izigame.me

I am a fan of Warhammer Vermintide, and really enjoyed the features. Darktide makes some improvements but also removed features which made Vermintide so enjoyable. It ended up making Darktide feel like a regression from Vermintide. This is still a fun and enjoyable game, don't get me wrong. Here are just my feelings on the game.
I played most of Vermintide alone with the AI companions and felt they were excellent additions, they stayed alive, helped me, collected items and would pass them to me. They were all around excellent companions. There is no way to play alone in Darktide. You will play with others and if there is an empty slot the AI fills it.
The Vermintide playable characters were Characters, with personalities, voicelines, they made me crack up, I enjoyed listening to them, and they just added to the experience. The Darktide character you play, you get to create, and choose from 3 different personalities per gender! That is a lot of different voices, but they all feel like they have a fraction of the personality or interest of Vermintides characters.
There are many more weapons in Darktide than in Vermintide! At least it looks like that at first until you realize most of the weapons are just a different mark or was manufactured on a different planet. What this means is you usually have 3-5 types of the same weapon to choose from, but they are not interchangeable, have slightly different stats, and different animations. You may find a high rarity version of a weapon you use only to realize it has attack animations you just don't like so you just don't use it.
The Vermintide maps were pretty to look at, they had color, they were grimdark, but they were interesting. Darktide had 101 flavors of grimdark which all felt largely the same. Slums in the sand, slums in the dark, and other non-descript metal hallways, floors, and ceilings for the entirety of your adventure. It had some interesting set pieces, but after playing for a while the missions all started to look the same as I ran through metal corridor after metal corridor.
Vermintides skills were pretty simple, every 5 levels you could choose between 3 perk options. You could then freely change skills as you pleased, picking between any of the 3 per level. It was simple, but it was effective. The skills often had a major impact. It did not change the character to a new class, but there were already 3 classes per character (15 classes, +1 DLC class per character added later). In Darktide you alter your characters class (from 4 different character options) through a flow chart. Most of the level ups gave me bonuses like +5% hp, +5% of something else. I felt I spent more time choosing how to level up and had less to show. In Vermintide if I played a match did not like the perk I picked, I just picked a different one. In Darktide, you have to reset all your perk points and respend them.
I did appreciate the cosmetics store in Darktide accepting the in game currency, but all the best items are locked behind premium currency. I also liked having the store in Darktide sell weapons that I could choose from, but it suffered from having earlier complaint about the weapons being slightly different.
Moving from Vermintide 2 to Darktide, the melee did not feel any better. Instead of just having a health bar you now have a much smaller health bar and regenerating shield/vigor type bar that refills with kills (slightly) or refills over time only if you are in close proximity to the party (or with certain other effects). There was a much bigger reliance in Darktide on your ranged weapon and enemy ranged units tended to be the thing that dealt the most damage to me consistently.
Overall I would recommend Vermintide 2 over Darktide any day of the week. If you love WH40k then Darktide is for you, it is not a bad game, it just feels like a step backwards from Vermintide 2. If you like Vermintide but wanted to shoot more things, Darktide may also be for you. Darktide is also a much more enjoyable game with friends, but that is true of almost any coop game.
I do not recommend this game as it was a disappointment coming from Vermintide 2.