Warhammer 40,000 fans keep on winning, with the excellent Darktide's servers now live for those fans devoted enough to pick up the game's Imperial Edition. The full release is next week on PS5, on 3rd December, where a universe of endless, four-player cooperative carnage awaits.
Swedish developer Fatshark has been on quite a Warhammer kick recently. Releasing the similarly first-person, Left 4 Dead-inspired melee carnage simulator Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide in 2015, this was followed by a more polished sequel, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, in 2018. Leaving the realm of fantasy behind for Games Workshop's sci-fi universe, Darktide retains the melee focus and is the product of a refined combat system that wonderfully simulates intensely claustrophobic, pulse-pounding combat.
Players are tasked with removing the cancer from the Hive City of Tertium. This horrific city spans continents and is home to miserable billions, who toil on the industrial world of Atoma Prime. Riddled with mutants, heretics, and most repugnant of all, the rotting followers of the Plague-Father, Nurgle, players are tasked with tearing out this infection, root and branch, in the endless tunnels, sewers, and manufactorums that make up the under-city. This is made much harder as players are cast as regular, misfit humans, the dregs of the Hive, a far cry from the super-human, god-like combat prowess of the Space Marines.
