The first time I came across this game was in April this year, a few days after I got tired of people following me through the walls in Rainbow Six: Siege and finally pressing the "Uninstall" button. I wanted a game that could be played challenging, but at the same time I didn't wanted to play against other players. This game was the perfect combination of what I wanted.
Story
I will only refer to only what this game offers, because this is part of the Warhammer 40,000. If you're not familiar with it, I will only say this, 54 main books, short novels, anthology articles, novellas, and other stuff written by a total of 98 authors (I think) from 1987 to present. So, the best of luck reading for the next 10 years if you want to read the entire lore.
Resuming to this timeline, these five arrive in Ubersreik, which it's in full invasion by rats. The cart they're in gets ambushed on the street, and the heroes retreat to the inn. From this point, you're doing missions to help the city resistance fight the invasion.
You can pick up one of the heroes right when you enter the game, even if they look like they escape the circus, each of them have their own thing.
- The first is Victor Saltzpyre - The Witch Hunter was actually escorting Sienna Fuegonasus to Ubersreik to be judged for murder
- Kerillian - Waywatcher, an elf that was once the guardian of the forest before she was exited for reasons that she refuses to say even a word about it
- Bardin Goreksson - Dwarf Ranger, was on a quest to Ubersreik to find a party that would help him discover an antic location special to the dwarfs. Him and Kerillian almost killed each other when they first met, right before starting to fight each other, a group of rats scouts attacked them, and after the last rat died, the two of them formed a pact to fight them together
- Sienna Fuegonasus - Bright Wizard, was Saltzpyre prisoner, freed in the middle of the ambush on the streets of Ubersreik by the Witch Hunter to rather fight the rats than being left in chains to be their meal
- Markus Krubber - Empire Soldier, a captain of the army, was assisting the witch hunter to escort the bright wizard to the trial
After choosing, you'll end up in the lobby, where you can invite your friends, or you can go solo-ish, cause there always will be 4 characters during the game, but the bots are pretty limited (there's a mod for that). The lobby itself is a nice touch, as you can walk around with your character accessing different menus to prepare for the next mission or just jump around while you're waiting your friends.
Enemies
The common rat is just annoying when in big numbers, it has nothing special, but it can surprise you with a blow if you're not careful enough, but, lucky for you, it usually needs more than that to take you down.
The stormvermin, it's the equivalent of a knight, dogging a lot of damage with the help of armor, but, as will the NPC's or friends will tell you "Hit it in the head!". Just be careful, if you block just one attack, it will drain all your stamina, leaving you vulnerable.
Rat Ogre, as you can imagine, is a brute with lots of health and damage. Fortunately, you will only get up to one per mission, and it's not that hard to beat until the last 2 difficulties.
Globadier, or poison rat, will throw jars filled with poison that will create a cloud for a period of time. And if it's at a certain percent of health, will run towards you to kamikaze.
Packmaster, is going to catch and drag you out of battle, and when it's further enough it will pull you up with that stick, fixing its end into the ground and letting you dry out like salami while going for the next victim.
Gutterrunner, or assassin, is the most mobile enemy in the game. "Attacking from the shadows" will jump on its victim and start stabbing until it dies. Same as the packmaster, if they are on you, you're helpless alone, only your teammates being able to free you.
Ratgunnner, well, it shoots.
Sackrat is actually inoffensive and will run towards the end of the level and despawn when far enough, but it's worth killing it because it carries random stuff like potions or even dices.
Loot
But what are dices, you're asking now?
You always have a pool of 7 dices, that you have to roll at the end of a successful mission, but that only have 2 faces. You need as many faces as possible on a roll, to get better loot. The loot rarity also scales with the difficulty, harder the mission, better the loot.
Also, you can replace the dices from the pool with one of the following:
- Mission Dice - with 3 faces, found during the mission in chests or with the sackrat
- Tomes dice - with 4 faces, tomes are books in number of 3 in each mission, that you need to carry to the end of the level. The thing is, the person who carry them have to give up the healing item
- Grim dice - with all the faces, only 2 in each mission, grimmoire's are similar to tomes, replacing the potion item, but each book takes 30% of the max health of the entire team and it can't be picked up again once dropped
Besides the basic loot that you're starting with, you will get a new piece after each mission, and each rarity level will get them another buff.
Fortunately, you also can forge weapons, sacrificing lower rarity ones, 5 different of each level will get you a random item of a superior level, while 5 of each type will get that specific type of weapon leveled up.
There's also this shrine where you can pray for a new weapon (it's actually a lottery that uses materials) switch the buffs, or improve their statistics.
And the last but not least, the contracts menu:
Here you can accept secondary quests alongside with the main missions, here you can stack them up to get materials and high rarity weapons.
Difficulties
This part deserves a separate part in this article, only because it plays a very important in the overall experience. The difficulty scale is from one to five. Eazy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare, Cataclysm.
Eazy, Normal, and even Hard are pretty basic and once you finish a few levels on the next one, for example if you're playing on Hard, trying Normal or eazy will be a walk in the park. But still the game shows a little bit of adaptivity, in the sense of spawning some more enemies when playing co-op than when going singleplayer.
Nightmare is hard and requires some experience with the game and maybe some good equipment if you're going alone. Still, you can complete pretty much every level alone with some skill.
Cataclysm is pretty much impossible if you're going alone. I mean, I've seen people doing that, but I'm really not that crazy.
Sometimes is just about how lucky you are with the enemy spawn. It's all about how the game decides to treat you in that day; it can go smooth and eazy, or it can be a total bitch.
Some other aspects of the game
This game can be played alone when the RNG gods decides to make your day better, other times the stars aren't perfectly aligned for your journey.
The game runs using peer-to-peer connection, meaning that it doesn't require servers to host the game; the host will be the person that sends the invite or starts the game, so others can join. This is actually great, because this game can only die when nobody will have any more interest in it. For now, there are about 100 players still active every day, even after Vermintide 2 launched 3 years ago.
It's all about cooperative play. From basic gameplay to achievement farming, this game is build around this concept, even if it doesn't have voice chat (I rather use discord) it still communicates well through a chat and ping system.
Final impression
This game can be very entertaining, but it's always better when playing with your buddies; the peer to peer connection is making this game some kind of immortal, so don't worry about servers. It also can be very challenging, and it doesn't show any mercy with the achievements, but I consider it one of the best games I've played.
