“There’s a globadier!”
“Where?”
“Dunno, the witch hunter dude just yelled it.”
“Okay, okay, but where is it?”
“I think it’s dead now. Oh, there is a ratling somewhere.”
“Yeah, but whereeeeeee…?”
The core gameplay will be really familiar to people who played Left 4 Dead before. You have a group of four characters, some will be controlled by you, the rest by the AI, and you have to fight hordes of things to do something/escape through a series a missions.
The game is of course not set in a zombie apocalypse, but rather in the fantasy world of Warhammer, so instead of controlling gun-toting survivors, you have… heroes(?) I guess. Oh, and you are not killing zombies, you are genociding skaven, which are basically sentient giant rats.
Vermintide has five playable characters, four will show up for each mission: a witch hunter, a bright wizard, a dwarf ranger, a waywatcher (aka. elf archer), and an empire soldier.
Once you picked your characters you arrive at a tavern, check for upgrades, swap out your equipment, then sign up for a mission, slay hundreds of rats, find ammo, potions, etc, finish the mission goals, and then escape. Then you are back at the tavern, and the cycle starts again.
This game should be our ultimate favourite. We are Warhammer fans, we like Left 4 Dead, we love co-op games, so this game should be in our top 10, right? Right?
The Good
Well. I can’t really think of a good thing to say here. I like Warhammer, so kudos for the setting? But then the game still feels sort of bleak and boring, even though the Warhammer universe has really great stuff in it (e.g. Tzeentch, Nurgles, etc, anything but boring giant rats). Whoops, I guess I ended up writing something negative in the Good section.
The Bad
Okay, so the main problems with the game is that it is just soooo boring, I can’t emphasise how out-of-our-minds-bored we were while playing this action-packed first-person fighter/shooter game. Let’s try to figure out why is Vermintide so boring.
The enemies just blur together. I had to google the names of the special rats because I couldn’t remember them. And this is weird because the last time I played Left 4 Dead was about eight years ago, and I still remember the Witch, the Tank, and I think there is also a Smoker. In Vermintide it is just a tidal wave (pun intended) of rats who look pretty much the same and the strategy for fighting each of them also happens to be the same.
The levels are very samey. I love fantasy settings, I am a sucker for great towns, magical towers, forests, etc, but I am really struggling with remembering anything unique about the levels in Vermintide.
There are five classes in the game, but they are barely distinguishable. Everyone has a melee weapon and a ranged weapon and you swap between them as needed. It feels like a stretch calling them classes, these are different heroes, who have different weapons, but play pretty much the same.
So the heroes are dull, and on top of that the combat itself is boring. It is very hectic, you just click around your screen until all the rats are gone, I really don’t feel like there is much strategy to it.
There is very little “progress” you can make through the game. You can get better equipment, sure, but that won’t change your playstyle of slashing around wildly around yourself. Each mission feels the same, you do the same things the same way over and over again.
The comments of the NPC heroes are the most annoying thing ever, someone might randomly scream “globa-bloby rat thingy” and you frantically start looking around, but it’s pretty hard to spot anything special through the hordes of rats, so after a while you just give up and move on. There is no minimap or anything that would give you an indication of where are things happening. I feel like this is a design flaw. I also have to mention that none of the rats are very dangerous so I don’t feel like I have to pay attention. There is no Witch-from-Left-4-Dead-equivalent in this game.
And this is where I should mention that we haven’t actually finished the game. Got distracted by other not-so-terrible games.
The Co-Op
You can resurrect each other, but usually the NPC heroes take care of that. Since combat is just random slashing you can’t exactly synergies or do clever strategies, so I don’t think there is much co-operation in this game.
The Recommendation
Don’t recommend it, it is boring and dull. Play Left 4 Dead or anything else.
Info
| Release Year | 2015 |
| Genre | First-Person Shooter, Hack and Slash |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 1 hour per mission |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Terrible |