Warhammer is usually experienced from far above. Whether in the guise of its orcs and elves Fantasy incarnation, or orks and Aeldari 40,000 (40K) incarnation, Games Workshop’s universe of eternal war has always been about floating on high as a god, ordering units of troops to charge into bloody and highly chancy turn-based battle. After all, Warhammer always was, and still is, primarily a tabletop wargame. So when a licensed videogame comes along and moves the viewpoint into its worlds to one of the rank and file, it can feel transformative.
We’re running through a factory deep within the hive of Atoma Prime, a dystopian city of nine billion souls. Around us, hulking Leman Russ tanks are under construction. Ahead of us is a cooling system that’s rigged to blow. And between is a horde of cultists, traitor guardsmen, and worse. They clamber over railings and storm through doorways. They take positions on gangways high above, and, as a Chaos Hound howls, they gather for an assault from behind. Warhammer 40,000’s fabled setting comes into full focus when it’s pressed up against your face in firstperson. A toughnessthree, one-wound cultist becomes a close and present threat instead of feeble battlefield chaff that’s blown off the table in the Ultramarines’ first shooting phase. In Darktide, it leers and taunts, showing off every lesion and mark it suffers as a servant of Chaos. From the hive’s steaming hallways and cramped living quarters to its cavernous factoria and interior superstructures, this game sets out to express the on-the-ground experience of grimdark.
Darktide is Swedish developer Fatshark’s followup to its Vermintide series, a pair of firstperson co-op games that took Left 4 Dead’s Director-driven horde action and translated it to melee combat against Warhammer Fantasy’s swarming Skaven rat-men and lunking armoured Chaos Marauders. You and your party of four doughty warriors cut your way through levels which tour a collapsing medieval city, corpse-strewn cornfields and vast underground caverns, every sword slash and hammerblow decapitating and eviscerating foes, resolving the heroics that exists in your head as you roll dice and move miniatures.
promises to build on all of this, with a couple of its biggest additions being a far greater emphasis on shooting, as befitting a game basedgames you play as one of a set prebuilt heroes, each with their own backstory and appearance, in you’ll be playing your own, born in a character creator. And they’ll be far less of a hero. begins with your character having been recruited from a prison ship into the service of an Inquisitor. You are the lowest of the low, cannon fodder for the defence of the Imperium, and the game hangs your progression over its hours of mission-running on proving yourself worthy of being raised up the ranks of the Inquisitor’s retinue.
