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"Hunter, what is best in life?"
"To crush the monster, see the monster driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the monster."
[Mass cheering]
"That is good."

I got this game on sale for 2.49, but I'd have been satisfied paying the full-price tenner. The highest one-line praise I can give this game is it's like all the fun of playing invoker, but you don't have to suffer playing Dota 2 to do it. See that house? Meteor. That dude over there having fun? Meteor his dumb ass. Townie that wants nothing to do with you and was minding his own business? Meteor that shoots other meteors. You can blow everything and everyone into smithereens using a very enjoyable variety of customizable spells. I thought Doombolt was cool because it shot a big purple energy bolt, so I made it conjure up a storm cloud that shot them for me. You may think "well, most games would only let you cast one storm-type spell like this at a time." This game doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ what you do. That's on you. As many simultaneous doombolt storms as your mana pool and graphics card will allow. With a certain rune the doombolt strikes started leaving a mist that was resurrecting the dead enemies as minions. Come on man.
I recommend this game if you like dope ♥♥♥♥, such as wizards, and don't mind if games look like they did back on the PS2. The environments are basically Mount & Blade: Warband battlefields with destructible houses scattered around and the enemies are born to become ragdolls, but what we have here is a great magic system with a sandbox to mess around in for what I would consider a very fair price. Fun game, pure and simple.

This game is way off the hook.

While not exactly as transcendental as some other reviews would have you believe, this is a very well-executed concept with no extraneous elements, just like sorath's previous work. Certainly a game that gives you back whatever you put into it, although that could be a double edged sword if you approach it casually. If you can see yourself delving into the interactions and trying to master the game's mechanics and pace, it will surely satisfy (and probably frustrate) you. Visually it is complex, interesting, and sometimes beautiful, and the sound design is also very good. Chaining together scuttler kills in particular has a very addictive audio feedback element. Having almost all of your movements bound to the spacebar doesn't always work for me, and the lack of ability to adjust the bindings at all is somewhat disappointing because of that. I respect the decision and it marries well with the overall concept of a minimal design, but getting a dash instead of a drop-slam or sliding being occasionally ambiguous is no less annoying no matter how elegant the one-button idea sounds on paper. That's really my only complaint, and I still strongly recommend the game to those who enjoy challenging themselves, climbing leaderboards, and exploring demanding, engaging systems. Also, ♥♥♥♥ scuttlers.

It goes without saying that if the game improves, so will this review. I'll keep it updated as things change. The information available to the player has improved dramatically, which is a big plus, but the equipment system itself remains a serious issue. The game also eats inputs regularly, which adds to the overall sluggish feeling when combined with the agonizing dodge timer and bizarre decision to make dodging pause stamina regeneration. Confusion reigns.

If there was a mixed option, I'd go with that, but I do have to err on the side of not recommending this game in its current state. I do have fun playing it, and that's because the core of what fatshark does is very well done. Perhaps that's no surprise though, because the fundamentals here have seen little change since the time of VT1 (and possibly even before that, though I haven't played any earlier works). Jesper Kyd's score seems very good from what I've heard and the visuals (when they aren't wringing your machine out like a dirty washcloth) are a great look at the 40K universe. The atmosphere and gameplay are truly top-notch, and if you're a fan of the IP like myself, warhammer is here to be enjoyed in tremendous fidelity, from the glorious to the grimy.
What fatshark can't do very well is just about everything else--and they seemingly haven't learned from past mistakes in these areas. After recruiting several people to play VT2, I found that paradoxically, the hardest part of the game for them and myself was the beginning. Grinding gear, learning how things worked through the fog of fatshark's horribly vague and occasionally outright false tooltips and descriptions, and repeatedly slogging through the leveling process was the time when people quit. Once the ♥♥♥♥-shoveling was out of the way, it was quite easy to fall in love with the game. We learned to laugh off the bugs and roll our eyes at questionable balance decisions, but I understand that my love of warhammer and the gameplay made me very generous with the game's flaws. You would think fatshark would have focused on these very, very, VERY obvious weak areas, about which they have received frequent criticism and advice, often constructive but occasionally caustic, yet Darktide currently suffers many of these old issues.
Stability is awful. Performance is a dice roll, and not the fun kind. Even the most basic talent or equipment descriptions may as well be in heiroglyphics for all the good they do. Gear is a worse affair than before; in maybe 30-40 mission clears, I have received two (2!) after-mission rewards. One of them was a vendor white. The rest of the gear grind lives in a shop that rotates a random inventory at regular intervals. Fatshark could've asked internally "Is this fun? Is waiting for the item I want, not knowing what might influence that item appearing or what stats it might have, fun? Or is there a better system we could create, one that gives the player more control, more feedback, and most probably more enjoyment?" I've been foaming at the mouth to rip into Nurgle's foulest with a chainsword, but the shop hasn't given me one. Maybe even more importantly, there is no indication of what needs to be done to get one to appear. In fact, there's very little indication of much of anything.
The obfuscation of player-helping information in this game is so common and so thorough it has to be purposeful. The quality of the gear is random too, apparently, but again, that quality is a guessing game, because you get so little information from the weapon tooltips (and this game's target dummies are hidden behind a loading screen) that comparison requires a real-life psyker to discern what the ♥♥♥♥ the devs intended. Also, you did read that correctly: the information is in the game, but you have to go over to a separate room and load into the training area to access it. Why not put it where the player can see it all the time? It's stunning. I'm trying to see a reason to hide this information that holds water, but I can't understand the decision. Players that don't care about the numbers are simply going to ignore them and get stuck in anyway. Players that want this information are going to enjoy cooking up spreadsheets to see if you really can one-shot a dreg shotgunner with the second heavy attack on a mark II chain axe. Both these groups are happy with more information; hiding it pleases only one of them and frustrates the other. The community manager made a baffling affair out of the patchnotes by attempting to use crude text-art to simulate the bar graphs in the game and had to be asked to post the numbers. (He relented with a pained "fiiiiine." This is a paid professional.)
I'm not going to bother to complain about bugs or poor balance, because I have come to ignore or laugh at the absolutely insane lack of QA or gameplay evaluation testing that fatshark seems to (not) use. If you're not already familiar with how this company pushes out games, they will shock you. I will say, however, that nebulous promises of improvement or content expansion are nothing to hang one's hat on. The game is out in little more than a week. What you're playing now isn't going to be dramatically different than what you will be playing on "release." I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that some higher power is forcing fatshark to push a version of this game they very well know isn't finished and make you pay through the nose with a rusty hook for content that should be in the game. To explain that idea more completely, one can enjoy no fairer comparison than the previous game by the same studio in the same genre.
VT2 launched with fifteen, FIFTEEN careers, spread three each across 5 well-developed characters with unique dialogue and interactions that felt backed by history and personality. Darktide? 4. Four. Slightly less than 1/3rd. Darktide's classes are claimed to be somehow much more than a VT career, but they're very much the same--a couple of passives, an F ability, and rows of talents acquired at 5-level intervals with three choices each. As for the convicts themselves, the characters interact in a disconnected way, mostly talking at each other with slot-in ad-lib dialogue. If you played a lot of VT and loved the characters' banter, then felt like something was off in the Chaos Wastes, then you know exactly what formula I'm describing here. "What do you think of [person]?" "I think they are [attribute]." "I'll reserve judgment for now." No history, no development, just sounds from mouths to fill the air when gunshots aren't going off. There are good lines, but the lack of defined characters has certainly impacted the care and depth that went into the dialogue. The worst part is this feeling of lacking inhabits a terrifying place between incompetent, overworked, and possibly even intentional.
If you don't think new classes are going to trickle out at just the right pace to keep you paying for a new one, I admire your optimism and I've never wanted to be wrong more in my life. Every menu, every system, feels like it's geared towards morphing into a mobile lootbox nickle-and-diming hellscape: the limited number of classes, the multiple currencies, the tiny pool of cosmetics. If a game gives you a "free-to-play with a predatory cash shop" sensation, it doesn't exactly scream love of the player and love of the game, does it? The wrinkle in that happens to be that the game has an upfront pricetag on top of it. I implore fatshark to prove me completely off the mark here, but somehow I know they won't. I wouldn't be so infuriated by this if the game had content parity with VT2, a game released four and a half years ago. We're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ going backwards and grinning about it.
tl;dr:
Please, vote with your wallet. Don't buy this, at least not yet. Make them earn it. As of now, they haven't.

I had a big long review typed out, but you don't need to read all that garbage. Just buy the game. The campaign might be short but you have NG+ and score/time attack for every room, plus modded levels. Even if you don't like shooters, just go for it.
If you aim very far down or up while airborne, you will do a flip. This will make the slow motion become slower motion so you can kill neighbors whilst upside-down. That's the sickest ♥♥♥♥ I've ever seen in my life. Yes I recommend this ♥♥♥♥.

I enjoyed the game overall, but there were certainly parts that I considered obscenely cheap. The game has a slightly loose or floaty feel that carries to the visuals, with armor and clothing clipping constantly. Everything about this game has a slight but noticeable aura of being bolted together quickly and not at great expense. Nevertheless if you're very fond of bonfires, rolling, and difficult bosses, it's probably worth it on sale.

i hate this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

BORN TO DIE
WORLD IS A UMGAK
DRENGI KILL 'EM ALL 2519 IC
I AM TRASH DAWI
51,813,266,294 DEAD RAKI