of lines, and conversations when matched with other classes and personalities.
You can choose between four character types to play as with a Veteran that focuses more on ranged combat, a Psyker with a variety of staff weapons that grant more magic like attacks and an ability to explode the heads of enemies to build charges that make them more powerful, a large Ogryn with high stagger attacks and a high health pool, and a Zealot with a bonus to melee attack speed and critical melee hits. The class types not being set characters also means that each game can have multiple versions of the same class, no one is forced to play anything that they might not want to play as. Each has their own unique weapon options and feel to them, combat is fun and visceral with a lot of the more unique 40K weapons like the power sword and boltgun easily cutting enemies in half or blowing them into bits. There are different versions of many of the weapons and guns that can influence their attack patterns, damage and fire rates, or what the assigned areas that weapon can have different bonuses are. This is nice to have as if you like a type of axe but want a weapon more focused on single or multiple target damage you can find that with the different versions.
The music is a strong point and the environments look great and you find yourself in varied parts of the city. The level design itself feels like an improvement by offering many sections that have different paths to the same areas that you need to get to. The sound and level design and enemy types being less focused around instantly grabbing a character in no escape damaging hold when compared to games like Vermintide, Left 4 Dead, or Back 4 Blood means that you can more easily split up if you were searching for supplies, secondary objectives, or wanting to get a more ranged focused character to a better and safer vantage, although characters do get bonuses when they remain in closer proximity.
It both is unfinished in some areas and feels a bit unfinished in others compared to Vermintide. For what is missing, they have just added the private game options for teams of 2-4 players, solo games still have not been added, they just added more to the weapon customizing/crafting area but some of those features are still missing, the number of stages feels a bit limited and it does make it worse that in some stages you are passing through areas from other levels as you go in a different route. There is currently no cross play between PC and console players which also means that there is no way for PC game pass players to play with people that own the game on Steam.
For what feels like content missing is that there is basically no story in the game, the number of conversations seem very limited between character types, most of the options in character creation have no effect on anything. When it comes to characters there are only four character types and while you can pick different traits as you level up for some minor customization each class type is more focused on one thing with one set of passive and active abilities whereas even when Vermintide 2 launched each of the five characters had three different class types they can play with different abilities. The lack of a fifth character, allowance of creating five characters, and frequent mentions of ratlings does seem like adding a ratling type with their own long ranged scoped weaponry has a good chance of happening. Some of the weapons have good alt fire abilities, usually giving high stagger or many of the Ogryns guns allowing you to turn them into highly effective melee weapons, the shotgun is great with a fast shooting main shot, powerful rifle style shot when you aim, and an alt fire that loads a round that does more stagger damage but many of the other weapons bash or bayonet options are slow and weak and often refuse to allow you to cancel a reload animation and they might as well not be in the game at all. It's unfortunate when I'm thinking that I'd rather just have the flashlight that is on some guns instead of alternate attack options. Your created characters are unable to share inventory, money, or crafting materials which does make swapping between characters more of a hassle and the harder to obtain the special currency that requires completing weekly challenges, this is especially tedious if you are trying to go back and forth between playing multiple character.
There is no reason to have as much RNG as the game does. With the new feature adding to crafting you reroll one of the benefits given to a weapon and at one point can do it without any cost or resource use, at that point it might as well just allow you to pick. You are getting random gear as mission rewards, random gear in the challenge point vendor every 24 hours, random gear every hour at the armory. Worse, you aren't just trying to get a higher power rating weapon anymore or even ones with the right added enhancements but each weapon also has areas that further customize them by adding percentages to different areas like damage/cleave/reload speed/first hit/finesse/resistance/etc and you are trying to get those values assigned higher to areas you deem to be more beneficial.
I have experienced frequent crashes since the game has launched. They haven't been a big deal, most of the time, as they almost always happen as soon as a match starts and there is an option to reconnect which would make getting back into a private game easier. This has happened less since the previous patch but is still frequent. I've had the game drop to about 10FPS for long periods of time but that only has happened in three out of over 100 missions played.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1604141576305139712
Takes the four player FPS action of the Warhammer Vermintide titles to the 40K setting. Former prisoners attempting to prove their loyalty fight a Nurgle cult uprising in the hive city Tertium. Instead of having a set character with one type of lines and voice, as in Vermintide, you create a character with each of the four having three personality type options with each having a different voice actor, set of lines, and conversations when matched with other classes and personalities.
You can choose between four character types to play as with a Veteran that focuses more on ranged combat, a Psyker with a variety of staff weapons that grant more magic like attacks and an ability to explode the heads of enemies to build charges that make them more powerful, a large Ogryn with high stagger attacks and a high health pool, and a Zealot with a bonus to melee attack speed and critical melee hits. The class types not being set characters also means that each game can have multiple versions of the same class, no one is forced to play anything that they might not want to play as. Each has their own unique weapon options and feel to them, combat is fun and visceral with a lot of the more unique 40K weapons like the power sword and boltgun easily cutting enemies in half or blowing them into bits. There are different versions of many of the weapons and guns that can influence their attack patterns, damage and fire rates, or what the assigned areas that weapon can have different bonuses are. This is nice to have as if you like a type of axe but want a weapon more focused on single or multiple target damage you can find that with the different versions.
The music is a strong point and the environments look great and you find yourself in varied parts of the city. The level design itself feels like an improvement by offering many sections that have different paths to the same areas that you need to get to. The sound and level design and enemy types being less focused around instantly grabbing a character in no escape damaging hold when compared to games like Vermintide, Left 4 Dead, or Back 4 Blood means that you can more easily split up if you were searching for supplies, secondary objectives, or wanting to get a more ranged focused character to a better and safer vantage, although characters do get bonuses when they remain in closer proximity.
It both is unfinished in some areas and feels a bit unfinished in others compared to Vermintide. For what is missing, they have just added the private game options for teams of 2-4 players, solo games still have not been added, they just added more to the weapon customizing/crafting area but some of those features are still missing, the number of stages feels a bit limited and it does make it worse that in some stages you are passing through areas from other levels as you go in a different route. There is currently no cross play between PC and console players which also means that there is no way for PC game pass players to play with people that own the game on Steam.
For what feels like content missing is that there is basically no story in the game, the number of conversations seem very limited between character types, most of the options in character creation have no effect on anything. When it comes to characters there are only four character types and while you can pick different traits as you level up for some minor customization each class type is more focused on one thing with one set of passive and active abilities whereas even when Vermintide 2 launched each of the five characters had three different class types they can play with different abilities. The lack of a fifth character, allowance of creating five characters, and frequent mentions of ratlings does seem like adding a ratling type with their own long ranged scoped weaponry has a good chance of happening. Some of the weapons have good alt fire abilities, usually giving high stagger or many of the Ogryns guns allowing you to turn them into highly effective melee weapons, the shotgun is great with a fast shooting main shot, powerful rifle style shot when you aim, and an alt fire that loads a round that does more stagger damage but many of the other weapons bash or bayonet options are slow and weak and often refuse to allow you to cancel a reload animation and they might as well not be in the game at all. It's unfortunate when I'm thinking that I'd rather just have the flashlight that is on some guns instead of alternate attack options. Your created characters are unable to share inventory, money, or crafting materials which does make swapping between characters more of a hassle and the harder to obtain the special currency that requires completing weekly challenges, this is especially tedious if you are trying to go back and forth between playing multiple character.
There is no reason to have as much RNG as the game does. With the new feature adding to crafting you reroll one of the benefits given to a weapon and at one point can do it without any cost or resource use, at that point it might as well just allow you to pick. You are getting random gear as mission rewards, random gear in the challenge point vendor every 24 hours, random gear every hour at the armory. Worse, you aren't just trying to get a higher power rating weapon anymore or even ones with the right added enhancements but each weapon also has areas that further customize them by adding percentages to different areas like damage/cleave/reload speed/first hit/finesse/resistance/etc and you are trying to get those values assigned higher to areas you deem to be more beneficial.
I have experienced frequent crashes since the game has launched. They haven't been a big deal, most of the time, as they almost always happen as soon as a match starts and there is an option to reconnect which would make getting back into a private game easier. This has happened less since the previous patch but is still frequent. I've had the game drop to about 10FPS for long periods of time but that only has happened in three out of over 100 missions played.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1604141576305139712