Darktide 001
Come back in a year or two, the core gameplay is fun but half my playtime is trying to get the game to run above 30fps. Got all the characters to lvl 30, played a lot of the hardest available difficulty and I'm calling it there.
The Good
The art direction, the gameplay and the soundtrack are fantastic. It's the core hybrid combat system that was refined in VT2, mechanically rich fun and rewarding gameplay where you feel like you are constantly making decisions. The audio/visual feedback on obliterating a poxwalker with your choice of lovingly juiced 40k weaponry is excellent. The crack of lasguns and the clashing of metal as you block, dodge and shoot alongside 3 allies feels great.
I'm a fan of 40k, I collect and play the tabletop and visually the game is fantastic. The sprawling mess of the hab city, the beautiful muckulent virulence of nurgles followers. From psychotic psykers crackling with warp energy to the barbaric and oppressive feeling of the manufactories and hab blocks; you can really see the attention to detail that has gone into making the universe of 40k visually impressive, but also readable, understandable and enjoyable to navigate as a video game. You truly feel like a cog in the imperiums bombastically horrifying war machine.
The Extremely Bad
I would be here all day however trying to list the other issues the game currently has;
Missing game content on "release", extremely poor optimisation on low end and high end machines, very rough server quality with frequent disconnects and poor hit registration, very questionable balancing choices, buggy and broken enemys, extremely lacklustre progression (both nonexistant and heavily RNG reliant when present), extremely lacking matchmaking, extremely braindead Bots to replace players, confusing UI and stat layouts that are often just broken or nonexistent, lack of any real end game content, lack of any kind of story progression (what is currently there is either very shallow, or heavily "implied"), predatory cash shops, bugs, crashes when loading, crashes while playing, crashes while standing around doing nothing, crashes while crashing to desktop. I feel like im holding my computers head under the water trying to play this game.
TL;DR SHUT UP! I DON'T CARE!!! STOP TALKING YOU'RE WEIRD!
You are paying full price for an early access title that may take years to have these issues listed addressed properly.
