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If you played Vermintide 2 on release, then this game will unfortunately remind you of that.

To start with the positives, the actual gameplay is pretty great. Smacking enemies feels good, shooting them feels great, watching heads fly and limbs fall off is a satisfying experience. Working with a cohesive, coordinated team on Damnation (The hardest difficulty at the time of this review) was an amazing experience, one I want to repeat ad infinitum. The levels look amazing, the music is fantastic, it all blends well, so the presentation gets top marks.

Unfortunately, the fun stops there. There is a multitude of glaring issues that makes me not want to play the game and sucks any enjoyment I feel right out.


Starting with the absolutely insane shop. Not the cash shop to purchase cosmetics, the in-game store where you purchase weapons/curios. The weapons/curios presented are RNG, and the shop refreshes every hour. This is your core endgame loop. Waiting an hour to see if there is a weapon you want with decent stat bars to appear. There isn't a weapon you want to use/it has terrible stats? Unfortunate for you, wait another hour.
You can beat missions and have a chance to get a weapon. Which, again, is completely random. You probably won't get the weapon you want, and even if you do, the stats are also random to an extent so you can be gifted a weapon at level 30 that is worse than your current one you got at level 8. This system just sucks.
There also doesn't appear to be any real reason to run higher difficulty missions outside of higher resource gain for the crafting system. (which isn't even fully implemented yet, mind you!)
I have gotten more, and better, higher tier weapons running lower difficulty missions than higher difficulty missions. This makes me want to continuously run lower difficulty missions because they are faster and easier, for what are probably the same rewards. Sure, I get less plasteel and diamantine, but I also have absolutely nothing to spend it on anyway.


Next is the penance system. It is bad. There is no other way around it. A penance is basically an achievement that rewards you with character/ui cosmetics upon completion. A majority of these are fine. What isn't fine are the the character specific ones. They are often quite difficult to get, which is fine, rewarding players for doing hard things with cosmetics is good. What isn't good, the BIGGEST flaw of these challenges, is that they are aimed at actively griefing your team, OR, the team can accidentally ruin your penance run very easily.
It sucks to get friends together and say "Hey, for this mission, can we play in a very specific, unfun way for everybody so I can get some fancy pants." Now imagine saying that to a group of randoms.



The mission board is random. That means if you want to play a specific mission of a specific difficulty, for fun or for a penance or whatever, you are at the mercy of RNG. You can't select specific missions or difficulties. You just have to hope they are available on the mission board. This also applies to secondary objectives, so if you have a weekly challenge of "Complete 6 secondary objectives on HL-16-36" (I made up the mission name, I'm not bothered remembering the codenames for them, they're all equally dumb.) you are subject to praying. Praying that the game will drop that specific mission on a difficulty you are comfortable with a secondary objective. If you have limited time to play games during the week, I am sorry.


And that all pales to just how buggy the game is.
Completing a frustrating penance and the reward isn't given to you. A sniper spawning behind a wall which they can shoot through but you can't thus ending your run. The current tier-4 difficulty is bugged to always be hi-engagement, spawning double bosses and massive hordes. Your weekly challenge not being progressed because you joined a mission 5 seconds after everybody spawned in. A dog tackles you through a wall and then you're stuck there forcing you to quit and rejoin. If the game allows you to rejoin, it may not, it's completely random. Getting a curio that gives you +15% of your 100 toughness, but it only gives you 12 toughness total because math is hard.

Optimisation is a mess. Some missions run fine, get 100-120 fps on high settings steadily. Some missions run terribly delving into 20fps no matter the settings. Notably the investigation missions, for some reason, they are REALLY badly optimised.
The game crashes randomly. Take out a grenade? That's a crash. Open a menu? That's a crash. Loading? Yeah, crash. Then you can play for 8 hours straight and not even have a single hiccup. It is strange.
Loading times range from 15 seconds to entire minutes. This isn't just based on other people loading into a mission, simply loading into the hub from starting the game can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

The balance is also terrible, between the classes and weapons. I personally don't care for meta but when a team of 4 Veterans using nothing but Power Swords can beat a Damnation difficulty level easier than any other group type, something is wrong. There are feats of some classes that are just awful, most notably the Psyker class. The Plasma Gun is awful. Some staves are complete junk. Half of Ogryns weapons are detrimental to use. It's not even a problem with "They fill a niche and aren't perfect 100% of the time." Not at all. It's more "There is one weapon, and another weapon which is just that one but better in every single way." There's weapons with niche uses, like the Devil Sword with a parry, or the Shield for Ogryn which makes them practically invincible. These are good, they have a specific role that they can do extremely well in the right hands. Then there's the Plasma Gun, which can fire about two decent shots and then it will kill you. Or you can use the Boltgun which melts hordes, staggers hordes and specials, mops the floor with pretty much any non-boss enemy and even then it's still REALLY good against bosses.
You COULD take the Shield and be really tanky and hope your team is smart enough to capitalise on it, or you can bring the Bull Butcher and just delete the horde yourself.
This isn't including blessings or perks because, just like the weapons, some are outright better than others. Getting +4% reload speed 0.5 seconds after sliding. Useless. Replenish 50% toughness over time during Continuous Fire that stacks up to 5 times? Amazing. Both can appear on the same gun. If you're a meta-slave, you'll hate this game.


The game is a mess. The game should be considered still in Early Access. It will probably get better, like Vermintide 2. Its just sad to see that Fatshark are repeating their mistakes rather than learn from them.

This game is not good.
The gameplay is incredibly repetitive, thankfully there's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ content so you probably won't notice by the time you get bored. It was very obvious they were going to pump out DLC like crazy and hope people were still playing by the time they released it.
The lack of co-op wasn't a big deal for me, but it really feels like this game was made with co-op in mind, which makes some design choices very confusing.
The game is optimised like ass. It might have gotten better through updates, but on release, it was horrendous.
Characters range from alright to unlikable. There were only 2 characters who weren't incredibly cringey/annoying (Oni and Scheherazade).

Don't buy it.
Or even pirate it.
Seriously.