Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Darktide is what happens when a studio nails the hardest part of the job and fumbles everything around it.

Fatshark — the Swedish outfit behind Vermintide and Vermintide 2, the games that proved four-player horde combat could feel like swinging actual steel — took its formula off the fantasy battlefields of the End Times and dropped it into the industrial gut of a 40K hive city. You play a convict. Not a Space Marine, not a hero, not a chosen one. A Reject: some unlucky heretic-adjacent nobody pulled out of a holding cell by an Inquisitorial agent and pointed at a Chaos cult metastasizing through the underhive of Tertium on Atoma Prime. Survive enough missions and you get promoted from disposable to slightly less disposable. That’s the arc.

The market positioning was aggressive and, for a while, disastrous. Darktide arrived on Steam on November 30, 2022 at $39.99 with a live-service structure, a cosmetic store priced like a free-to-play title, and a feature list that was visibly incomplete on day one. Crafting was half-implemented. Private lobbies didn’t exist. Performance on mid-range hardware was rough enough that Fatshark publicly paused its own roadmap in early 2023 to go back and fix the foundations. The Xbox version slipped nearly a year. The PlayStation 5 release came later still.

What happened after that is the actual story. The Unlocked and Loaded overhaul in late 2023 tore out the RNG-gated itemization that had players refreshing a vendor timer like a slot machine, rebuilt the talent system into proper branching skill trees, and let you upgrade any weapon you actually liked. Later drops added the Arbites and Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii classes, the escalating Havoc difficulty ladder, and a steadier cadence of seasonal content. The gap between the game’s rocky launch reputation and its warmer current standing is the review in miniature: a game people are still angry about on principle, and still playing on Wednesday nights.

• Weighted hybrid combat: Melee built on block, dodge, push and cleave — with hit-stop and animation weight that most shooters never attempt — welded to 40K gunplay that plays by its own rules. Chainswords that need revving. Lasguns that need charge management. Bolters that kick like a car crash.
• Six asymmetric classes: Veteran, Zealot, Psyker, Ogryn, Arbites and Skitarii, each with a deep talent tree that meaningfully reroutes how the class plays rather than nudging damage numbers.
• The Toughness system: A regenerating stagger-shield that rewards aggression and team coherency, punishing anyone who wanders off to solo a corridor.
• AI Director-paced missions: Procedurally seeded objectives, layered difficulty tiers and rotating modifiers — pitch darkness, elite-heavy spawns, Maelstrom conditions — that keep the same map from playing the same way twice.
• Havoc: A persistent 40-tier escalating difficulty ladder that functions as the real endgame for players who’ve exhausted Damnation.
• Character creation and voice: You build the Reject — appearance, voice, backstory — and the writing gives that character actual personality in mission banter.
• Full crossplay across PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the storefront, the currencies, the seasonal framing, and what remains is a combat system with few peers.

The core tension is the weapon swap. Vermintide taught Fatshark how melee should feel; Darktide’s problem was that 40K demands guns, and most co-op shooters treat melee as the panic button you mash when you run dry. Darktide inverts that. Ranged combat is precise, ammo-starved and positional — you’re not spraying, you’re picking off the Sniper on the gantry and the Trapper working around your flank before either one removes a teammate from the fight. Melee is where the horde gets answered. The switch between them happens dozens of times a minute, under pressure, and the animation timing makes each transition a real decision rather than a free action. Reload at the wrong moment and a Mauler opens your ribcage.

Then there’s the enemy roster, which is the unsung engineering achievement here. Poxwalkers are chaff — shamblers you cleave through six at a time for the pure physical pleasure of it. But every threat above that tier demands a specific answer. Crushers must be dodged or staggered, never traded with. Bulwarks need flanking. Ragers need space. The Hound pounces from off-screen and pins you until someone frees you, which means the correct response to hearing one is to stop what you’re doing and shout. The Daemonhost is a wandering horror that ignores you completely unless someone gets too close, at which point it will kill that person and probably one more. Darktide’s difficulty isn’t a damage multiplier. It’s a priority-management exam under a strict clock.

The Toughness system holds it together. Rather than a health bar you slowly bleed out, Toughness regenerates when you’re near teammates and when you’re actively killing things in melee. The design intent is unmistakable: stay together, keep moving forward, don’t turtle. It’s the mechanical reason a good Darktide squad looks like a single organism and a bad one looks like four people who met in an elevator.

Progression and Friction

This is where the game earned its scars.

At launch, getting a weapon you wanted meant watching a vendor’s inventory refresh on a timer, praying the RNG produced acceptable stat rolls, and then discovering the crafting system that was supposed to fix bad rolls simply wasn’t in the game yet. It was onboarding friction as a business model, and players correctly identified it as contempt.

Unlocked and Loaded fixed most of it. You can now take a weapon you like and push it to maximum, swap Blessings between items, and consolidate the junk into something usable. The talent rework turned four flat progression lines into six trees with real branching identity — a Zealot built around stealth resets plays nothing like a Zealot built around martyrdom and flamers. Character building is finally the strong part of the loop rather than the tax you pay to reach it.

What’s still thin is mission variety. The objective types — hold this, escort this, flip these switches, collect these things — rotate more than they evolve, and the procedural seeding shuffles layouts and spawn logic rather than generating new spaces. The maps stop surprising even when the fights don’t. Havoc papers over this by making the difficulty the content, which works well for the dedicated and does nothing for anyone else.

The Store

The cosmetic shop is the hardest part to defend. This is a premium-priced game selling single outfits, at rotating availability, for prices that would raise eyebrows in a free-to-play title. The in-game currency is bundled in the usual mismatched denominations designed to leave a stranded remainder in your wallet. It works exactly as intended, and it is exactly as cynical as it looks. That Fatshark also gives out solid free cosmetics through play doesn’t neutralize it — it just makes the storefront’s pricing feel more deliberate.

Tertium is one of the great video game environments of recent years. The hive city is rendered as a vertical industrial nightmare — cathedral-scale machinery, sodium-lit smog, corpse-processing plants, endless gantries over drops you can’t see the bottom of. The art direction understands that 40K’s horror isn’t the demons; it’s the bureaucratic scale of human misery that makes the demons a rounding error. Volumetric lighting does the heavy lifting, and the ray-traced reflections and global illumination on capable hardware turn wet metal corridors into something oppressive.

The audio is better still. Jesper Kyd’s score knows when to sit back and let the industrial ambience breathe, then detonates into choral dread when the Director sends a wave. Weapon sound is excellent — the chainsword bite, the bolter’s report, the wet finality of a power sword activating. Voice acting across the Reject archetypes is sharp, funny, and doing more world-building than most 40K games manage with cutscenes.

Performance is the qualified part. Launch was rough: main-thread CPU bottlenecks, stutter, crashes, a DirectX 12 renderer that punished mid-range rigs. Years of patching plus DLSS, FSR and XeSS support have made it broadly stable, but this remains a CPU-hungry game by design. Dense hordes on high difficulties are built to stress older processors, and ray tracing is a luxury tax rather than a default. Budget accordingly.

On Steam, this is the definitive version and it isn’t close. Mouse-and-keyboard suits a game that asks you to headshot a Sniper mid-dodge, and the precision ceiling on Damnation and Auric content is high enough that input latency matters. Controller support is competent and gyro-free aim assist is present, but the PC build gets the graphical ceiling, the mod scene, and the fastest patch cadence.

Crossplay works well and matchmaking populations are healthy enough that queues are short at most difficulty tiers — a meaningful reversal from 2023, when high-difficulty queues could strand you. Steam Deck is playable at reduced settings, but the horde spikes will test your patience and your thermals. The one persistent PC annoyance: the launcher-and-menu layer around the game is slower and clunkier than it has any right to be, and the Mourningstar hub still asks you to walk across a ship to talk to vendors that should be a menu tab.

Darktide is a case study in how much goodwill a studio can burn and still recover. The 2022 release was a broken promise with a great engine underneath it, and the people who bought it then were right to be furious. Three years of unglamorous repair work later, the game those players were promised largely exists — better classes, sane itemization, a real endgame, stable performance.

What that repair job can’t fix is the storefront, and that’s the thing keeping this out of the top tier. Fatshark built combat that other studios should be studying frame by frame, then attached a monetization layer that treats its most loyal players as a revenue surface. The recent review trend suggests most people have decided the fighting is worth the friction. We agree, narrowly.

Buy it on sale, ignore the shop entirely, bring three friends, and play it on a difficulty that scares you. That’s where Darktide is a great action game on Steam. Everywhere else, it’s still apologizing.