Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide Review

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. That's certainly developer Fat Shark's approach with Warhammer: The End Times -- Vermintide as it takes the Left 4 Dead formula of four-player co-op first-person slaughter and translates it from a zombie apocalypse to the Warhammer fantasy universe. But if you're going to steal from the best, and you can’t quite match the best in execution, you have to add something special. Other than its decent loot system, Vermintide never quite makes a case for itself as something more than a reskin, and while it's always an enjoyably hectic and bloody time, it's very much the student, not the master.

Watch 15 minutes of Vermintide gameplay above.

The entire setup seems like a nod to Shaun of the Dead.

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Vermintide certainly makes a great first impression, steeped in deliciously overdone Warhammer fantasy flavor. A gang of other Warhammer heroes, each with unique and nicely-complementary class abilities, arrive in the medieval city of Ubersreik just as a Skaven rat-man army bursts into the city. They retreat to a heavily fortified inn that becomes their base of operations for the campaign (the entire setup seems like a nod to Shaun of the Dead) and begin their counterattack against the Skaven invasion. Tasks range from the pleasantly mundane, like making a high-stakes food run to make sure your stronghold doesn't starve, to the more bizarre and fanciful, like climbing a wizard's bizarre and beautiful tower to ask for a favor.

Gothic architecture, narrow winding streets, crumbling monuments, and a terrifying and beautiful night sky all bring the setting to life, while strong vocal performances do the same for the characters. Warhammer has always trafficked in archetypes, so as you’d expect, you'll find a haughty elf assassin (whose quick hands with a bow make her the party's Legolas-style machine gunner) trading barbs with a religious dual-pistol wielding Witch Hunter and a jolly, bloody-minded dwarf. None of the characters or their exchanges are quite as memorable as those between L4D's Louis and Francis, for instance, but they do keep reminding you of what an oddball group you've got around you.

Watch the official release trailer above.

A single sword swing will scythe Skaven down by the dozen.

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The problem, however, is that the Skaven simply aren't a menacing adversary, despite the armor and pointy objects. A single sword swing will scythe them down by the dozen, which makes the melee combat feel oddly weightless and unsatisfying. They're so trivial, and your resources so plentiful (ammunition is near-meaningless in this game, especially since most characters predominantly use melee attacks) that there's never a jolt of fear as the Skaven come pouring over walls and out of holes. The fact that each mission is self-contained and fairly short, lasting just about 20 or 30 minutes on average, also means the stakes for failure aren't that high.

That's not to say battles are easy. Some missions are brutal, especially one later in the campaign where you have to gather up grain sacks from around a deserted farm, and nonstop waves of Skaven quickly make the task near-impossible. But while sheer weight of numbers is primarily how Vermintide ramps up the difficulty (along with much scarcer health), that demands very similar answers from the party each time: group up, find a corner, fend off the onslaught, and move ahead again.

Because every character is so heavily reliant on melee, there's less incentive for the squad to split up, meaning that it's very rare anyone gets caught out of position unless they're making an obvious mistake. While Vermintide can be very difficult, the problem is always one of fairly straightforward crowd-control and individual reflexes, and not so much about planning and team tactics.

Vermintide doesn't really encourage map exploration and separation.

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Vermintide employs special enemy types to create additional tactical challenges, and those too are lifted straight out of the L4D playbook. There's the pouncing Assassin that jumps onto players, pins them to the ground, and tears them up until a teammate rescues them (like L4D’s Hunter). There's a gas-bombing Skaven that creates a large toxic cloud (much like the Spitter does in L4D2). But they're less menacing and opportunistic, again perhaps because Vermintide doesn't really encourage the kind of map exploration and separation that could make for the kind of comic disasters that occur in L4D.

So you're left with a lot of hectic, atmospheric sprints from Point A to Point B, without much connective tissue between one mission and the next. Those sprints can be cathartically chaotic as you and your squad mow down legions of Skaven and operate like a fire brigade trying to hold a key location or collect precious resources from a deadly arena, but they don't have a lot of tension or storytelling - environmental or otherwise.

Vermintide is built around a loot and crafting system that encourages you to play missions again and again.

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And you'll run these missions a lot, until they start to feel like MMO raids, because Vermintide is built around a loot and crafting system that encourages you to play missions again and again, with added challenge, in the hopes of finding a better drop. In each mission you can find special dice that will improve your chances after the mission, or you can carry Tomes around in your medical item slot that will add two more dice if you make it to the end of the mission.

Most intriguing, there are Grimoires around the map that will reduce the max health of the entire party if you pick them up, but which guarantee you a successful dice roll at the end of the mission. If you really want the best gear, you have to find all this stuff on each map, and learn how to complete the mission with less health and no ability to bring medicine along with you. It's at the end of these high-stakes loot-runs that Vermintide might come the closest to matching the tension of a Left 4 Dead finale.

It's certainly an effective hook: I was sold on doing loot runs after my Empire soldier replaced his clumsy blunderbuss with a deadly new sniper rifle, but I also became frustrated at how some of the best groups I played with clearly just wanted to go through a level again and again until they had the routine down to a predictable science. Then we'd all go back to the inn and melt down our loot to create new gear, or unlock upgrades.

Verdict

The use of different classes and the evocation of the Warhammer setting is enough to make Vermintide a competent twist on the Left 4 Dead formula, but it doesn't execute them well enough to live up to its inspiration. Even at its best, Vermintide’s co-op horde mode lacks a sense of suspense, and its addictive loot chase can’t fully replace that. As I'm sure any Skaven would tell you, there are better things than being a rat in a maze.

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide Review - IGN (2024)

Verdict