I picked it up.
Much like my first few hours playing L4D, this isn't a game that presents itself well playing solo.
The good first though. It is much like L4D in that the game is mostly about mowing through chaff, here with melee instead of guns. Melee combat is pretty responsive once you get familiar with it, although the long range of both your's and their attacks takes some getting used to. Combat gets quite hectic. Encountering a swarm head on at the right spawn place means you're cleaving through a literal pile of bodies. You end up slashing around like a madman most of the time and, if you stopped looking there, combat might come off as pretty repetitive. I think there's a layer of subtlety beyond that though. Between charged attacks to hit big crowds of guys, dodging, blocking and block-smashing an opening for yourself, combat feels responsive to the point where you're able to accomplish as much as you're capable of with the controls.
The graphics are pretty nice. Curiously the game is way brighter than I've seen in videos even with the gamma turned down quite a bit. It's a little hard to appreciate the gore though. The speed of things, the dark browness of the skaven to begin with, and what shadow there is means you only occasionally see a head or limb come off.
There's quite a bit of WHF lore peppered throughout the game as well, which is always a nice touch.
Now the not so-good:
Some of the voice acting gets on my nerves. Just like L4D the characters comment along as you do stuff. The Elf sounding like a country lass in particular just sets my teeth on edge, like no one really thought about what she should sound like. While the lines are all done well by everyone, I dunno, the content of the dialog isn't that great. Like a bad D&D game really.
The AI is bloody useless. They respond terribly to you being incapacitated, either by special vermin or getting taken out. I've seen them stand next to me in a big pile and do nothing to save me.
The game can be glitchy in patently unfair ways right now. Packmasters snaring you through walls and floors, destroying what little chance the AI had of saving you. Said Packmasters glitching through floors themselves while they have you in the noose, basically doing the same thing. Sometimes they'll throw two and three of them at you at once at just the right time, and you and your band of feckless AI are pretty much screwed. They will run and run and run while carrying you along and I've watched the AI follow along, swinging and missing trying to catch as they turn corners, go up stairs and through buildings. Smokers by comparison are nothing to this.
There's doubltlessly rules I'm missing here, but, some stuff seems kinda like bullshit. Ratling gunners will absolutely destroy you if you try a frontal assault against them, chewing through 3/4 of your life bar in one volley. And yet if you come up behind them, no amount of wailing on them with light attacks seems to make a difference. I had one turn around one me after 15 hits probably and proceed to mow me down at point-blank range. Maybe only Power Attacks really matter because they're armored, but, power attacks are slow and it's hard to get a sense if anything is actually doing anything until it topples over dead.
Assassins and Gutter Runners are in some ways even worse than L4D's Hunters. They don't bounce off walls and leap, but their attack seems? nigh unblockable. And the worst is, after you knock them off someone, they almost immediately drop a smoke bomb and vanish, meaning you have to put with two to three rounds of their sneak attack shit. Stormvermin aren't bad to fight, they're actually kinda fun because it's where blocking and dodging become more important. But when they throw 4 of them at you it's easy to get overwhelmed because unlike slaves and clan rats they don't go down in one hit. More like 8 to 10.
And then there's Rat Ogres. At first I watched one wipe my team in one mission, just pounding each AI down one at a time like nails into wood. Then I sort figured out that as long as your team is all on its feet and attacking it, and you have room to get it to charge so you can dodge its attacks, it's beatable. Although it takes forever to kill it. Going toe-to-toe with it is a supremely bad idea. And if your team isn't there with you, or is down, you're pretty much screwed, as you don't have the damage to kill it or anyone to keep the other vermin off your back. Vermintide seems to keep a more constant stream of guys on you so you rarely have the luxury of a 1 on 1 fight with big guys and real threats.
And then there's missions. I've tried most of the starter ones now, and I gotta say it's a total pain in the ass to have barrels of gun powder or explosive get lit up when they're struck in melee. It makes the missions take twice as long as they should. So playing solo, you grab a barrel and go running for the drop off, and a rat takes a swing at you as you run by, and congrats, that barrel is useless.
And then there's the loot system. It's like....double, triple, maybe even quadruple dipping on the RNG. First you get the standard amount of dice to roll for beating a mission. I think there's 6 or 8 of them to start with. Only a couple faces of those dice has a winning mark, the rest are blank. How many winning marks you get dictates what quality level of loot you get. And then the item type is random. So 1 to 2 or 3 pips which is an average roll gets you a common item, which may or may not be for the class you're playing. Of course you can throw it in storage and use it on another character, melt it down and use it to upgrade other gear, yadda yadda. But it feels like the worst kind of lottery meant to support long-term play. Higher difficulties reward more dice and so on, so, early impressions are what they are. But it feels pretty tedious to go through all that, to then get a shit white weapon you're not even going to use. I think there's other pickups you can find in levels that give you more or better dice, at the cost of some disadvantages you carry around with you during the match. Maybe? you get better dice just for being in a group? I dunno.
So all in all, it's not bad. The action is good and the Skaven are pretty awesome (the voice overs are great.) But this is a game you really need to play with people both for it to be maximum fun and because it's balanced for it. There's polish and balancing to be done still for sure.
I think it differs from L4D in several ways. Working together seems more important here. Things are generally just tougher than in L4D and so much of your business gets done at the end of a sword instead of a gun. Special vermin happen regularly and do lots of damage, big swarms of clan rats and slaves can do serious damage if your back is to a lot of them. The objectives seem to encourage you to watch people's backs. It also seems like you're more tempted to get separated too, because levels can be pretty open and gnarly, there's chests and potions all over the place to distract you and it's easy to lose yourself in hewing through vermin. Levels are also harder to read in Vermintide sometimes. I wandered around the sewer map for about 10 minutes because one objective room looked much like the last and there was no marker. I suppose because L4D is modern day and VT is fantasy, one is easier to read than the other. Still, it feels like L4D keeps you on task better than VT, but maybe that's just my newness to the game.
I'm going to try some online play and see how that jives, I imagine it's easier. On solo I was starting to get a little frustrated.
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Topic: Warhammer: End Times, Vermintide. Now with II! (Read 25333 times)