Warhammer: Vermintide 2 2022 review: Leaving the shadow of the Left 4 Dead

In the world of cooperative action games, Left 4 Dead and the sequel looms large. Numerous games have chased the success of Valve’s zombie horde shooter, but most have stumbled, either unable to capture the ghost, or worse, cleaving too close to the source material. Warhammer: Vermintidewhich was released in 2015, as well as the 2018 sequel, Vermintide 2, are two of the few genre examples that managed to thread the needle. They are structurally reminiscent of the Left 4 Dead series, but still stand out in one important way…

warhammers. And axes, swords, clubs, flails, and halberds; an entire melee suite available to the player. if Vermintide has one central, distinctive feature, it is the reorientation of first-person action away from Left 4 Dead‘s long-range headshots and spray-and-pray tactics, and towards thunderous, jarring blows and frenzied, close-up-and-personal thumps.

Almost half a decade old, Vermintide 2 is itself a shriveled co-op classic. With thousands of players still matchmaking on Steam, and developer Fatshark is about to release his first-person shooter Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (pending further delays), I thought it was worth jumping in again Vermintide for one last fantasy romp to re-evaluate the game’s successes.

Image: Fatshark

One of the Vermintide‘s strongest quality is the attitude. The impact here can’t be underestimated – as a world has been constantly evolving since the early ’80s, Games Workshop’s “Warhammer Fantasy” setting does a lot of the heavy lifting: it absorbs you into its slightly off from the start. whimsical stark dark universe. As I said in my review of Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, Warhammer’s world construction and knowledge, built around small plastic figurines, has a history of doing a lot with relatively little. Warhammer has an uncanny ability to evoke the wonderful feeling of something otherworldly with just a single word. In daemonhunters I became obsessed with terms like “astropathic” and “archeotech”; in Vermintide 2 it is the “Skittergate” that immediately captures the imagination.

Character flexibility is vital to the continued success of Vermintide 2

As with the original game, Vermintide 2 focuses on the threat of the Skaven – a type of vicious, conspiracy rat men who prowl the subterranean world beneath the human kingdoms. It is the Skaven who create the evocative name Skittergate – a Warpstone-powered portal leading to the realms of Chaos and central to the main campaign’s plot. Through the portal arrive the bloodthirsty Norscans, who, along with the Skaven, make up the game’s many enemy hordes.

And Vermintide 2 is very much a game of hordes – of crowds, floods and swarms that, just like the original Left 4 Dead zombies, run over architecture and pour through doors to surround you and your team of heroes. Striking back the horde takes on an almost rhythmic quality as you furiously hack into the oncoming traffic of rats and Chaos warriors. Swipe left, swipe right, make sure your enemies are in front instead of behind – sometimes fighting is a kind of spatial puzzle, more in common with PowerWash Simulator, in which you clean up a ton of messes and trash, then anything resembling a choreographed duel. Distance combat isn’t entirely absent – in some cases it’s a more efficient tool for taking out elite enemies – it’s just more of a punctuation for the melee action.

Image: Fatshark

Almost any hero can specialize – the five characters each have four different “careers” (three, in Sienna’s case, as her last class has yet to be released). Victor Saltzpyre, a witch hunter, who initially feels like a dexterous, lightly armored assassin who is excellent at targeting single enemies, can eventually become a weapon-carrying bounty hunter, or even a heavily armored, hammer-wielding warrior priest. The game’s melee slant makes experimenting with ranged weapons certainly an appealing prospect. But the most important aspect here is the sheer amount of customization: weapons, career options, and playstyles.

This flexibility is critical to the continued success of: Vermintide 2. While the game offers a ton of cosmetic upgrades (sometimes paid for with real money), paintings to collect and hang on the walls of your hub area, and of course looting, none of these feel like the reason people are constantly returning to play. .

Cosmetics feel especially unimportant, due to both the game’s visual age and its muted aesthetic. There is a real dedication to grimdark Gothicism in Vermintide 2 – it’s hard to quantify the number of caves and gray-brown underground warrens you make your way through over the course of a campaign. A level leads you from an underground asylum to a sewer and then finally a catacomb. There are a few outdoor levels that offer more spectacular rural vistas, as well as the “Chaos Wastes” area that makes much better use of Warhammer’s vibrant purples, pinks, and reds. But these are anomalies in an otherwise sedate landscape.

Image: Fatshark

Loot is another aspect that doesn’t contribute that much to Vermintide‘s enduring popularity as one might imagine. It’s a tempting carrot on a string, of course: Tomes and Grimoires are scattered throughout each level, and wearing them requires you to sacrifice a health potion and/or a hefty chunk of life (Grimoires reduce your health by 30%). These books are a classic risk-versus-reward mechanism – take the penalty and complete the mission with them in your possession, and the treasure chest you receive at the end of each level offers better loot. Like all multiplayer level up-athons, the looting creates a compulsive loop, but the constant flow of weapons, trinkets, jewelry, and charms isn’t what I’d consider a game changer. A sword – orange or maybe purple – still works just as you’d expect; a crossbow on “Power Level” 300 behaves just like on Level 5.

It doesn’t take much to unlock every career and try out most of the weapons on offer – and yet, with Fatshark’s continued support and a relatively healthy player base over the years, there are clearly good reasons to keep playing even after you’ve seen everything.

The biggest change in Vermintide 2 over the years it has been free The chaos waste extension. Billed as a new, “roguelite” game mode, it leans on what many love about these types of cooperative action games to begin with: variety.

Image: Fatshark

While the original Vermintide 2 campaigns created a lot of discrepancy, with their own version of Left 4 Dead‘s acclaimed “AI Director,” The chaos waste adds even more ingredients to the mix. Your expedition through the Chaos Wastes is sort of a random mini-campaign and is completely self-contained and non-permanent – you start out with nothing but basic gear, and as you and your team progress you collect coins which can then be turned in at altars to things like improving your weapons, or adding new skills and passive talents to your hero.

The chaos waste introduces a ton of randomness and unpredictability to your game, changing things as fundamental as level construction, blocking certain paths, or moving start and end points, or even vice versa. Loot also plays a more important role, as the game isn’t afraid to let you get overpowered, or even just plain oddly built, with bizarre combinations of blessings. After completion, everything is stripped away. This is Vermintide 2‘s endgame – and its best facet. Forget all cosmetics; forget your “power level”, specific gear or career. Jump into the Chaos Wastes, with friends, and battle your way through the hordes, enjoying the fact that you have no idea what’s next. Since the beginning, Vermintide 2 has had a solid core and captured much of what makes these types of horde games so enduringly popular. But it has also been proven over time that it has something new to offer, with The chaos waste adding some much-needed volatility to this endless procession of fantasy battles.

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