TL;DR
Moving from A to B on a map while dodging, blocking, hitting, and shooting everything in your way. The 'Tide gameplay loop and soundtrack never get old. It’s more ranged-focused than the Vermintide games, yet more melee-focused than Left 4 Dead. Let down by inconsistent performance, half-baked game modes, limited cosmetics, and a desperate need for more maps in the core mode.
Player Context
Coming from nearly 2,000 hours across both Vermintide games, the muscle memory was already there, but Darktide shifts the formula. Vermintide was at core melee-focused, with limited ammunition reserved for specials while you carved through chaff up close. Darktide leans much more heavily into gunplay. Almost a 50/50 split. It’s faster, more frantic, and constantly pushes you forwards. You’re almost always dodging, sliding, and charging into the next map set piece.
Combat
The gameplay itself isn’t especially varied, but the shooting, melee combat, and movement all feel excellent. You and three teammates fight through missions, dealing with hordes and specialist enemies, scavenging ammo and health, reviving each other, and pushing through objectives. Enemies explode, are decapitated, sliced apart, burned alive, thrown into bottomless pits, or riddled with bullets. Every weapon feels satisfying to use, and even better to hear. The four core classes offer distinct playstyles through abilities, talent trees, stats, and weapon choices. Instead of Vermintide’s named heroes, you create your own Reject by choosing background, appearance, voice, height, tattoos, and more. It should give more ownership over your character, but face and hairstyle options are limited, so you often run into near-identical characters. Most armour hides tattoos anyway. Free cosmetics earned through challenges or currency are generally good, but the premium shop rotates stock purely to create FOMO. Some outfits clip badly, while others are barely distinguishable from existing sets. As of writing, neither the Hive Scum nor Arbites classes have received any new cosmetics since release.
Reaching level 30 with each class doesn’t take long, but upgrading your armoury can feel like a grind. New players are heavily limited by crafting resources needed for weapon upgrades and blessing management. Weapon balance is in a good place overall. Some options are clearly stronger, but almost everything is viable on high difficulties with the right build. You don’t need to chase the meta—if a weapon feels good, it’ll work.
The enemy armour system was one of the more intimidating mechanics early on when I started. Instead of a simple light/heavy setup, enemies have different armour types, and sometimes across different body parts. A charged Voidstrike Staff shot might do great damage against a carapace wearing Crusher, but feel weak against a shirtless Mutant, who has a completely different armour profile from similarly near-nude enemies like Infested or Poxbursters. Expect to spend time in the Testing Grounds to figure this out.
Maps
The maps are gorgeous and do an excellent job of showing life inside the Tertium Hive. Like Left 4 Dead and Vermintide, the AI Director keeps repeat runs fresh by varying spawns and encounters. They’re really fantastic maps, I just wish there were more of them!
Since release, Fatshark has added a few new maps, but recent updates have focused more on additional game modes. Auric and Havoc provide harder versions of existing missions, while Mortis Trials and Expeditions offer new ways to play. If you’ve played Vermintide 2’s Chaos Wastes, these modes feel like someone split its best ideas in half. Mortis Trials is a wave survival mode where you fight through nine increasingly difficult rounds, choosing boons after each wave to create ridiculous builds. It’s fun, but limited by only three maps, and it lacks the journey and exploration that made Chaos Wastes so good. Expeditions are extraction runs outside the Hive City. You explore semi-randomised maps, gather Tech-Remnants, and extract when you choose. Leave early for modest rewards, or push further for more. Despite randomisation, runs start to feel very similar, and the mode would benefit heavily from Mortis-style modifiers.
Performance & Networking
Matchmaking in the UK has been solid for core missions at all difficulties. However, Mortis Trials and Expeditions have noticeably longer queues, which raises questions about their long-term population. Performance and optimisation still need work. Lowering settings makes surprisingly little difference to visuals or FPS. On my system, the game on Windows 11 delivers a fairly stable 80–90 FPS, while Linux sits in the high 70s, both with poor 1% lows. For Linux players on Nvidia GPUs, ray tracing is currently broken and can cause crashes. Ray tracing works fine on Windows, but isn’t worth the performance hit imo.
Music
I left the second best part for last: the music and sound design. Do yourself a favour, listen to Imperial Advance, Light of the Imperium, and Disposal Unit (Imperium Mix) on YouTube — you’ll hear them constantly in-game, and they never get old. Jesper Kyd’s soundtrack is excellent throughout. Weapons sound heavy and dangerous, melee hits land with real weight, and every elite or specialist enemy has distinct audio cues that cut through even the chaos of hordes. The audio design does a huge amount of work in making combat readable and intense.
Conclusion
Darktide is a frustratingly brilliant game. At its core I do feel it has one of the best first-person combat systems ever made. The blend of melee and ranged combat, the weight of every weapon, the movement, and the soundtrack all keep me coming back. It falls short due to poor performance, too few maps, underwhelming cosmetic support, and new modes that do not reach the heights of Vermintide 2’s wonderful Chaos Wastes.
And I keep coming back. Few games make moment-to-moment combat feel this good.
If you enjoy any two of the following: Left 4 Dead, Vermintide, or just the Warhammer 40,000 setting, you’ll very probably enjoy Darktide.
