The Vermintide That Binds: A Challenging, Fun Warhammer Game
“Try not to die .. it’s so burdensome to have to do your job and mine,” Kerillian the Waystalker yelled out to me as she notched another arrow and fired into a gibbering pack of Skaven ratmen. “Focus on the task at hand and be silent,” riposted Victor Saltzpyre, the Witch Hunter Captain who I controlled. In the background I could hear Sienna Fuegonasus the Bright wizard tossing explosive fireballs into a batch of Chaos Northmen who had come over a stone wall to flank us. “What does an elf knowing about killing?” shouted Bardin Goreksson the dwarf who charged forward in his Ironbreaker heavy armor and knocked over a ratling gunner before it could bring to bear the heavy warp thrower gun held in its crooked claws. Another threat loomed off in the distance as a sorcerer summoned a mystical tornado that scattered my team and allowed the Skaven horde or circle us and eventually overwhelm us. Even the strong tank, Markus Kruber, couldn’t slay them fast enough to keep us from being wiped out.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a first-person multiplayer game developed by a small company called Fatshark Games that had also developed the first Vermintide and another lesser known game called Krator (an RTS co-op game). Vermintide 2 takes place in the fictional universe of Warhammer created by the tabletop company Games Workshop. The setting of the game takes place in “The End Times” where the world began to sink into the apocalypse and all the factions fought for the end of the world. The game plays like a high fantasy Left for Dead where the character you play constantly interacts with the other ones via in game conversations, quips and commentary on everything around them. The bantering has a nice feeling of camaraderie and one-upsmanship akin to Gimli and Legolas.
Each character has a talent and profession tree that lets them to branch out into specializations that allowed for a strong and diverse play set for the players. Victor Saltzpyre the Witch Hunter Captain can branch into another profession like Bounty Hunter or Zealot, each with a different combat style, ultimate attack and buffs that are separate from the other profession. That coupled with the ability to use different types of weapons as opposed to having to be locked into one solid weapon set allows for a character to wield weapons that the player feels is more fitting for their play style, be it a rapier for speedy attacks or a flail that impacts hard and works for crowd control.
The game is absolutely gorgeous and the music, atmosphere and feel of the game really rings of the Warhammer universe. The A.I. Spawn Director does a solid job of randomizing spawn points and at times it almost seems to have a sadistic edge to it by tossing in some hard hitting enemies among the low level hordes. You can be turning the tide on an attack only for one of your teammates to be yanked away by a Skaven Packmaster who causes you to shift focus from the front line to whatever has disabled your teammate. Other times you might be attacked from behind by a Gutter Runner assassin who, like the Hunter from L4D, pins you down and mauls you until it kills you or someone helps you. Sometimes the difficulty of the game scales high in a way that almost seems unfair. One moment you and your friends could be holding your own and then the game spawns an incredibly tough mini boss like a bile troll or chaos spawn and now you’re fighting a horde, a flanking horde and a incredibly tough boss and whatever other special enemies that it spawns like armored rats, armored Rotblood Northmen or more Gutter Runners.
The tide of war can shift so quickly and the difficulty can escalate so fast that it’s hard for players to redress and take on the changes, which can be frustrating and a big turn off to new players. Even seasoned ones could get tired of fighting for 20 minutes only to be abruptly overwhelmed and taken out in the middle of the battle. Hopefully the developers of the game will tweak the Spawn Director to space out these random and tough spawns. Despite that shortcoming, I really enjoyed Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and continue to have it in my rotation of games. Its definitely a heck of a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to see where Fatshark Games plans on taking the game with its DLCs.
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