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.

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 shit-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 fuck 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 fucking 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.