Recent reviews by Spelli

It's been 7 months since release.

The game is still beta quality at best, and a glorified tech demo at worst.

Bugs that make the game unplayable at times are still commonplace:
- Hit registration not working. Which is horrible for a game that has twitch-shooter components. Very bad when you pretty much have to sometimes rely on stagger from your melee attacks to not be overwhelmed. Or fire a full boltgun volley into an elite at close range, every bullet hits, but your enemy healthbar mod tells you that the elite has taken exactly zero damage.
- Weapon switch not working. Unacceptable when you're stuck in melee but the game insists on having your ranged weapon out so you can't block. Or you're Psyker at 100% peril, switch to melee, left click to swing, and the game instead pops back to staff and does a warp attack, making you explode.
- Netcode overall is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, as are some fundamental network design decisions like weapon switch being server-side.
- General latency issues. I am monitoring my network connection on a second screen while playing. Sitting on a gigabit pipe in a large city, wired connection, 12-20ms ping to google, zero packet loss, yet according to DT ping mod I have 60-120ms to the game server? Darktide lost 95% of its player base since release, so it can't be server capacity issues.
- Missing audio still happens. Which is terribad when there's a disabler behind you but you can't hear it.
- Sometimes, enemies will spawn right in front of you
- Visual bugs are still there. I've had invisible enemies, invisible teammates, HUD disappearing, RTX being on when settings say it's off, etc.

Fatshark also keeps re-introducing bugs like pox hounds being janky and not being able to switch loadout in pre-game lobby every other patch. It's like they have no version control system, or are so deep into 10y+ of spaghetti code in their little VT homebrew engine that nobody knows what side effects anything they do will have,
The game does look absolutely gorgeous. When you have a 2000€+ PC. And even then the game doesn't smoothly run at 60fps at 4K max settings.
Fatshark seems to have a plethora of overpaid artists, but not a single competent programmer that is actually allowed to fix things. Less game designers, more game developers, please. We don't need people churning out 8K textures for cosmetics when the fundamental plumbing of your game is still broken.
I would accept half the visual fidelity if they actually fixed the incredible rot inside their game engine and seriously tackled bugs.

Though I am loathe to do this, case in point: I'm playing more and more Deep Rock Galactic for co-op multiplayer now. Which is a game with washed out 2000s era graphics, But gameplay is top notch and bugs are mostly a non-issue. Networking is leagues ahead despite not having dedicated servers and being p2p instead, even when there's hundreds of enemies on screen. And it's made by a tiny team.

I want to love Darktide, I really do.
The core gameplay feels extremely satisfying. When it works. If it works.
But the continuous frustration of losing game after game where you know and can see on screen that it wasn't your fault, but instead the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you over again and again.. it just drives you away. There's plenty of YT videos showcasing this, from the closed beta to this day.
I will still pop into Darktide from time to time, because I love 40K and the X-tide genre too much. But if you're just someone who wants to play a game that actually works and is worth the money in the state it's currently in, stay away.