Vermintide 2 is a compulsively playable den of slaughter
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Warhammer: Vermintide II
- Developer- Fatshark
- Publisher- Fatshark
- PC, Xbox One, PS4
Warhammer has got to have what is personally the most off putting, wretched and boring fantasy worlds put to pen and paper. Everything about it, from the aggressive focus on the ugliness of its world to the aggressively unlikable characters with ridiculous names spouting fake ol’ timey insults really represents everything that I personally dislike about fantasy as a genre. Warhammer: Vermintide II is one of the few games good enough to make me put up with that.
Vermintide II builds on the multiplayer format of games like Left 4 Dead and Payday, bringing together 4 players to run through a set of missions and survive a continuous onslaught of enemies. The emphasis here is on melee combat and sheer numbers. The Skaven, Warhammer’s man sized rats, go down fast and bloody, but there are so many you’ll be worn down no matter how well you play. This isn’t a surgical game. While there’s a little bit of finesse to dodging, scoring critical hits and breaking armor, for the most part combat is fast and messy, focusing more on controlling crowds and spaces.
First-person melee combat can be iffy at times, so thankfully Vermintide II gives you a lot of leeway in landing your hits. Attacks have a much longer range than you’d initially expect, and knockback attacks have a wide range to covers a lot of space in front of you. When things get chaotic its usually enough to pick a direction to clear out and swing away. When that’s not good enough you’ll want to drop one of your character skills to get an edge in.
This is where we get to the heart of the game. Vermintide is centered on RPG style character progression and gear. It encourages you to play your role by awarding experience and loot boxes for missions, and funneling those towards unlocking alternate classes and perks to help enhance your playstyle. Progression is paced just fast enough to make it a slow drip, and to encourage you to push yourself to challenge higher difficulties and activate tougher challenges on subsequent attempts. At the same time harder levels are gated by the necessity of better gear.
I’m not a huge fan of this approach. It adds a level of busywork between matches that I could do without, and I’m already tired of seeing the lootbox opening animation. It’s hard to get excited about items that feels so disposable. Other gear and cosmetics show up as well, but that’s not too exciting in a first person game where I’ll never see them. Likewise, the skills only make small adjustments, and they never really felt like they made a huge difference in the way I approached situations. These are systems for people who enjoy seeing numbers climb, and want that treadmill that will keep them compulsively coming back. It’s just not enough for me.
Alongside that are maps that often meander, asking you to hang around areas and complete objectives that aren’t always immediately obvious before moving on. It definitely helps to have someone with experience when tackling them, otherwise its easy to get lost and split apart. Some of that is definitely by design, but depending on the map it can come off as a bit of haphazard busywork. It’s not exactly exciting to run through empty houses opening all the doors or matching runes on doors to find the correct switch.
All of this ends up makes Vermintide II a slow burn. For as straightforward and immediate the combat can be, the game shows its cards slowly over the course of hours. It’s designed to give you a drip feed to slowly work you through its several missions, keeping you running on the treadmill until then, hoping that you’ll be invested enough in your character and gear by the end of it to keep the momentum going on your own. This doesn’t ruin the satisfaction of the slaughter, but the end point of these experiences always ends up making me work a lot more than I’m willing to. I might enjoy the exercise, but I’m not willing to run a marathon.