Alright lets start this off positive. I was really enjoying the game and I put several hundred hours into VT2 so I have plenty of experience in these games and I truly enjoy them for what they are but Dark tide has so many flaws with it that I’m draining quickly and losing interest to keep playing fairly fast because of so many poor gameplay design decisions.
My first introduction to games like these was Left4Dead as I’m sure many other people began with too and what that game introduced and perfected in this genre were in my opinion, specials. Zombie hordes were basic, fast, aggressive, and simple the main meat of the game but simply dealing with a wall of meat that runs at you is surprisingly easy once you get general combat spacing and teamwork down and that’s where specials come in.
Specials in my opinion are designed to stir the pot, each one should be a mini boss battle, proficiently dangerous in a specific field with a major flaw to balance out an overwhelming power point. However, where Darktide falls flat on its face and down a flight of stairs is two primary points.
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Specials are not strong in just one respective field, they are overwhelming, they do not lean into a specific trait each of them seems more like a well balanced decent murder machine and that’s what makes them significantly more dangerous and frustrating to deal with then in games like VT2 and left4dead.
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Spawns are completely, utterly, indefensibly, horrible. There are too many specials at once, they spawn in the worst positions, they are free to run off and hide in the spawn rooms like trolls waiting for you to stop looking so they can pop out and hit you with a cheeky one shot, and there is no limit to concurrent special spawns meaning me and the mates can get eaten by a pack of four dogs together ain’t that swell. This point above the general design of the specials needs to be addressed first and foremost because holy mother of mercy there is no level of skill or ‘get gud’ that will save me from 3 ragers 2 crushers 4 dogs 2 trappers 2 flamers and 2 maulers + a plague ogryn or beast of nurgle leading the charge all simultaneously in a single corridor. Like listen, I know God of war Ragnarok just dropped but I’m not trying to 1v99 all of Asgard, I’m not Kratos I’m Larry the failed wizard reject, come on for real its rejects will rise not the gods of mount Olympus.
Now onto each specific special design and their flaws along with how I believe they could be improved to provide a more pleasant gameplay experience. This by no means is a be all end all I’m sure others can think of finer points than me this is just what popped specifically for me and what I think would make these challenges more fun and reasonable to interact with or simply special interactions that I think would make the general gameplay more dynamic.
First on the list is the Poxburster, the failed boomer reject who fails to do anything boomer oriented besides being a heavily armored suicide bomber that is far too tanky for a SUICIDE BOMBER enemy. The effect of this enemy is devastating one good pox burster can launch you or multiple of your team mates into lethal positions, ruin group formation, and deal extremely heavy damage. Now this wasn’t an issue with the boomer yet the boomer from left4dead had an extremely interesting effect that made killing him at close range or not being able to snipe him from a distance punishing. This was his ability to MARK you, an ability I believe should return in Darktide. After being marked hordes could rush you as well as an extremely dangerous gascloud that would force a retreat but naturally this buff in lethality could be offset by making him squishier and easier to take out so that players would have to prioritize this enemy and treat it more like a landmine that you have to avoid rather than a tank that’s just going to run through your shots because your veteran is too busy to pop him for you. Taking out a special should never fall to a single class, each class should be able to do the job, some just better than others. Other than, I really like the sound and visual design of the burster its just a shame his gameplay does not reflect his look in the slightest. This half dead rotting corpse with no armor an anvil strapped to his back and his eyes sewn shut in extreme agony ignores gun shots like a charging bear and that is not ok.
Next are mutant and pox hounds because my god I like the fear of dealing with a fast enemy but these two are JANKY. Dogs can fly into the sun, visit papa nurgle for some headpats, and come back to eat me all in the span of 3 seconds when they aren’t awkwardly clipping around cover structures and teleport/diving back and forth across my screen like a kid suffering from 300 ping in a COD lobby. And whose genius idea was it give the charge enemy the ability to turn on a dime. This is a tanky suppression enemy that doesn’t go down quickly. You should at the very least be able to use cover and smart positioning to abuse this one in particular. I know the grab can be dodged if timed correctly but the window is extremely miniscule and when your fighting a swarm and your stamina won’t regenerate and your dodges are shrinking because of “genius combat design mechanics” and this enemy can instantly run through the swarm without affecting them, knocking any of them down, or hurting anyone besides some poor player. These chargers should have to push down or through the hordes themselves in order to reach the player. If a mutant busts through the swarm to instagrab someone then the swarm should be downed like an ogryn just used his ability. Dogs should also need a clear line of site to leap on a player which they don’t because I’ve seen these dogs trick shot themselves around corners in order to catch some poor person who didn’t want to have their booty eaten by a Pitbull with jaundice that day but the dog just watched the wanted movie before this round so he’s about to curve like a bullet. In terms of strength and health I have no beef with these two, I think the scaling and strength of these two is wonderful, they are just extremely JANKY. Dogs need patches to improve their movements, mutants need to impact the hordes with their charges and they shouldn’t be able to instantly turn and abuse players as much as they do. A straight charge can be just as devastating as this one without the added BS factor of him having better footwork than Floyd Mayweather.
Next is a personal favorite, the Ragers. Ragers, while not the hardest enemy to take out and by no means the most annoying but definitely one of the hardest to deal with when they are ripping you a new one from the safety of the swarm. I know these enemies are meant to act like a suppression unit that locks you up and prevents hyper aggression but unlike the well designed plague rats from vermintide 2 who had a combo that locked them in place so you could dodge away and zip back in to finish them off instead they remain FIRMLY GLUED to your buns. No amount of blocking, parrying, or dodging will save you from these poorly designed spam factories in a 1v1 because YOU CAN’T PARRY. In VT2 focusing your guard on the target swinging at you provided a relatively high amount of defensibility in Darktide however if an enemy sneezes on me my guard is likely to break leaving me stunned and my cheeks wide open for a rager to ruin my life. The only way to justify the stickiness of this spam swinging enemy is to either make him less sticky so I can actually dodge and disengage to avoid having my guard smashed open or give me back a guard that actually works so that I can defend myself from the spam city reject. Or, perhaps to mitigate the extreme strength of this enemy in swarms make it so that while he rages he also hits his allies leaving the players opening to put him down.
Demolishers and maulers in my opinion are perfect in their current state, I have no issue. You can avoid their attacks and they act like the wall armored heavy hitters they are. They fill the role they were made for without over stepping into other roles that would make them frustrating.
As for the shooter specials they could use some QOL enhancements like flamers should have explosive backpacks which can detonated with precision shots or strikes, gunners should have to rev up their miniguns and plant themselves before unloading on you, trappers should have better distinct warning noises like the poxburster to mark them out as the dangerous mission ending enemies they are. Toughness shouldn’t instantly vanish when you graze a fire so that you can actually mitigate some of the unavoidable damage created by bombers, either that or reduce the explosion radius for bomber grenades since in most of the areas these can cover the majority of a platform. Lastly, the gunner enemies need to more consistently switch to melee when they are engaged the amount of times where they just ignore you and continue to rail you at point blank makes fighting and actually getting the drop on a pack of gunners extremely ungratifying as they turn and all unload in your face shredding your health bar instantly for something you can barely avoid or can’t avoid at all due to the general nature of the game.
These were just how I feel about the game and how specials and shooters need some tuning before the game can actually settle into a comfortable enjoyable skill based scenario. In its current state the game is too unbalanced to be truly enjoyable especially on the harder difficulties, no amount of skill mitigates the unreasonable garbage hurled in your face, from the ridiculous spawns to the lack of options to deal with the challenges you are presented. They either need to make players and their weapons stronger or they need to make specials and their traits weaker.