Above: Vermintide has a number of different missions to tackle, and collectively they tell a story.
What you won’t like
The inevitable slog
I see a future for myself with Vermintide, but I don’t think I want to pursue it.
I’m still having fun getting through all the missions with both friends and random players, but in order to continue climbing the loot mountain, I’m going to have to start playing on higher difficulties. Hard feels like a good middle spot right now, as I’m still getting weapons of the highest rarity (Exotic). But if I want better chances of those weapons dropping, of gaining levels more quickly in order to receive more weapons to craft into better ones, I’m going to have to start playing on Nightmare or higher. And having played a mission on Nightmare a few times, it’s not going to be fun.
So while I still want to keep playing Vermintide, I don’t feel like I have the best outlet to continue to do so unless I want to put myself through the ringer, even with all the allure of finding new weapons making them more powerful. It also feels like you’ll need much better weapons to tackle the higher difficulties, which is going to make finding games on those difficulties much harder. You never find armor to reduce the amount of damage you take, so no matter how good your weapons are, you’ll still die in three or four hits. And if you don’t want to go through that, the whole loot cycle comes undone. That’s disappointing.
When runs go poorly
Even on lower difficulties, you’re better off playing with people than computer-controlled allies, and that has its ups and downs. While this has a lot of potential to have a good time with strangers, more than a few people out there won’t let you hear the end of your failures. Even in groups of fours, I found there’s a tendency for cliques to form and for single players to get labeled as “the problem.” No matter how the team ends up failing, that person gets blamed for it. And if you’re that person, you may as well find another group. The higher the difficulty, the worse this gets, and it’s never pretty.
Above: Tomes and Grimoires allow you to try your luck and make the game harder in exchange for a shot at better loot.
All the technical issues
Another problem hampering my desire to keep killing Skaven is the deluge of technical issues that can do everything from give me free stuff to killing great runs entirely. At one point, I entered a lobby as the game was ending and got all the experience and drops I would have gotten if I’d played through the entire thing. That’s great for me, but the system offsets this with near-complete runs that end with everyone getting disconnected, players randomly falling through the world and dying, or the game reading revived players as dead, which means they couldn’t revive anyone else or even heal themselves.
Vermintide also suffers from random crashes and disconnects, and sometimes, the character of the person who disconnects will walk off into the sky instead of being replaced by the A.I., dying and taking their precious tome with them. These glitches aren’t constant, but they happen often enough that losing all the progress I’ve made on a difficult run is always at the back of my mind, which keeps me from fully investing in the rest of the game.
A minor thing to note: Around 95 percent of the games I’ve entered were hosted in Europe, which could account for these glitches as well as lag. But if you’re a player from the United States, you’ll have to contend with dealing with time schedules from outside the country.
Conclusion
Warhammer: End Times — Vermintide gets so many things right, and its designers have made enough smart decisions about how to deviate from the Left 4 Dead, that it makes the difficulty knee-capping and technical mishaps all the more disappointing. It’s absolutely worth a look if you’re looking for something to do with friends and love slay hordes of monsters. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself quitting earlier than you might want to.
Score: 68/100
Warhammer: End Times — Vermintide is available now for PC, with Xbox One and Playstation 4 versions due out early next year. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a digital copy of the PC collector’s edition of the game for this review.