Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is the latest co-op shooter to come from Fatshark, the same collection of talented developers that brought us the roundly entertaining Warhammer: Vermintide games over the past few years. Looking set to be one of the more promising shooters of the year, we’ve got everything you need to know about Warhammer 40,000: Darktide including the release date, characters, classes, weapons and so much more. For the Emperor! (or something)
What Is Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s Release Date And What Platforms Can I Play It On?
The Warhammer 40,000: Darktide release date has been confirmed as November 30, 2022. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide will release on Xbox Series X/S and PC platforms. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is also currently slated to arrive day one on Xbox Game Pass. Specifically in regards to the PC version, players can purchase and play Warhammer 40,000: Darktide via Steam. Presently, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is regarded as a timed console exclusive for Xbox Series X/S platforms. This hopefully means that a future PlayStation 5 release likely won’t be too far behind.
What Is It All About?
Set in the sprawling darkness of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Darktide has a brand of brave warriors attempting to wrest back control of the city of Tertium from a legion of evil enemies led by a deity of Chaos. Taking place from a first-person perspective, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide supports up to four players in cooperative play as they stab, slash, smash and blast their way through an increasingly more powerful army of bloodthirsty baddies. Though to the uninitiated Warhammer 40,000: Darktide might look like a sci-fi take on the Warhammer: Vermintide offerings that have previously come from the developer, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide adds a whole lot more to the formula to keep it both refreshing and interesting.
Who Are The Bad Guys?
Every Warhammer game worth its salt has a group of enemies that are up to the task and capable of testing players to their limits. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is no different. As it turns out, smelly old Chaos god Nurgle is the big bad behind all the grief that you’ll be running into when you get stuck into Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. A Chaos god with a bit of thing for pestilence, disease and all things gooey and squelchy, Nurgle’s ultimate aim is to whisk everyone off to Nurgle’s garden, a rotting realm of pus-filled waterfalls and crusty, fecal valleys where the very air you breathe festers in your lungs and rots you from the inside out. That doesn’t sound ideal, to be honest. Beyond the big N himself, he has surrounded himself with an ever growing army of followers, from a massive throng of Poxwalker zombies to more fully armed cultists, guards, elite Plaguebearers and plague giants, getting to Nurgle himself will prove to be quite the feat indeed. The inclusion of so many enemies with firearms also means that Darktide provides players with a rechargeable shield too, encouraging wannabe Nurgle mashers to hop into cover and catch some shield regeneration before heading back into the fray.
What Is The Hive Planet Tertium?
The main setting of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Tertium, is a hive city. What this means is that Tertium is a multi-tiered, massive and largely ruinous urban sprawl housing billions of people. Of course, with injustice being rife in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the city of Tertium is also representative (often literally) of the class divide. With the well-to-do upper classes sipping their Imperial martinis in the higher levels of Tertrium, while the rundown and impoverished billions toil away in the suffocating and cramped quarters of the abyssal depths below. Nurgle and his smelly army of poisonous snot monsters couldn’t have chosen a better target quite honestly. In practical terms, the planet of Tertium also has a few surprises up its sleeves too thanks to how it dynamically reacts to events which unfold during missions. For example, visiting a tower full of friendly NPCs but failing to prevent a bomb blast, will result in many of those friendly faces having a distinctly murderous aspect the next time to revisit that same area. It’s neat stuff that not only keeps you playing, but makes re-treading previous areas nowhere the sort of chore it might otherwise be.
How Does The Hub Area Work?
When you’re not mashing up Nurgle’s Admonition legion into fine pus paste, you’ll find yourself aboard the Inquisitor’s starship. Here, you can do everything from speaking to NPCs to further story and communicating with other players, to improving your gear and picking out the next mission you and your mates will be taking on. As a point of comparison, it’s certainly fair to say that the Inquisitor’s starship isn’t all that different from the keep or tavern hub areas seen in the Warhammer: Vermintide games.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Characters
Known unflatteringly as the ‘Rejects’, the player characters in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide are certainly something of a motley crew to say the least. First you have the Veteran, a stoic Imperial Guard stormtrooper whose lasgun, chainsword and thick armour makes him a threat at all ranges. A member of the Imperial Inquisition, the Zealot meanwhile wields a titanic thunder hammer and balances devastating melee damage with magical attacks at range. Finally, the towering Ogryn is a massive brute that uses a giant slug gun for ranged combat and an oversized cutlass for close encounters of the melee kind, while the Psyker can call on the void to imbue themselves with destructive psychic energy that can be used to destroy their enemies rather swiftly indeed.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Classes
What is especially interesting about Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is how the classes are handled. Though you get archetypal characters such as the Ogryn, the Zealot and the Psyker, Darktide also boasts a fairly substantial character creator that allows players sufficient creative latitude to tweak cosmetic appearances, loadouts and more besides. Much like the Vermintide games before it, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide also boasts a wide range of different skill trees for players to specialise in on a per character basis. This essentially means that two players could both choose to be the Ogryn character, but could play that character entirely differently depending on the skill trees that they decided to put points into.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Weapons
Any Warhammer 40,000 title wouldn’t feel right without a sizable arsenal of super deadly weaponry with which to viscerally vanquish the legions of evil before you and thankfully, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide doesn’t skimp at all when it comes to the various tools of murder that you can put your paws on. On the melee side of things, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide allows players to mash up their enemies in close quarters with a force sword, a massive cutlass, a punishing Thunder Hammer and the chainsword that has long been a staple of Warhammer 40,000 games since day one.
Pushing beyond the melee focused formula that so well defined the Vermintide games, developer Fatshark has also provided the player with plenty of firearms to acquaint themselves with. Encompassing everything from handguns to continuously firing autoguns, long-las sniper guns, frag grenades and automatic shotguns, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide boasts an absolute abundance of ways for players to messily do away with Nurgle and his legions of Plaguebearers.
