Warhammer 40,0000: Darktide Review

The basic premise of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is pretty straightforward: thousands of cultists and dregs fall beneath the feet of four prisoners utilizing a devastating variety of guns, melee, and psychic powers, who will stop at nothing to accomplish their mission. It is also Stockholm developer Fatshark’s follow-up to its popular first-person horde action game Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and is its first attempt at tackling the 40K series.

Warhammer 40K: Darktide is light on narrative, but it opens with the player-created protagonist being hauled off to be executed for reasons determined in the character creator. The ship they are on is suddenly attacked, and with the help of Explicator Zora, players escape to a ship named the Mourningstar. The player’s sentence is put on hold with the intent to be conscripted in the Inquisition and investigate a Chaos infiltration on the city of Tertium.
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After the prologue, cinematics are a rarity, with most of the story being told through banter between teammates and the people giving them orders. Whenever a new cutscene does appear, they do little to progress the story with few exceptions and mostly consist of the player character standing silently while other characters acknowledge their accomplishments.

What is available at launch is charming, with the banter showing decent chemistry between a squad of people from different walks of life who are consistently thrown into hellish situations and not expected to return. Since Warhammer 40,000 writing veteran Dan Abnett penned the story, the dialogue’s quality is of no surprise even if lines do repeat from time to time. Since the game is a live service with an evolving narrative, it remains to be seen if expansions will lean more heavily on a cinematic narrative or keep delivering the story during missions.

Regardless of how one may feel about a thin narrative,…

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