Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is a coop game where you have to kill ceaseless waves of ratmen, the Skaven, to survive, in a fashion very similar to Left 4 Dead. I spent my last two weeks playing this game with a group of friends and indeed, many, many rats I killed. It was very fun, I liked it a great deal. It packs lots of hours of good coop fun.
Vermintide is set on the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and you have to pick between a selection of five characters (but your party is limited to four) to defend against the Skaven, a race of rats (evil, malicious ratmen!) and complete different objective-based maps. If you're succesful you get a dice roll and a chance to get better gear, which you keep permanently. You also get EXP for your efforts, no matter if you win or your whole team perishes.
It is very similar to Left 4 Dead, there's waves of enemies, special enemies, a likeable cast of characters, items to increase survivality scattered across maps and it features a first person perspective. Vermintide mixes things up by making each character has its own set of weapons and changing the objective from "going from saferoom to saferoom" to making the player complete a series of objectives, which have some variation from map to map, with no checkpoints in between. All great fun! The characters and weapons feel truly different from each other, role and gameplay-wise respectively. Some weapons are faster, some are ranged, some have bigger swings, stuff like that. The selection is not that big, but it's varied enough for me. There's also "trinkets" that you can equip which provide different percentual buffs, that allow to tailor a little bit more your equipment to the needs of your team. In lower difficulties this doesn't matter much, but on the higher, and specially the last difficulty, you'll need comunication and precise coordination. It's really a great experience when the whole team is entirely focused on the action and in rat slaying. But it sucks when someone is ill-equipped, because is very noticeable.
This brings me to what I dislike about the game, and what I really don't like is the decision of making getting weapons and trinkets so luck dependant. You only get one piece of gear (any kind of weapon or trinket) each time you complete a level. There's also daily quests, but again you have to be lucky to have a quest with a piece of equipment you'd want. As you only get one piece of equipment, and weapons are character-based, many victories can pass without you getting a better for your character. The alternative would be to gather good items for all characters, and that will take a LOT of time (unless you search the internet for the best way to farm, which I think is the reason I didn't reached 100+ hours of playtime, but gets dull). Other stuff I didn't liked so much was that the movement felt a little clunky, or maybe in some maps there's too much mini-clutter? I'm not sure, but I feel like I got stuck way too many times in the direst of hours. Could be a skill issue, though. Maybe I just suck. But what I think truly sucks is to play this solo. I don't believe this game would be as nearly enjoyable as it is when playing with a full group of pals playing with the other characters as it is when playing alone. The IA is not very good, although you can address that with mods, it is not a complete solution.
Not much else to say, I really enjoyed my time with this game and had a lot of fun fighting the hordes of rats with my fellow exterminators, and I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel. I would recommend this game to any group of friends looking for a Left 4 Dead-like experience, with some elements of progression over time peppered in. But be prepared to submit yourselves to the will of the dice and to face the endless Vermintide.
Vermintide is set on the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and you have to pick between a selection of five characters (but your party is limited to four) to defend against the Skaven, a race of rats (evil, malicious ratmen!) and complete different objective-based maps. If you're succesful you get a dice roll and a chance to get better gear, which you keep permanently. You also get EXP for your efforts, no matter if you win or your whole team perishes.
It is very similar to Left 4 Dead, there's waves of enemies, special enemies, a likeable cast of characters, items to increase survivality scattered across maps and it features a first person perspective. Vermintide mixes things up by making each character has its own set of weapons and changing the objective from "going from saferoom to saferoom" to making the player complete a series of objectives, which have some variation from map to map, with no checkpoints in between. All great fun! The characters and weapons feel truly different from each other, role and gameplay-wise respectively. Some weapons are faster, some are ranged, some have bigger swings, stuff like that. The selection is not that big, but it's varied enough for me. There's also "trinkets" that you can equip which provide different percentual buffs, that allow to tailor a little bit more your equipment to the needs of your team. In lower difficulties this doesn't matter much, but on the higher, and specially the last difficulty, you'll need comunication and precise coordination. It's really a great experience when the whole team is entirely focused on the action and in rat slaying. But it sucks when someone is ill-equipped, because is very noticeable.
This brings me to what I dislike about the game, and what I really don't like is the decision of making getting weapons and trinkets so luck dependant. You only get one piece of gear (any kind of weapon or trinket) each time you complete a level. There's also daily quests, but again you have to be lucky to have a quest with a piece of equipment you'd want. As you only get one piece of equipment, and weapons are character-based, many victories can pass without you getting a better for your character. The alternative would be to gather good items for all characters, and that will take a LOT of time (unless you search the internet for the best way to farm, which I think is the reason I didn't reached 100+ hours of playtime, but gets dull). Other stuff I didn't liked so much was that the movement felt a little clunky, or maybe in some maps there's too much mini-clutter? I'm not sure, but I feel like I got stuck way too many times in the direst of hours. Could be a skill issue, though. Maybe I just suck. But what I think truly sucks is to play this solo. I don't believe this game would be as nearly enjoyable as it is when playing with a full group of pals playing with the other characters as it is when playing alone. The IA is not very good, although you can address that with mods, it is not a complete solution.
Not much else to say, I really enjoyed my time with this game and had a lot of fun fighting the hordes of rats with my fellow exterminators, and I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel. I would recommend this game to any group of friends looking for a Left 4 Dead-like experience, with some elements of progression over time peppered in. But be prepared to submit yourselves to the will of the dice and to face the endless Vermintide.
BANGER