Dead Wild Roses

Fatshark’s Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is one of those frustrating games that is much easier to criticize than to stop playing.

I have around 1200 hours in it. That alone says something. Not everything, but something. A game does not hold my attention for that long on atmosphere alone, brand loyalty, or because I happen to like Warhammer 40K. The truth is simpler: Darktide is fun. It remains fun despite the slow content drip, despite Fatshark’s habit of making the same design mistakes more than once, and despite some baffling quality-of-life omissions that should have been fixed ages ago.

The core loop still works.

That is the review in miniature. Darktide is a flawed live-service game wrapped around one of the best co-op combat systems in the industry.

This is not a launch review. It is a long-term player review. That matters because Darktide is a very different game depending on when you meet it. A new player sees the grind, the early gear friction, the uneven explanation of systems, and the long climb toward weapons that feel properly alive. A veteran sees the deeper game underneath: buildcraft, sound cues, armor solutions, class roles, coherency discipline, and the strange joy of turning a doomed mission into a recovery.

The Pressure Dial

The reason I keep coming back is that the game lets me choose the kind of pressure I want. If I want endgame sweat and build optimization, there is Havoc. If I want something more experimental, there are the newer side modes. If I want a more open objective-focused experience, Expeditions add variety outside the usual hive corridors. But most of the time I hover around Heresy and Damnation. Level 4 is where I can relax without turning my brain off. Level 5 is where the game challenges me without always demanding full sweat-mode concentration.

That flexibility matters. Darktide is not just “run mission, kill horde, repeat.” It is a pressure dial. Some nights I want to optimize. Some nights I want to survive. Some nights I just want to smash heretics and not embarrass the Emperor too badly.

When Darktide is at its best, a mission feels like a combat situation that almost got out of control.

That “almost” is doing a lot of work. The best missions are not clean. They are not smooth. They are not four players casually deleting the map. They are the runs where an unexpected spawn of heavy armor nearly wipes the team, then everyone’s role snaps into place. The Psyker locks down a pack with tickle lightning. The Veteran drops Krak grenades into the biggest threats and tags another for extra damage. The Zealot dodge-dances around lethal swings, keeping the armored enemies focused away from the squishy backline. The frontliners do their job, the ranged damage dealers get a pocket to work from, and the whole team recovers from the edge of disaster.

That is the magic of the game. Darktide is not really a power fantasy. It is a chaos-stabilization fantasy.

A great run feels like four rejects turning panic into procedure.

The Dance

The melee combat is a major reason that still works. Darktide borrows a lot from Vermintide 2, and that is a good thing. Your head needs to be on a swivel. Audio cues matter. Target priority matters. The dodge, block, push, slide, and stamina systems all give you tools to survive, but they do not let you mash your way out of bad decisions forever. Spamming dodge gets you killed. Doing the dance lets you live.

That distinction is important. Darktide is not a pure twitch shooter. Fast reflexes help, obviously, but the game rewards situational awareness first, teamwork second, and high mechanical skill third. A player with good aim but poor awareness is cooked. The better player is the one who hears the trapper before seeing it, notices the flank forming, sees the armor pack gathering, stops chasing damage numbers, and returns to coherency before the run collapses.

The coherency system reinforces that lesson. Staying with the team is not just polite co-op etiquette. It is mechanically rewarded with better survivability and group support. Running off alone has a real cost, both for the solo player and for the team left behind. This is one of Darktide’s better design choices because it pushes against main-character syndrome. You can have hero moments, but the game keeps reminding you that solo heroics are fragile. Hounds, trappers, and other disablers exist to punish isolation. One net, one pounce, one bad corner, and all your skill suddenly requires someone else’s help.

Guns With Personality

The gunplay is also excellent, especially when the weapons have strong identity. The bolt weapons are the obvious stars. They have heft, recoil, noise, and consequence. They feel like miniature RPGs being fired at heretics, which is exactly what they should feel like. Lasguns are in a good place too, though they ask more from the player. You have to build toward them and do the skill-ceiling thing, but they can work very well in the right hands. The plasma gun remains a monster: high damage, high cleave, serious work output, offset by that strange firing delay you have to learn. The Arbites shotgun is another standout, clearing rooms for days.

The weaker side of the arsenal is the standard bullet weapon category. A lot of those weapons feel niche at best and underpowered at worst. They may function, but they do not always feel like they have the same reason to exist as the better-designed weapons. Darktide is strongest when a weapon has a personality. When a gun feels generic, the whole thing loses some charge.

Classes and Buildcraft

The classes do a lot to keep the game fresh. The four original classes remain clear and readable. Zealot is zippy melee damage. Veteran is ranged pain and problem-solving. Ogryn is the frontline beef wall. Psyker is fragile, high-risk, high-reward ranged pressure. The added classes complicate that roster in good ways. Arbites, despite nerfs, remains a durable hybrid damage dealer in both ranged and melee combat. Hive Scum is more of a glass cannon: you do great until you get cornered, and then the game reminds you what “glass” means.

I was late to Hive Scum because the class felt like a letdown after the Arbites launch. Having spent more time with it, I think it is a good addition, but it has a higher skill ceiling than Psyker. You need to understand spacing, threat priority, and exit routes. When Hive Scum works, it can feel fantastic. When it fails, it fails quickly.

The build system is also much better than it used to be. At launch, progression and buildcraft were in rough shape. The move to full skill trees rescued a lot of the game’s class identity. Players now have more ways to shape roles, emphasize strengths, and create meaningfully different approaches to combat.

But the meta sharpens as the difficulty rises. At mid difficulties, you can experiment. You can bring comfort builds, strange weapons, or off-meta choices and still succeed through good play. In Havoc and high-end content, the sandbox narrows. The game has a balance problem where “harder” too often means flooding the field with heavy carapace armor. If your team is not built to crack armor, you are not merely challenged; you may be functionally dead on arrival. Creativity gives way to optimization. Bring the armor solution or become scenery.

The Grind and the Better Game Underneath

Progression is where Darktide still struggles.

There is a real grind and climb to this game. As a veteran player, I can spend saved resources to get over some gear humps, and even then it can be annoying. Newer players do not have that cushion. Gear moves through the usual gray, green, blue, purple, and orange tiers, and those tiers matter because perks and blessings make weapons feel dramatically better. A gray weapon can feel nerfed compared to a fully tricked-out orange version. Several people I wanted to bring into the game simply stopped because the grind to the good stuff felt like too much.

That is a serious onboarding problem. Darktide may be at its best hundreds of hours in, but new players are being asked to trust that the better game is coming.

Crafting, thankfully, is in a much better place than it used to be. Fatshark has taken most of the worst RNG out of the system. You can now build perks and blessings how you want instead of praying to the slot-machine servitor. There is also a weapon progression system that unlocks those perks and blessings. At high level, you can essentially buy your way to weapon mastery through a series of inconvenient steps. That is very Fatshark: much improved, basically functional, and somehow clunkier than it needs to be.

Long-term progression still needs another layer. Account-wide resources were a good change, and they made playing multiple characters less punishing. The game does have titles you can earn and pieces of armour tied to achievements, so it is not fair to say there is nothing to chase. But after 1200 hours, the game still needs more ways to acknowledge time invested. A paragon-style system would be welcome. It would not need to break balance. Small account-wide ranks, class prestige, expanded earnable cosmetics, or minor customization rewards would help preserve that feeling of “I am still earning something.”

The cosmetic economy makes this more irritating. The in-game currency cosmetics exist, but too often they feel lackluster compared to the paid cosmetic shop. That does not ruin the game, and cosmetics are not the main reason to play Darktide, but the imbalance is noticeable. When the best-looking cosmetic pipeline feels tilted toward paid options while meaningful content arrives slowly, it lands poorly.

Fatshark Keeps Building Sideways

Fatshark’s bigger pattern is that it keeps building sideways instead of inward.

This was a problem in Vermintide 2 with Weaves. The mode had separate progression and rewards that did not properly enrich the base game, so it split the community. Darktide risks repeating the same mistake. Side modes add variety, but if they do not feed meaningfully into the main game, they become separate lanes rather than true expansion.

Expeditions help because they push the game outside the usual hive corridors and into more open spaces beyond Tertium. That variety is welcome. But the larger design question remains the same: does new content strengthen the whole game, or does it create another lane for players to sort themselves into?

Havoc has the opposite problem. It is clearly endgame content, but the separate queue, promotion and demotion structure, rank decay, and meta pressure make it feel like its own ladder. Players who enter the Havoc loop can peel away from regular difficulties. Everyone else remains in the standard mission pool.

Fatshark keeps finding ways to split its own audience when the game would benefit from deeper integration.

Maps, Story, and the Grime

The maps are another mixed bag. They still work. The hive-city aesthetic is strong, and the combat spaces are usually readable once you understand them. But repetition shows. Many missions are different routes through familiar spaces, and after hundreds of hours the hive can start to feel less like a vast world and more like rearranged corridors.

Modifiers help. Lights Out and Ventilation Purge can transform a familiar mission into something tense again. They also reward the institutional map memory veteran players build over time. When visibility collapses, experienced players can still navigate by layout memory, audio cues, spawn expectations, and team positioning. A new player, though, can be completely lost in those conditions.

The larger problem is the lack of new maps and weak connective tissue between missions. Fatshark has made attempts to backwrite a campaign into the mission structure, but it still feels patchwork. The story is not the reason to play Darktide. The mood is.

And the mood is excellent.

The grit, grim, and grime do a lot of work. The 40K lorekeepers will have complaints. Plague exposure, Chaos monstrosities, and the general survivability of these rejects all invite some lore eyebrow-raising. But it is a video game. What matters is that Darktide understands the atmosphere of 40K. The banter between characters is good. The voice lines get expanded over time. The religious madness, industrial decay, filth, chanting, machinery, and oppressive hive architecture all give the combat flavour.

Could you replace the heretics with zombies and make a Left 4 Dead 2-style game out of this structure? Technically, yes. But it would feel off. The setting is not just decoration. It gives the violence weight.

There is also the usual Fatshark technical grit. Spawns can feel strange, performance can wobble, and bugs still appear often enough that veteran players learn to absorb them as part of the weather. None of this ruins the core loop for me, but it does matter for new players. A veteran can shrug off jank because the combat high is already proven. A new player encountering grind, weak onboarding, and technical rough edges all at once may not stick around long enough to see the better game underneath.

Enemies and Sound

The enemies are well-designed. Almost every enemy has a purpose. Gunners shred you at distance and punish exposure. Shotgunners close and tear you apart if allowed into range. Ragers teach dodge discipline and attack-pattern recognition. Bombers deny space and split the group. Trappers and hounds punish isolated characters. Bursters ruin your day if you miss the audio cue or botch the push block.

Trappers are probably the most annoying because one net can start a failure cascade if the team is not aware. But even then, the annoyance has a purpose. The enemy roster is not random noise. It is a set of pressure tools. Each one tests a different part of player discipline.

The bosses are fine, but we need more of them. Chaos Spawn, Plague Ogryn, and Beast of Nurgle all work, but veteran players know their attack patterns too well now. More monstrosities, or more meaningful boss variation, would help keep that pressure fresh.

Sound design deserves special mention. It is huge in Darktide. Fatshark took the lessons of Left 4 Dead 2 and built an even richer threat language. Good players learn to identify danger by ear before they see it. Specials announce themselves through distinct cues, and the soundscape becomes part of the combat interface. The soundtrack is also outstanding: dark, industrial, techno-liturgical, and perfectly matched to the feeling of fighting through a diseased cathedral-factory. It slaps.

Friends, Randoms, and Failure Cascades

The random-player experience is variable.

Darktide really sings with a group of four on comms. Coordinated players can call specials, focus armor, manage revives, and recover from disasters that would wipe a silent group. With randoms, roll the dice. Sometimes matchmaking gives you disciplined teammates who stay together and understand the assignment. Sometimes it gives you someone auditioning for a solo YouTube montage in the next room.

Still, the community is not all bad. Most mistakes are forgiven by the end of the run because every veteran has had a streak of doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. Everyone has dodged into disaster. Everyone has missed the sound cue. Everyone has chased the wrong target. Better with friends, workable with randoms, but your mileage will vary.

The Annoyances

My biggest annoyances are specific.

First, Fatshark still refuses to give players proper UI tools to improve, especially a real scoreboard. In a co-op shooter built around specials, elites, rescues, damage taken, target priority, and team play, post-mission feedback should not require mods. A scoreboard does not have to be an ego board. Done properly, it teaches players what happened.

Second, the content pace remains painfully slow. The lack of new maps hurts, and class-specific neglect makes it worse. When a class like Ogryn goes a long stretch without a new weapon, veteran players notice. It is not just “give me more stuff.” It is that some parts of the roster can start to feel stale.

Third, the character-name problem is ridiculous. You can change nearly everything about your character except the name. If you hate the name, you reroll and start from scratch. That is not design philosophy. That is stubbornness wearing a purity seal.

Verdict

So would I recommend Darktide in 2026?

Yes, but with warnings.

If you like demanding co-op games, Darktide is very easy to recommend. The grind for new players is real, but it is no longer the RNG nightmare it used to be. The crafting system is much better. The classes are more interesting. The combat loop remains exceptional.

But this is not a cozy game. Darktide requires concentration, situational awareness, target priority, and a willingness to stay with the team. It is high tempo and high engagement. If you hate switching between melee and ranged weapons, this is not the game for you. You need to weave both into your playstyle, often within the same fight and sometimes within the same few seconds.

The biggest warning for new players is that Darktide asks for patience before it shows its best self. Early weapons can feel weak, early builds are incomplete, and the game does not always explain why something feels bad. The combat loop becomes far more satisfying once perks, blessings, class talents, and player awareness start working together. That is a real ask. Some players will not want to push through it, and I cannot blame them.

The story is weak. The connective material is patchy. The content drip is slow. Fatshark remains Fatshark, for better and worse.

But after 1200 hours, I am still coming back.

That matters. When the content drip hits, it is usually good. More importantly, the core loop of smashing heretics with three teammates while the whole mission threatens to come apart has not really been equaled elsewhere in the industry.

Final score: 87/100.

A flawed, stubborn, occasionally baffling game — and still one of the best co-op action experiences available.