![]() ![]() Blood and limbs fly everywhere when you switch to melee damage, and there’re few more cathartic squad shooters.īetween missions you can wander the prison complex unarmed, spending credits earned in you forays to prepare for the next excursion. Special abilities, grenades and the ability to carry and drop ammo refills or medical aid further forces the aspect of teamwork, and when the game really ramps up – usually when you’re carrying out one of the multiple objectives – it’s frenetic and deeply satisfying. But as atmospherics go, it’s superb, with your quartet of nutters sprouting one-liners at one another with barely-constrained hatred. If it’s not caked in grime it’s probably on fire. The environments are what you’d expect from Warhammer 40,000: it’s all rust and chrome and blinking LEDs, skulls on fucking everything and engine oil smear everywhere. When it picked up and allowed me to enjoy it, the gameplay was intoxicating. Even after updating drivers and dropping the graphical settings to lowest, it chugged painfully with a framerate that came close to single figures at times. Unfortunately, the beta was far from optimised and even on low settings, I struggled to run it on a PC that comfortably runs the likes of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Cyberpunk 2077 and Ghostwire Tokyo on high settings. This encourages you to stay close to one another, and protect each other. While you can restore health through various means in each stage, toughness is returned b y killing enemies and “coherence”, which means staying near to your allies. You have a health meter and a toughness meter which acts like armour. In fact, Darktide does more than any of its genre-mates to keep you working together. From a brute that charges you and send you flying, to a hellhound that pins you down or a huge guy with an energy net, you can’t get out of trouble without an ally close by. They were also super long, with loads of firefights, mini-bosses and,m of course, special enemies. The several I played were multi-phased and juggled objectives around in blocks. You’ll level up, earn new weapons and armour, and unlock new abilities as you go, but you’ll always be an expendable prisoner either way. This being the 40k universe, you can’t just live out your sentence doing push-ups in the yard and must instead run dangerous excursions into hostile territory. The story, such as it is, sees you in prison for one of a handful of crimes. It’s an interesting system and one that ensures you get attached to your menace of choice. This backstory determines everything from how they sound to how they interact with one another on missions, dictating their call-outs and cries for help. But beyond that, you also customise your character, and pick their backstory from an extensive set of parameters. You can select from four archetypes: Veteran Sharpshooter, Psyker Psykinetic, Zealot Preacher, and Ogryn Skullbreaker, and each has different abilities, loadouts and stats. You don’t just pick a class here your character is not only persistent, but will develop and grow like it’s an RPG. ![]() One thing Darktide has that the other titles simply don’t is personalisation. On the surface you’d be mistaken for thinking it’s just another Left 4 Dead or Vermintide clone, but peel back that top layer of rusty steel and you’ll see there’s a lot more going on. Thankfully, though, what I was able to play has more than whet my appetite. While the closed beta undoubtedly gives a clear indication of what the game will eventually be, it’s also buggier than a week old bin-bag. Take Fatshark’s Warhammer 40K: Darktide, for example. On the one hand they’re great for showcasing what a game will eventually be, but they’re also a representation of a game still in gestation and therefore, of arguably inferior quality. Closed betas can be a little hit and miss at times.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |