Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (PS5)

Aboard the Mourningstar, your life holds little value. To call you a cog in the machine of the God-Emperor of Mankind’s forces would imply you had greater importance than you truly do. You are a Reject, a prisoner conscript being thrown into battle against the heretics and other nuisances in the enormous Hive City of Tertium, and were you to perish, your superiors would probably mourn the loss of whatever weapons you left with more than you. Luckily for you, despite this grim situation, you are a fairly capable killer, so when you and a small band of other Rejects are thrown into the first-person shooter action of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, you won’t end up splattered by the first group of club swinging maniacs you come across.

 

Set in the fairly bleak but intricately realized future of Warhammer 40K, Darktide doesn’t seem too concerned with trying to help players unfamiliar with its setting get up to speed. In some ways this fits a bit with the story premise surrounding your customized playable character. The universe spanning empire called the Imperium is trying to oust a heretic rebellion in a city known for its high quality steel, the rebellion fueled in part by supernatural forces associated with a corruptive force called Chaos. In particular, a former Imperium soldier named Captain Wolfer has broken out of a prison ship in the game’s opening to lead the rebellion forces while you just so happen to be roped into fighting against your fellow freed prisoner. While you get to customize a backstory for your character mostly for flavor purposes, you remain a prisoner of the Imperium sent out to quash the rebellion’s activities in the many forms that takes, the game’s story throwing a lot of terminology and concepts at you in passing but not slowing down to explain them or acclimate you to them well. This is because a good deal of it is somewhat irrelevant, story missions are just more structured and consistent tasks than the randomized ones that swap out frequently and you’re not working towards a big change so much as fighting a nearly unending battle for control. You’ll get to enjoy the trappings of a well realized universe with some of the lack of understanding you might expect of a prisoner who didn’t live a life where knowledge of what a Technomagus is or who Nurgle is would come up. It does mean what small efforts at story-telling do crop up can struggle to latch on though, a background din of information formed since a strong narrative or the player’s comprehension are not at the forefront of the game’s priorities.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is, however, mostly concerned with providing an exciting and often challenging first-person shooter for up to four players to tackle missions together, with AI companions filling any gaps in the group as needed. When attempting a mission, you get to bring in two weapons with you that you’ll stick with until it’s over, and in a somewhat telling choice, the game designates your melee option as your primary weapon. This is because whether you’re exploring places like the black market district called the Carnival, the frozen machinery of the Tertium’s inner workings, or the bright sandy outside spaces on its edges, one thing you can count on is frequent run-ins with hordes of nearly mindless men who will charge you looking to smash you apart with clubs, blades, or even their bare hands if that’s all they have. Your melee weapon, whether it’s a cleaver, hammer, club, shovel, or even a sword or axe with a chainsaw blade built in, is going to prove pretty efficient at smashing the regular rabble to bloody bits, and if you want to actually survive a mission, using the melee weapon liberally is key to not running out of ammunition for your “secondary” firearms. While the hordes can be reduced to bloody chunks with wild weapon swinging, there are a good deal of more dangerous and lethal special enemies that also appear with some regularity. Snipers, flamers who will coat the nearby area in fire, trappers who will snag you in a net and pull you towards a horde for killing, Poxbursters that detonate should they reach you, mutants who will ram into you to separate you from the group, and massive monsters like the Beast of Nurgle that serve as minibosses are just some of the bigger concerns you’ll face on a mission. Many of these can be quite deadly if not addressed quickly and they can come alongside other special foes that can make for lethal combinations, many even trying to pull your group apart since teamwork is not just a recommendation in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but practically required for survival.

 

One of the main reasons you’ll want to stick with your group beyond enemies like the Trapper that will require rescue if you’re hit is the Toughness system. While your character has a set amount of health that can be depleted or occasionally replenished, Toughness is a protective shield that takes the hits for you until it’s been depleted. Toughness can be recovered after it is lost more easily than health, and while many unlockable abilities or special tools can do so, the easiest way to regain Toughness is just to stay near your allies. The passive Toughness recovery is a smart way of discouraging lone wolf strategies without the stronger enemies always having to whip out tricks that punish isolation, and because the game is already encouraging you to stick together, it can craft those larger hordes with deadlier mixes of enemy types since you should reasonably have four characters who can respond to it at almost all times. How you respond can change quite a bit based on which character class or gun you bring with you to the action. While there are no firearms that are universally available across all the classes, you can pick your gun based on what you think might suit your playstyle or class skills. An autogun is a fairly standard automatic rifle which can chew through hordes if you like, but with the explosive shot of the boltgun or the powerful blast of a shotgun, you get high-powered attacks that can often kill even special enemies in just a shot or two at the cost of slow fire and low ammo. Laser firing lasguns and laspistols, grenade launchers, even a fairly standard pistol can all be good choices depending on what you want out of a weapon because melee is often consistently useful and only certain foes are going to attack from long range, your weapon preferences easier to embrace without feeling like you’re hampering yourself or ending up a weak link in the team because most every gun can do something strong enough to justify its choice.

 

For classes, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide comes with four default ones to pick from as well as a few downloadable ones available for purchase. As part of the initial lineup, the Veteran is a fairly straightforward sort, a gunner with grenades whose abilities often relate to using firearms or assisting the party with things like revives or toughness boosts. Zealots are melee combatants with a good deal of support options as well, although the gigantic Ogryn is often the best to put up front as they are great for slashing away hordes and weathering the violent attention without perishing easily. Psykers get a wide range of psychic powers like firing homing crystal shards or popping brains from afar, but with the caveat their own brain can get overwhelmed if they lean on their special powers too much. The different classes can go down different upgrades paths as you level up though and choose which abilities you’d like to nurture, and even if you don’t buy the DLC yourself, you might pair up with a dual-wielding Hive Scum or the Arbite whose attack dog can sometimes pick off a strong foe on their own. You can make multiple characters, although they’d all need to level up individually, and if you do stick with one character and play with a consistent group, you can find the voice lines repeat rather quickly and surprisingly often. However, there are clear reasons to prefer different classes and they also get unique tools like the Psykers who can get Force Staffs for attacks that almost feel like magic or the Ogryn who can whip out something close to a chaingun.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide does try to encourage sticking to what works though, sometimes in ways that discourage experimentation. While you are free to retool your ability point spending whenever so you can try out new skills, weapons are all individually leveled up as well, and investing in one can give you a lot of passive helpful boosts like scaling damage, extra effects like applying bleed, or ways to boost your toughness mid-fight. There is a good amount of randomness in what kind of weapons you’ll be rewarded as you play and the money you earn from missions is slow to acquire. You might be tempted by a new weapon at the store but you’re left uncertain how it plays, and taking the risk and buying it might lock you out of other useful purchases. Cosmetics are also bought with the same currency and can be quite expensive so they can inhibit your willingness to explore other options if you want to just change out of your ratty prisoner rags. A lot of acquisitions are meant to be long-term rewards and some items like equippable Curios can give such small situational bonuses that earning them can feel underwhelming.

 

When it comes to missions themselves though, randomization and efforts to add some variety and mix-ups can swing back and forth. There are some things set in stone when you head out to an area, areas usually having specific objective points that can serve as a source of intense focused action for a bit. You might need to repeatedly play small simple minigames to keep a device running, necessitating the protection of one busy player by their allies. You might need to hunt around an area for objects to scan or infestations of Chaos to clear out that keep you moving around one location for a while. Sometimes you carry a fuel cell to a designated spot, meaning you can’t attack while in transit. These moments often let the game throw huge waves of foes at you while giving you work compared to quieter moments of exploration that suddenly get interrupted when you run into heretics or spot some foes up ahead unaware you’re approaching, downtime usually not too much of a problem since there are moments to regroup and look for ammo pick-ups or other useful items before more action kicks back off.

 

However, since there are bits of randomization, you might attempt a mission and have a surprise encounter with the very rare Deamonhost enemy… and then never see them elsewhere for a long while and just keep running into the usual special enemy types. There are some more structured and reliable encounters in the story missions, including proper boss fights and more high concept missions like trying to stop a train you’re riding in time or pushing through a somewhat linear trench-filled warzone, but other times you will end up in a familiar part of Tertium with not much of a strong concept to set it apart from the last visit. The game can still be challenging despite that, and death isn’t necessarily a failure if your allies can either get you back up quickly or later find you being held captive so you don’t just sit out the rest of the sometimes fairly lengthy missions. Because there is an emphasis on reshuffling variables and content to keep this live-service shooter running for a long time though, you will find some moments less exciting because they don’t have clear intentional design choices to guide the flow of the action.

THE VERDICT: Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a co-op shooter that does a good job incentivizing sticking together, from objective formats and the Toughness shield mechanic to enemies specifically meant to prey on players who split away. The player classes give a good range of options for how you fit into the team dynamic as well, with different abilities and guns having their place so you don’t feel forced into choices save for how weapon loyalty is rewarded with upgrades. Some of the story details are likely to whizz past you since the game doesn’t tell its tale well and the randomization meant to give the game longevity can sometimes instead lead to a mission missing some spice due to a poor bit of luck, but generally you’ll get frequent intense action as you’re rushed by hordes or fighting back special foes that can make up for there being a focus on replayability over curating missions with strong directions.

 

And so, I give Warhammer 40,000: Darktide for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. While Warhammer 40,000: Darktide does have campaign missions, they were added in a later update as the game was originally focused much more on the replayable randomized mission format. Some of the impact of that direction is what gives the game many of its more uneven elements. While it is nice to have the potential for surprise encounters like the Daemonhost appearing in a mission despite your last attempt at it having nothing to worry about in that area, it also means there are essentially less exciting or challenging variants to run into as well. Most levels still have those objective points that can better ensure some excitement, the areas often serving well as a hub for intense action, and periodic encounters on the way to those big moments can still be a decent bit of fun even if they’re not bringing as much heat. You’re kept active and left to manage your ammo which can lead to moments of squeeze that keep the challenge around, and at least there are options for different mission formats like the Mortis Trials where you survive waves of foes in one areas and get upgrades per round or the Expedition mode’s large open area where you collect resources and can spend those on useful items before attempting the next portion. The gameplay fundamentals are strong and sound, enemy groups built well to encourage both melee action and gunplay with abilities and weapon choices having meaningful impacts. The slow growth is certainly a side effect of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide wanting to be a game you come back to for tens of hours rather than playing through the more structured content once, but it shuffling things around the way it does at least means revisiting maps or running into the same batches of enemies isn’t going to grow repetitive as quickly as it could have. No Man’s Land, the trench level mentioned earlier, shows what some strong direction can add to the experience, so perhaps it’s just a matter of getting more content of that nature in the mix so you can end up with a better jumble of gameplay types to keep things more consistently varied.

 

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide got down the gameplay feel very well, the actual action once it kicks off able to apply pressure to even a capable group of four players. Excitement isn’t a rarity for that reason and you can feel like a meaningfully unique member of the team thanks to whatever choices you make as you grow, but its focus on being an ongoing multiplayer title also means some bits of aren’t as clean as they could have been. The story doesn’t want to rattle things too much to avoid disrupting the focus on providing constant missions for long term replayability and you can only have so many variables to swap around that can lead to highs or lows based on their presence when making something you’re meant to play again and again. Thankfully, while that may keep the game from being a phenomenal co-op shooter, it does work well enough for its intended format and can give you plenty of hours of entertaining action before you start feeling some repetition sink in. For a job that is meant to be hopeless grunt work per the story’s framing, it can actually be a good bit of fun to be a prisoner callously sent to carve through hundreds of heretics or not come back at all.