izigame.me

Darktide is an absolutely fantastic horde combat game brought low by terrible design of it's progression and secondary systems. I'll be comparing to Vermintide 2 heavily here, because Fatshark seems to have learned basically nothing from their last release.
Combat:
Combat is for the most part excellent, fans of Vermintide will be well at home. Notable is that combat feels much better than Vermintide and ranged combat is blended much more cleanly with melee combat. Overall I have few complaints, in fact I wish I could judge the game on combat alone, because if I could this review would be positive. There are a few issues, notable that class balance is very uneven; the Veteran excels at basically everything in the game(although notably, the Veteran was unplayable for three days after launch because of a game breaking bug), the Ogryn excels at horde control and close range combat, where the Psyker falls behind greatly at higher difficulties and the Zealot feels unfinished. Still, all the classes are enjoyable to play up to difficulty 3 out of 5 difficulties.
The Music:
Five stars.
The visuals:
Five stars, but the game runs like shit for most people.
Level Variety:
The first truly noticeable problem in Darktide is that, unlike Vermintide 2, nearly every level in Darktide looks the same. In fact, you may notice in doing a different level, it seems like you're going through parts of another level backwards. Yeah, it's because you are. There is heavy assest reuse in the fairly limited number of maps, with only two areas that I can meaningfully differentiate visually. There is a Throneside map that takes place in a noble area and a Desert map that takes place in, well, a desert. Everything else is the same mishmash of reused industrial hallways. There's set pieces here and there, and I can't really complain about authenticity, because the levels FEEL very 40k. But in VT2 I could immediately tell what level I was in almost all of the time. In Darktide entire rooms are reused completely.
Stability:
Game crashes, a lot. More than the beta.
Progression:
Folks familiar with these games will know that you don't just clear levels once, you clear levels to get gear which you use to tackle harder difficulties. This has been horribly botched. In Vermintide 2, you got a chest after every mission with three items in it, the quality of which were based on the difficulty you tackled, the amount of challenge items you brought back(scriptures and grimoires), the amount you explored(loot dice), and the amount of monstrosities you slew(loot dice), and some RNG. Good players could consistently get the highest end crates by tackling higher difficulties and coming back with 3 scriptures and 2 gimoires, a "full books" run. You were also awarded a chest whenever you gained enough experience for another level, even if you were at the level cap. If you didn't like the items, you could break them down into materials to craft items you did want to use; so if I kept getting blue swords, but I wanted a hammer, I could break down a couple blue swords and get enough materials to make a hammer of my level and upgrade it to a blue. Pretty clean, pretty satisfying, and doing missions was always rewarding since at the very least you were getting materials to upgrade your stuff or reroll perks.
All of this is gone in Darktide. Monstrosities(boss monsters) do not drop loot dice, scriptures and grimoires grant a pathetic amount of XP for returning them(and grimoires are HARDER) when they even spawn in a level, and you only, very rarely, get a single item at the end of a mission whose quality seems completely detached from both the difficulty and the teams performance. So how does one get gear? The geniuses at fatshark have common up with an incredible idea: there's a gear shop with a completely random set of ~10 gear pieces that you can buy that resets hourly, conveniently located next to the real money cash shop, which you have to run past to check the gear store from the hub location. So yes, you will have to run past the cash shop after every other mission to check that maybe the gear shop has something you actually want. The best way to get gear you want is to leave the game open in the background(good luck, it's a resource hog) and check the shop every hour.
Crafting new items of a type you might actually want is not in the game nor is it planned to be, and the community manager has called such a feature lore unfriendly; something which is absolutely not true if you are at all familiar with 40k lore. One of four planned crafting features exists in the full release of this game, which is the ability to upgrade gear a rarity tier in exchange for crafting materials found in missions. These upgraded items have random perks and blessings. Oh, and you have to run past the real money cash shop on the way from the gear store to the crafting shop.
There is one other store for items, which sells stuff in exchange for a weekly currency you get from doing special contracts. These are fairly easy but this shop only resets daily with four higher quality items, but I've yet to see a weapon worth buying in it. The contracts deliver most of their value from completing a full weekly set of them, which is especially frustrating as the contracts often completely bug out and do not progress at all even when you fulfill their requirements.
The Hub:
It's bad. You know how the castle in VT2 loaded quickly and you could switch characters instantly? That takes two loading screens now, I assume because the hub is fully online. And I can't think of a single reason to make the hub a worse experience other than so that you'll look at other players cosmetics. VT2 had just your party in the hub and ran much better. There is a test room with every type of enemy in it now though, so I'll give them credit for that improvement.
Microtranscations & Cosmetics:
I will note that Fatshark, as of 2021, is a subsidiary company of Tencent. If you aren't familiar with Tencent, they are a Chinese company infamous for pumping games full of microtranscations. I have no idea how much influence they have over Darktide's microtranscation model, but there's some predatory design in this game.
As I've mentioned above, the cash shop is positioned so that you have to run past it constantly, and the hub is designed to get you to view other players cosmetics. There are some free cosmetics in the game, but these are either earned by ridiculously stupid challenges, like kill a monstrosity by doing 90% of the damage to it with a single class ability, or ending a mission with zero ammo and 100% accuracy on a class that regenerates ammo when it kills a special, or taking no melee damage for an entire run, or doing an entire run without ever being more than 10m from ANY of your allies. There are also some cosmetics you can buy with in game currency, but they are all recolors. The paid cosmetics are generally better looking, and Fatshark has implemented full FOMO by putting up 2 cosmetic sets each week for each class with no information on what will be coming next rotation or when the cosmetics currently in the shop will be available again.
Fatshark & Broken Promises:
Fatshark is a developer who, even prior to being acquired, had no idea what a timetable was, and often broke their game for months by introducing poorly planned features before going radio silent. This is on full display with this release. The full release of the game is missing advertised weapons, advertised cosmetics, and advertised progression features. I am fairly confident based on the lifecycle of VT2 that these things will be added; eventually. When Fatshark gets around to it. And when that happens this game will probably be worth your time and money. Until then? I'd give it a pass unless you really really love both 40k and VT2, and are willing to play a game that is much worse than VT2 just for the 40k aesthetic.