Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Is A Mess!

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, the first-person, cooperative shooter from developer FatShark, is now a little over two months old and it still handles incredibly poorly.

Rough around the edges is an understatement, and I'm shocked it was even allowed to be released in the state it's in. The game is about as smooth as a sheet of sandpaper; it's almost impossible to make it through an entire round without connectivity issues. If you're not being thrown around the map, you're just being straight up disconnected. There is a reconnect feature, but it not only takes a while to load back into a game but repeated disconnects just leave you thinking "why should I bother?".

Speaking of the game's speed, it's painfully slow — to a point where you wonder if it's stuck in a load loop error. You just have to wait it out and hope for the best. This leaves a bad taste and that's before you've even started playing; this is the required process needed to just get into the hub world.

If you're stuck with Darktide — like me — then my condolences; I suggest using the Ogryn (something I've written about recently). Unfortunately that's all I can suggest because the rest of the game feels clunky. Sure, it's great to blast an enemy and watch them explode into a thick, red paste, or mow down an encroaching horde of seemingly endless goons, but everything else is unintuitive. I appreciate that you can hop into the menu and make adjustments, but its native options are just broken. Everything is either too slow, or too fast – unless you consider the look acceleration, which is somehow both. I'd much rather be wrestling an enemy's head from their shoulders than constantly fighting with the game's controls.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has received a steady stream of updates since its release, but it seems that improving stability wasn't on the agenda. No, luckily we got premium currencies and DLC instead. FatShark has acknowledged and apologised for the poor condition of the game, which is a nice gesture, but doesn't fix the problem; we need the developer to bring the game to an acceptable level. I really want to enjoy Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but at the moment that's not something that I can do.