I've mostly enjoyed and defended the game for the last several years due to monthly balance tweaks and incremental additions, but the recent railgun bullsharks are a new level of blatant pay-to-win I can't defend and utterly ruin any match they infest. If you like suddenly being crippled by withering all-range instant damage with no counterplay to speak of other than "hope they miss" or "buy one yourself," this is the game for you!

Exactly what the cool trailer looks like. Reminds me of playing Vermintide 1 at launch 10 years ago: relatively small scope but great art/gameplay. Was definitely wowed by some of the weapons, enemies, environments, and music. Also the only UE5 game I've played that runs well or doesn't "look like UE5." There aren't a ton of levels (my friends and I have already gotten several complete runs after a couple hours), so we'll see how much raw gameplay I get out of it. At least it's got a robust set of challenges to attempt for cosmetic and functional unlocks rather than the usual modern-day GaaS microtransaction slop. Game crashed a few times for my friends, scuffing a couple runs, so hopefully they iron that out.

Edit: I turned on some of the optional difficulty modifiers and got blindsided by even more cool stuff.

The game plays like a weird evolution of Doom with dungeon-delving and inventory management due to a similar 2d plane of levels, and characters as basically sprites (albeit made of voxels).

Pros:
- Fantastic emergent gameplay that's cruel but fair. Lots of weird interactions are possible which can lead to hilarious chain reactions, intentional or otherwise. Reminds me of Space Station 13. Lots of jank (the good kind).
- Devious traps that are also cruel but fair (if you play smart, you can always avoid being hit by them).
- Great lighting and great stealth system
- Co-op generally works very well as long as you communicate in voice chat.
- Runs feel like more of a many-hours adventure compared to the shorter form of many other run-based games.
- Death is punishing, but you can still be helpful and at least somewhat make yourself useful as a ghost. It works like turning into the bomb with wheels when dying early in Mario Kart 64's balloon battles, and you resurrect next floor with all of your gear if a surviving ally picked up your dropped box of stuff.
- It's fun to discover upon secret enemies, items, and places.
- Lots of levels to progress through with a decent number of biomes.
- Interesting subsystems like casting, appraisal, and tinkering.
- Class variety makes for interesting party dynamics.
- Great room/layout variety.
- Big feeling of achievement from overcoming difficult situations and slowly getting better at understanding the game.

Cons:
- Still some jank (the bad kind). Sometimes item labels don't show up, and if something is forcefully unequipped you often have to manually re-equip it and set it on your hotbar again. It especially stings to have to manually re-equip everything on a new floor from your death box and reassign every hotbar place. It should really remember what you had equipped and where and try to restore that.
- Inventory management is a constant interruption and not fun because the sorting/labeling/icons are bad. The ground can get very polluted with dense item piles that are hard to differentiate and sift through, but you have to do so constantly since you constantly need to replenish equipment/food.
- The doom-esque 2d-plane movement is normally fine but there are a few weird cases where you feel like you should avoid something vertically but it still hits you. Like being low in water and seeing an arrow trap shoot over your head but still hit you, or levitating but still triggering a spike trap.
- Weird camera movement. Apparently the camera moves at 50hz, so without "camera interpolation" on, looking around is stuttery even though moving is not. Interpolation makes it visually smooth if you also set your framerate limit to a multiple of 50, albeit slightly delayed.
- Performance is subpar sometimes despite the very low-fidelity graphics, like surprise hitches at weird times.
- Rare networking problems like disconnections or desync, but worst case you can just restart the floor.
- Melee seems unfairly punishing compared to ranged. Melee users are in constant danger and have to level up Blocking and one of 5 offensive skills they're basically locked into by their class (unarmed, axes, maces, polearms, swords). Ranged only has to level up the Ranged skill but enjoys safe distances and multiple weapon/ammo types they can freely switch between. Magic has the casting/magic skills but is more limited by mana and finding good spells to learn.
- I wish there were more named enemies. It feels pretty goofy to see the same one multiple times in one run (and therefore have two allies with the same legendary weapon).
- Level order is samey, and I wish it were more randomized. For example, it's a bit lame to discover strategies like "always go to the gnomish mines for a strong start."
- I do not enjoy the floors that are mazes of thin corridors. They aren't hard or interesting, just annoying and very time-consuming. Luckily that's usually just Gnomish Mines and Sand Labyrinth.

Mixed review that meets the low bar of "fun with friends," but I can't recommend it for $70. Great/improved core combat gameplay, new creatures, itemization, and characters. However, it is marred by having bad (or worse than World's) menus, controls, zones, performance, graphics, co-op, quest/mission system, music, and general immersion of hunt/ecosystem. It's also far too easy, even in the hardest of high-rank missions.

Background: My only previous monhun was World, but it's one of my most-played and most-enjoyed games with 700 hours. I bought Wilds at launch with the intent of playing co-op with a friend group I had meant to play lots of FFXIV Dawntrail with until it turned out that expansion was just truly awful. I have a high-end PC with a 5800X3D and an RTX 4090 at 1440p.

Campaign is absolute kino, especially if you're a fan of Space Marine 1. Six long missions. Co-op has potential. PvE balance is a bit iffy, largely because it's a nasty war of attrition where hp is easily whittled down with very few ways of getting it back (unlike the hp-restoring executions from SM1), and many enemies require a weirdly large amount of bolter rounds to down vs. what I'd expect. Game DESPERATELY needs better sound mixing and larger field of view since it's very difficult to perceive enemies (or even damage being actively taken) that aren't right in front of you, same as how enemies could silently approach you from behind and backstab you without an audio cue when Vermintide 2 launched. Sometimes inputs feel weirdly dropped. I appreciate how there are many customization options earnable, and how the DLC cosmetics don't feel shoved down my throat like other games. I hope they add a way to sync or copy color schemes between classes though, since right now you would have to manually recreate them across up to 12 different characters (6 PvE + 6 loyalist PvP).

It's exactly what it looks like, and it's quality.

TLDR: It's good now!

HD2 has been riddled with game-breaking bugs since launch, yet they keep focusing on pushing out new content that is itself half-broken and only increases the technical debt. For now, I've lost my patience with the not-uncommon crashes, matchmaking issues, dysfunctional weapons/stratagems (arc thrower / spear / eruptor / mech rockets), and crappy balance (worthless slug shotgun, crossbow, default pistol, HMG, half the offensive stratagems). With the new warbond out, it occurred to me that I was no longer excited to try new options, but rather wondering in what ways they would be broken THIS time. I'm convinced they don't meaningfully playtest their changes, and I'm tired of being QA.

There's a solid chance that they'll iron out these issues over time, and since the core gameplay is great, there's big potential here. But right now the honeymoon period is over and I think it needs some more time in the oven.

Update 6/19: Based on Pilestadt's own posts, it turned out I was right about changes not being tested. However, recognizing this, they're making good progress on fixing things: many offensive stratagems were buffed and are now more capable at their intended functions (ex: orbital gatling, HMG, eagle strafing run, eagle rockets, MG/rocket sentries), some of the weaker primary weapons were buffed (ex: crossbow, liberators), and a good amount of miscellaneous bug fixes. But my favorite weapons are still dysfunctional (ex: still-nerfed stagger-less slugger, still-misfiring-since-launch arc thrower / blitzer), and half the new releases are various degrees of dysfunctional (ex: purifier nerfed compared to trailer, Peak Physique armor perk making weapon handling worse instead of better, throwing knife actually being loud/awful and liable to kill yourself immediately upon throwing it, and supposedly-fixed enemy density remaining full/high-strength for solo/duo rooms). But most of all, the game is still often unplayable: permanently stuck loading screens, quick-join repeatedly failing to connect me to hosts (sometimes because they are private!), inability to invite/join friends, game crashes, etc. It still needs more fixes before it feels more like I'm fighting against enemies of freedom instead of fighting against technical problems.

Update 10/15: Against the odds, they put in the time/effort to fix things. Recent matches have had far more moments of immersive, manic fun killing the enemies of Super Earth instead of feeling like I was just fighting against the game design itself. General balance is vastly improved, and it's very cool to see players bring a wide variety of weapons based on personal taste or whim, rather than gravitating toward a small selection of "least-bad" options like before. Stability is vastly improved, as I haven't had trouble joining or staying in a match with friends lately. Overall fairness is vastly improved, so players have a lot more agency for doing well and are less likely to be suddenly screwed over by mass simultaneous tanks, instakill bugs, etc. Matchmaking with randoms is still poor due to the planet hologram being unrefreshable, not showing pings, and showing private games you can't join, so they still need to fix that. The other remaining things I want to see are now just nice-to-haves, like further difficulties (d11 and d12 could have more simultaneous enemies), increased slugger stagger, a way to paint all armor black/yellow, an APC stratagem, an infantry-held gatling with ammo backpack, duplicate stratagems allowed, and even more dynamic music variety.

Other than the very good gunplay and melee combat, every aspect of Darktide feels unfinished to me.
Stability: I crash in one out of every 5ish matches, and unlike the beta, I can't rejoin.
Graphics: I have a 5950x and a 3090, and it runs like ass no matter what I turn off. Visually, it has great art, but there are a lot of issues for me even at highest settings that I wish I could improve like atrocious pop-in on everything in the environment and blocky-looking fog. EDIT: They're adding a mesh/LOD option next patch! Didn't expect that; very cool.
Weapon variety: As ogryn, I feel like I'm shooting myself and my team in the foot if I don't bring a shield, but there's only one weapon that has one. It'd be nice if I could get a fun chargeable weapon like other classes, but even the power maul on the _game cover_ doesn't actually exist. Other classes have missing weapons shown in trailers as well. Guns have a variety of randomly-generated stats that are very well-described, but many of the perks are comically miniscule and boil down to "+2% damage against 2013 Toyota Camries during the blood moon for 4 seconds."
Weapon feel: Mostly fantastic. There are definitely some weird quirks that need to be cleaned up though: Lasguns use 3 ammo instead of 1, which is silly on its own, but their mag/reserve sizes aren't even necessarily multiples of 3. Any of the non-single-shot ogryn weapons are burst fire at a minimum, which feels needlessly clunky in practice. Wanna fire just one ripper gun or stubber shot? Nope, you're gonna get rooted for longer and waste ammo and like it.
Toughness: A fantastic idea on paper, but I'm not sold on it in practice. It feels like it often does an inadequate job of shielding you from "occasional" inbound ranged fire, which only gets more and more pervasive in higher difficulties. As a result, it makes your overall hp feel more like a true resource to be spent on success compared to Vermintide, where a skilled player could truly avoid all inbound damage. In contrast here, you'll often be taking hp damage because of what the AI decided to spawn against you at range, and that inbound fire will often stop your movement, making you take even MORE hits because you were stunned. I'm convinced they never settled on a system they actually were satisfied with for this, evidenced by making a last-minute fundamental change to it on release day that was clearly not playtested even once (making the veteran class take roughly double damage).
Class dynamics: Much more so than Vermintide, each class has clear intended roles and weakness. The zealot is extremely high melee damage, the ogryn is crowd control by charging in and knocking things around, the psyker is priority-target removal with brainburst, and the veteran is ranged removal. This sounds good on paper, but in practice it feels suffocating because it's very hard to build for things outside your "intended" role. In Vermintide, everyone could shore their weaknesses or bring weapons according to your preferred playstyle; for example, everyone could bring a bursty ranged weapon if they always want to be able to precisely remove disabling special enemies. But in this, you HAVE to depend on your teammates for certain things. Your team has a bad (or no!) veteran? You'll get gunned down by groups of shooters because nobody else can properly remove them. Your ogryn prefers ranged combat because he thinks the guns are fun? Nope, trap option, you'll get overrun by hordes and all the spare ammo will be gone. Build variety within the classes feels anemic.
Specials: In Vermintide, all disabler specials could be one-hit at range by every character, so if you were fast you could beat them to the draw. In this, many of them are bizarrely durable. This especially screws you over if a handful spawn all at once closeby such that the team could not possibly kill them before they reach you.
AI: Far too many wipes feel less the result of team's mistakes and more the result of the director choosing to spawn duplicate specials all at once, hordes in plain sight, hordes at precisely the same time as a boss, etc. Far more so than in Vermintide, many hordes come out of literal spawn closets in the form of little holes in the adjacent walls and ceilings. In Vermintide, they tended to approach from further away such that you could actually react to the inbound masses by repositioning, shooting them as they dropped down from ledges, etc.
Hub: Crafting was originally intended to be at release, but they literally ran out of time. The hub is also huge but mostly empty, and there are many parts of it that seem like they were intended to have certain purposes at one point but never actually implemented. It's not even fun to explore and jump around in like the Keep in Vermintide 2. Instead, it's transparently just a waiting room where you're forced to see yourself and others in first person so you can lust for cosmetics that don't make you look like a hobo. The microtransaction store with predatory mismatched currency amounts is fully functional though! ♥♥♥♥♥.
Character creation: Great visual options. Tons of faces, tattoos, colors, and miscellaneous features. I'm really surprised by how different one human/ogryn can look from the next. Inexplicably, you can't change your name, voice, or height. Even though height has real gameplay implications, your initial (probably arbitrary) choice is permanent. Names also don't allow spaces, so you see a bunch of people running around with PascalCaseNames or Hyphenated-Names, which frankly looks silly and kills any choice of making a name that looks like it could possibly be in-universe. Disallowed spaces feels like an intern-tier database ♥♥♥♥♥♥ they just didn't bother fixing.
Levels: Far less visual variety between levels than Vermintide. The devs write this off as intentional, but in practice it feels silly to be crossing the same set piece in different directions for completely narratively unrelated tasks. The levels are far less iconic than the 13 from Vermintide and feel samey/interchangeable in comparison (within their "environments"). Unlike Vermintide, there are no longer tomes/grimoires hidden in fun, hard-to-reach locations; instead, they are sometimes side-objectives that are just lying out in the open and offering negligible bonus for the enormously exacerbated danger in carrying them (grims). They may as well not be in the game at all.
Dialogue: The mission-givers are great, and I like how they talk to your throughout a mission unlike most Vermintide levels. Individual player voice lines are also great; there are tons of voices to choose from (3 per class) and they have distinct personalities. Unfortunately, it feels shallow in practice to me because of the "anonymous" nature of the player characters: fundamentally, they can't have any prior relationships/interactions to reference or build upon, so a lot of depth of dialogue compared to Vermintide is lost. More importantly, many conversations feel stilted and nonsensical because of the way they were designed to go along the lines of "player A says thing about abhumans; player B says other thing about abhumans." They often just say things at each other instead of truly _replying_ or reacting to each other. If it were another game, I would think the voice lines were bugged and playing in the wrong order or context, but that's just what it sounds like in this. I miss the Ubersreik 5 truly talking _with_ each other instead of _at_.

Vermintide 2 was also a mess at launch, but it became a gem after years of polish. Sadly, they didn't learn from those mistakes, so this game will need more time in the oven as well. As it currently stands now, I tend to just be annoyed instead of immersed when playing, like I'm playing it just to get it over with. It just makes me wish I were playing VT2 instead, where I've long since ascended beyond the progression treadmills but play it because it's simply a fun way to spend time.

Great content, great community, great game. Just wish it had an incoming backstab sound like Vermintide since sometimes enemies can silently(ish) approach from behind after freshly spawning.

The core of the game is fun, and it's oozing with potential, but Tripwire's glacial pace of updates and stunningly moronic design decisions over the past year have killed any interest I had in the game. While there is more content than there was a year ago, the actual gameplay is far worse, feeling more like a dull slog than a thrilling fight to survive.

It's possible that they'll get their act together later, but their refusal to listen to feedback and apparent incompetence leave me with zero hope that things will change. Avoid this game for the foreseeable future.

For those of you wanting more specific feedback on what is holding the game back right now:
- Far too little ammo across the board, resulting in running dry even if you play near-perfectly. This was always somewhat of a problem, but they inexplicably decided to nerf the spawn rate and usefulness of findable ammo boxes.
- The new resistances system, which does nothing but make enemies bullet sponges in a completely unintuitive manner. Nobody wanted this.
- Terrible, terrible perk balance. Support and Demolition in particular are screwed, and Firebug has only been useful for Microwave gun abuse (spraying fire, like you'd expect it to be good at, is a waste of time and ammo). The worst part about this is that such issues could be fixed with easy number changes pushed out in test patches (it being EARLY ACCESS and all), but they instead tend to wait months for the "big" "free content packs" to even attempt that.
- Teleporting enemies. Have a group of zeds on your tail? Good luck running from them, as they'll respawn before your very eyes at a chokepoint as you try to escape instead of actually chasing you. Also, small obstacles like tables or fences cause zeds to suddenly warp on top of them, making headshots with such obstacles around a fool's errand.
- The addition of microtransaction loot crates adds insult to injury.
- The parry system for blocking incoming attacks with your melee weapon started out a little clunky but useful and rewarding, but it has been nerfed into the ground via significantly reduced overall effectiveness, and making most of the attacks you'd want to parry UNPARRYABLE.
- Sound design used to be great, but bizarre changes to it have made it just ok most of the time and distractingly bad at others. Previously, when a scrake would spawn, it would emit a bone-chilling roar over the current action. Now, it temporarily mutes the ambient metal soundtrack and other sounds before roaring at significantly reduced volume (and with bad timing too, resulting in a sizable duration of almost no sound at all). An abomination announcing its presence should NOT result in a net loss of noise.