WARHAMMER 40,000: DARKTIDE
Robert Jones: Even knowing Fatshark’s heritage in needing to seriously keep developing its games after release, I was still absolutely mad as hell when Warhammer 40,000: Darktide launched. The game was not only so janky and broken that, one time, it took me seven crashes with restarts to finish a single run, but it also shipped with key chunks of the game missing. It wasn’t just me who was spitting with rage, either, with thousands of reviews on Steam at launch leading to the game getting a ‘Mostly Negative’ badge of shame.
Despite this, though, I could see the potential for the game and noted that at the time. When it worked I had a blast. A year later and Darktide, while still recognizably the same game, has gone through a vast amount update patches that have brought the game to the level it should of been at launch. And crucially, despite a rocky first year, the game and community still very much feel alive, and more upgrades are incoming from Fatshark, too. This is a game that is absolutely ongoing in the right direction, something evidenced by recent Steam reviews of Darktide now leading to a ‘Very Postitive’ badge of honor.
Sean Martin: It was hard not to be initially disappointed by Darktide, especially when it came with such a strong foundation of gameplay and a unique perspective among most 40k games in terms of highlighting the human characters in the setting. A game set in a hive world co-authored by Dan Abnett sounds like an absolute dream to me, so it’s a real shame that it’s taken so long for Darktide to get to a good place. But it is in a good place. Fatshark has slowly but surely made good on its quality of life promises, plus the class overhauls add far more variation to playstyle. Hopefully now the game is stable, it can start fulfilling the narrative promise of Atoma Prime and the setting’s potential.
Robin Valentine: The thing about Darktide is, the core of it has always been good. The shooting is explosive and loud, the atmosphere is perfectly grimdark, and the music finds a wonderful new sound for the Warhammer 40K universe. Now I take every new patch as just an excuse to dive back into blasting heretics.