Recent reviews by [🐱]Superking

I appreciate the developer's attempt to make a native Linux version, but unfortunately the port is so bad that it's near unplayable. With two monitors the game always has the wrong resolution, and opens on the wrong monitor if you try to manually select a resolution. If you ignore the resolution issues and play anyway, the game feels sluggish regardless of graphics quality.

Gameplay wise it seems like somewhat of a mix between Battlefield and Hell Let Loose, so it has a lot of potential. Each player commanding a whole squad is a fun idea, you get more kills than in an all-human game, and you don't have to always start over from the spawn on every death as you take over one of the bots. Unfortunately the bot AI isn't great, and having them around also brings some frustrations.

At first I thought the game just had really bad physics and hit detection, but searching forums it seems like they added significant random bullet spread at some point, similar to the oldest Battlefield games, except without any visual indication of how large the spread is. This isn't necessarily an all bad thing, as it reduces sniping and long range encounters, but it can also be very frustrating to have a perfectly lined up shot miss.

Anyhow, review stays negative until they've either fixed the Linux version, or enabled anti-cheat for Proton so we can play it through Steam Play.

What's actually going on: EA wants to replace Epic's anti-cheat (EAC) with their own. EAC worked well enough on both Windows and Linux, but EA couldn't be arsed to implement their anti-cheat for more than one platform.

Also the way this change pushed out without warning shows how unreliable EA are. I imagine the Linux users who bought expensive skins for Apex the last couple of months were expecting that they would be allowed to use them in the game. On the other hand, EA has multiple decades of history screwing customers over, so hopefully games have learned not to trust them.

Have you ever played a game where you pressed the "interact" button to open a door, only to instead have the game interpret it as that you wanted to climb through the adjacent broken window, end up cutting your hands, and bleed subsequently to death? If you want those kind of things to happen over and over again, buy McPixel.

What a hugventure it is!

An enjoyable puzzle platformer

It's like Hell Let Loose except fun.

This could've been a pretty solid strategic semi-realistic war game, but unfortunately the developers' decision to push carriers and submarines often takes the fun out of it for people who play ships. Which is pretty bad for a game about naval combat where most people play ships. Depending on how unlucky your are with the matchmaking, it's not uncommon being forced to just sit there and watch your health ticking down from constant aerial attacks, if your ship isn't nimble enough to be able to dodge torpedoes and bombs. Anti-air is a joke, and planes can just ignore it.

But apart from frustrating game play, this is also the most expensive f2p I've played. First of all you "need" premium, which costs about €7.50 / month, unless you're happy with playing only the low tier boats. Without premium any kind of levelling and resource farming is severely hamstrung and you'll eventually run into the glass ceiling where you expend more money than you gain per match. But even with premium, levelling gets painfully slow at higher tiers so you'll probably want to buy some resource boosters. And to not fight at a disadvantage, you probably want to buy signals that offer single use passive buffs to your ship.

Then there is also a battle pass, which is another €7.50 per month and does not give any premium currency back.. Compared to many other f2p games, where you buy a 3 month battle pass for €10 and can earn enough premium currency to buy the next one of you max it out, this just feels unnecessarily greedy.

But surely €15 / month is not that bad you say? Well, there are also constant collection events where you can get new ships and other unique rewards. And there are of course lots of premium ships to straight up buy (mid tier ships are around €20 each, and high tier go up to €60). Special events often involve gambling elements and/or obscure costs with extra steps, so it's not impossible that you'll have to pay €200 if you want the final reward.

I'm not changing my recommendation against this game because of these reasons, but I have to admit that it has grown on me over time. I found that installing some mods made the game more enjoyable, so don't hesitate to do that if you are going to play it. Playing against carriers and subs can still be boring, depending on which ship you're in, but at least the matches without them are more fun.

There are two different ways of playing Darktide:

1) Choose a weapon (ranged or melee), run forward and hammer left mouse button when you see enemies. At the end of the mission, receive XP and money. Level up and buy weapons with higher numbers. Maybe go on higher difficulty mission for slightly more XP and money.

2) Constantly swap between weapons, chain your attacks, dodge and block enemies, duck and weave from cover to cover, etc. Pick a pair of weapons you enjoy using. Push your limits and try harder missions.

Coming from different game genres, I think it's easy to fall into the first play style. I did so, but it wasn't until discovered the second style that I really began to appreciate DT. Because it's not very rewarding if you play it as a hack-n-slash / shooter / RPG.. Characters only have 1 active ability, there's barely any loot, and you only get a new passive class ability every 5 levels.. However if you try to master the combat, just playing the game becomes fun.

The problem is that the game does not tell you to play in a fun way. You can level to 30 (current max) by only going on missions that are so easy that you never have to do anything other than left click. It's usually even faster than going on challenging missions, since you can run through the map and don't risk failure. Weekly challenges might even encourage players to go on easier missions since they are faster to grind whatever thing you need to do. It's easy to get trapped in the loot/reward mentality, which turns this game into a chore.

Works well on Proton/Linux except raytracing appears to be disabled even with an RTX card. But to be fair I barely notice any difference with raytracing on when I tried playing on Windows. Crashes occasionally but that happens just as often on Windows, and devs are working to fix that.

Graphics are absolutely stunning. The maps, weapon and character designs really draw you into the WH40k universe. Cut scenes and "story" is a bit lackluster and don't contribute much.

Graphics and controls are pretty good, but the whole game is brought down by being ridiculously imbalanced and the massive grind..