Recent reviews by Stasis

Vermintide is a beautiful blend of Warhammer Fantasy, co-op first-person hack and slash with a very similar structure to the Left 4 Dead series. The immaculate art, level design, voice acting and character interactions really captures the essence of the Warhammer Fantasy universe. While it seems Fatshark have been quite inspired by Valve's Left 4 Dead formula they've given Vermintide much more depth and replayability, primarily from the clever yet frustrating character progression.

The character progression through obtaining new weapons, head gear, trinkets and even re-rolling traits/improving them on your weapons all revolves around RNG. While it can cause frustration it also gives more of a drive, sense of purpose to continue playing. There’s always something to work towards whether it be gaining levels, obtaining rare head gear, earning banners and much more all contributes to keeping the player invested and is a unique attribute I really appreciate about this game.

The base game offers 13 enriching and unique levels all with various environments, objectives and aspects of lore, 5 different difficulties to climb and corresponding loot for your efforts. Additionally there is an endgame Last Stand mode where players fight endless hordes of Skaven to see how long they can last with all the flash gear they’ve obtained through the Adventure mode.

Fatshark took two great things and fused them together, making it very much their own and did an incredible job. I’m very impressed that an Independent developer made such a polished, refined and beautiful game in 2 – 3 years. I highly recommend this game, for the amount of hours you will end up investing into this it’s worth every cent. My only warning would be that this game being solely co-op based requires friends to really get the most out of it. If you don’t have 3 other friends who will play make sure to make friends through the lobbies you join.

Overall Vlad the Impaler is a great interactive graphic-novel with fantastic art and an intriguing dark story. However it does suffer from a few drawbacks, the main one being that the developers have tried encouraging players to replay the game dozens of times with the choice of multiple classes, outcomes and weapon choices. The problem with this is that the game lacks variety, mainly with not offering enough different scenarios to keep each play through unique. After the third or fourth time you've easily done every possible scenario at least once with very little varied difference. Even if there was the same amount of scenarios but more than one piece of art and choice was given each time I think the game would have defiantly benefited.

Another drawback is that the game contains quite a few spelling and grammar errors that were never fixed. Makes me wonder how the game wasn’t proof-read? I can only assume the game wasn’t originally English. While this isn’t a huge deal it is distracting and completely breaks the immersion of the story. Finally the game has an issue where it displays a black screen upon launch, this is fixed by verifying the game cache but is pretty irritating and really should have been fixed by now.

For its current price of $0.99 I would defiantly recommend still giving this game a chance, while it’s far from perfect and disappointingly shallow, it’s still worth the price and sinking a few hours into.

An overall great game with endless amounts of things to do, it won’t be hard to find yourself sinking hundreds of hours into this game. The PC port of the game is very well implemented, I had no real issues with adapting to the keyboard and mouse controls after previously playing the game on Xbox 360 (you can still play it with controllers on PC anyway). The graphics look phenomenal on high settings but people with lower-end PC’s will still be able to enjoy the game with decent frames/performance. The next gen version of the game also has additional features that the old-gen versions lack, such as director mode, self-radio, first-person and increased lobby player caps (from 16 to 30).

A big draw-back for the PC version (and almost all PC gaming) is the hacking/modding that completely plagues the online aspects of the game. Sure sometimes it can be innocent fun, however more often than not modders choose to ruin peoples play experiences and this occurs far too frequently. Rockstar do try to prevent modders but it surely will never stop happening, so if you choose to purchase this game just keep in mind that cheating is very apparent in online.