Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide – Review
Warhammer, a classic game known and loved by many has just gotten another virtual game on its name. Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide is a pure action game by heart where you slay the filthy Skaven rats and rid them out of your town. Take on the role of one of five heroes and battle them to the death!
Story
Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide takes place in Ubersreik, a city that’s overrun. Your mission is to take on the role of one of the five heroes and work cooperatively in order to fight back the hordes of rat-men known as the Skaven. The battles will take place in and around Ubersreik until all of the Skaven have been dealt with and won’t dare to come back.
The story in End Times – Vermintide is pretty non-existent. You get a little story introduction in the cinematic before the game starts but that’s pretty much it. It tells you what you already know once you start the game, the city is overrun by Skaven and you have to kill them, no more, no less. You then go on some errand missions to keep the town supplied until you find out what’s the cause of the Skaven assault and then you deal with it. All very simple and linear, there’s no huge story value to be found.
Graphics
When you look at graphics, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide scores very good. The graphics look extremely well, realistic and really contribute to the action in the game. End Times’ atmosphere is very dark as well which helps emphasize the dark story line where you’re at a last stand during the onslaughts.
Performance wise, this game is pretty demanding, which is to be expected with graphics like these. The minimum system requirements aren’t a system that your average casual gamer will have. To be able to play the game on high or extreme, you’ll pretty much need a 4K ready setup, which very little people have.
Sound
When it comes to sound, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide scores good again. The music is extremely good, the game has ominous music ready for you when you’re dwelling in alleyways and has pure action music when you’re engaging in a big fight with a horde of Skaven. Sound effects are also very good, there’s a big diversity of effects and they go together really well with the actions they’re combined with, which is obviously a plus.
Gameplay
As briefly mentioned before, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide is a pure action game. You fight your way through hordes of Skaven in order to complete your objective and escape without a scratch (or a lot of scratches). The controls are pretty simple to get used to, you use left click for a regular attack or fire, hold left click for a heavy attack, right click for blocking and left while blocking for pushing. Movement is done with the good old WASD keys and the rest is pretty self explanatory, if it isn’t try holding F1 while in the game, it will explain everything!
Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide has a total of five classes for you to pick between. You have the Witch Hunter, a master of precision, the Waywatcher, the most agile of the five, the Empire Soldier, a character who prefers fighting on the front lines, the Dwarf Ranger, the loudest and most social of the group and the Bright Wizard, a pyromaniacal fanatic with a wicked sense of humor.
Each class has its own unique play style. The Witch Hunter’s weapon of choice is a rapier and dual pistols, which are most suited for precision. The Waywatcher uses dual daggers or swords and a bow for ranged kills, the Empire Soldier prefers to use big weapons and a blunderbuss, ideal for crowd control. The Dwarf Ranger uses heavy weaponry like an axe and shield accompanied by a hand gun, cross bow or some other ranged weapons and the Bright Wizard uses magic weaponry to achieve spectacular results.
Your enemy is obviously the Skaven army and consists of a large group of forces. There’s the Clanrats: your ordinary enemies, the Skavenslaves: the lowest of low, the Stormvermin: heavy armored enemies, the Poison Wind Globadiers: poisonous enemies, the Gutter Runners: stealthy assassins and many more… You’ll have to find out for yourself if you want to know all of the enemies!
You’ll receive all of your tasks from the mission board. This is simply a map that highlights all of the missions you can start. For each mission you can select a number of options like party type (public or private) and some advanced options as well as the difficulty. During each mission, you’ll have to stick together with your team of four and complete all of the objectives and then escape once you’re done.
During each mission, you can find some equipment that you can use to help your team. These can be healing items, bombs, potions, ammunition and more. You can also find loot dies, which serve a special purpose. After each mission you can participate in Ranald’s Bones. This is a big pot where you can roll dies, like the well known Warhammer games. The more good rolls you have on your dies, the better loot you’ll get for your heroes.
You can equip your heroes with numerous weapons like melee weapons, ranged weapons, trinkets and more. These can benefit you greatly as some have special effects for you to help you. To unlock these special effects, the game introduces a Forge mechanism. You can use the Forge to combine five items of equal rarity and get one item of the rarity above that, you can also upgrade an item which has an upgrade slot and disassemble items so you can use the materials to upgrade.
Other than that, there’s not much to say… You’ll burn through most of the content (on normal) in about six hours and after that it’s just rinse and repeat on a harder difficulty. The game also has quite a few glitches when being grabbed or in precarious situations, like a rattling gunner shooting at you through the bottom of the platform he’s standing on. Hopefully most of these will get fixed a little bit down the road.
Conclusion
Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide has some very nice features under its belt like fun classes to play and extremely convincing combat, accompanied by good graphics. The only downsides are that the story isn’t as detailed as we’d hoped it’d be and there’s quite few content, on top of some bugs which appear pretty often. Soon enough, most of these things will hopefully be addressed, other than that, it’s a great game.
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[…] a year ago, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide was released for PC and also passed our revue, in the meantime it has found its way to Xbox One and PS4. Since it managed to rake great scores on […]
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