2109: Vermintide

My friend Sam and I tried out Warhammer: The End TImes – Vermintide this evening, a game which has been positioned by various people as “Left 4 Dead in the Warhammer universe”. I’m all for that as an idea, so we decided to give it a shot.

Turns out it takes most of its inspiration from its stablemate dungeon crawler board game Warhammer Quest, in that it is ludicrously difficult and very likely indeed to splatter your chosen heroes across the walls in fairly short order. Sam’s tried the first mission on “normal” difficulty six times today, and we couldn’t clear it once, though with two of us actually playing, thereby cutting down on the imbecilic AI, we got further than he was able to solo earlier in the day.

It seems like a good game, though. There’s five different characters to play, each of whom have a different selection of gear to start with, and there’s various bits of loot that you can collect and upgrade as you progress through the game — assuming you can actually clear a mission, of course. Having failed to clear the prologue mission, of course, we didn’t see any of that, but it certainly seems that there should be a bit of variety in there — just the starting gear offers a couple of different ways to play for each class.

I tried out the Witch Hunter and Bright Wizard classes. The former is a plummy-voiced sort of chap with a sword (either one-handed or two-handed, depending on preference) and a pair of flintlock pistols that he fires alternately. The latter is a stern-sounding lady who wields a sword and a staff which can blast out simple fireballs or cast a particular spell.

The Witch Hunter seemed relatively straightforward. The choice of melee weapons gave him two distinct play styles — the one-handed sword allows you to slash quickly, making for a fast-paced experience when wading into melee. The two-handed sword, meanwhile, is much slower but deals much more damage, particularly when its attack is charged up. I’m not quite sure which one I actually preferred, but both were quite fun. The flintlock pistols seemed to be fairly accurate, too, making for satisfying ranged kills, often before the Skaven enemies noticed up.

The Wizard, meanwhile, had some interesting mechanics. Rather than ammunition for her ranged weapon — her staff — she has a little meter depicting how much she’s tapped into the Winds of Magic. Casting spells — either the staff’s basic projectile or the more powerful charged spell — increases this meter, which then gradually declines over time. If this pops over the top, she’ll catch fire and potentially explode, which is not good, but going over a lower mark still causes damage to yourself if you’re not careful. Playing as the Wizard, then, involves taking a bit more care with your shots and spells rather than just spamming fireballs at enemies. She also has the ability to “vent” her excess magic energy with the “reload” button, so during moments of downtime, it’s advisable for her to do this — fling a couple of fireballs, hide, vent, pop out and fling a few more.

As you might expect from the name, Vermintide focuses pretty much exclusively on the ratmen Skaven monsters as enemies, but there’s plenty of variety in there. Basic Skaven will swarm you like the zombies in Left 4 Dead, but there are also specialist monsters that will be familiar to anyone who played Warhammer Fantasy Battle or Advanced Heroquest in particular — there are Poison Globadiers, Warpfire Gunners, Assassins, Gutter Runners and all manner of other horrible bastards just waiting to make your life miserable, and, as in Left 4 Dead, many of them require cooperation to deal with. Packmasters, for example, grab a character with their hooked polearm and drag them away, so another player has to free them before they get “hung” from the polearm, at which point it becomes more time-consuming (and thus dangerous) to free them.

It was surprising quite how difficult the game was, but I’m interested to try it again — hopefully we’ll be able to get a full four-player game going with a couple of other friends this weekend, so it will be interesting to see whether it’s any easier with four human players!