As most of you will be aware, even if you aren’t Chinese, it’s the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Rat this year. Whilst for most people this won’t impact their lives too much, for (un)fortunate companies who (for some reason) chose the humble rat as their mascot, this is their marketing team’s wet dream.
One of the few industries where rats are surprisingly common (albeit typically as enemies), is video gaming. Or so I realised one fine evening recently when I booted Steam and was immediately met with their special Year of the Rat Sale. After briefly checking my wishlist and concluding nothing important was on sale, I swiftly ignored the front page and booted DotA 2 as usual. That was until one of my friends pointed out Vermintide II was on sale for a tasty 75% off, an investment I was willing to make at the recommendation of a friend. And so our conquest of rat slaughtering began… after spending 2 evenings downloading the 60+GB game.
At the time of writing I am only 8 hours into the game, and a good 2 of those have been spent dossing around the Keep (or home base). Vermintide II is very much a Hack & Slash style of game, you have tactical options such as Block and Dodge, but I’m typically too busy throwing fireballs and panicking that “They’re behind us too!” to actually use those options. The core gameplay is fun, though somewhat repetitive; but the missions are kept short enough, and the equipment options just varied enough, that I expect we’ll complete the main story before we get tired of it.
The story of the game is… there, Vermintide is set in the Warhammer universe, and though I’ve only briefly dipped my toe into the exceptionally deep Warhammer lore waters, it always excites me. The game starts by showing you a giant Chaos portal which (for some reason) the Chaos have entrusted the rats (or Skaven) to build. Maybe I don’t know enough about Warhammer Lore and actually the Skaven are the greatest builders of their time, but based on the creaking halls and unstable walkways the game spends most of it’s time in, I’d say the Chaos have gone with a real “lowest bidder” approach here. Which I’d think is not the smartest decision if you’re constructing a giant (presumably demon summoning) portal, but then I’m not in charge of a Chaos/Skaven horde. After the tutorial the story becomes more of a background feature, which while not hard to find is something you need to be looking for and pay attention to; and while playing with friends the loading screens are often used as downtime to make jokes rather than being quiet for Storytime.
That said, I don’t believe not knowing the story has greatly impacted my enjoyment of the game; sometimes we’re killing people, sometimes we’re saving people, but always we’re killing hundreds upon hundreds of rats. The fun of the game comes from the interesting environments, the simple but well oiled combat, and the sheer satisfaction of blowing up a dozen Skaven at once with a well-aimed fireball. I’d guess my friends and I will get around another 8 hours out of the game before we move onto something else – the progression isn’t exciting enough to warrant levelling multiple characters, and the story not enough of a focus to play through multiple times. Though we did just discover the mystery that is Grimoires, which are hidden objectives which grant you bonus XP for finding, but are often quite difficult to find; so we may replay a few levels to hunt for those, but I don’t expect we’ll care to find them all.
For the sale price, this game has been well worth the purchase, but at full price I don’t think there’s quite enough content there (unless you’re seriously invested in Warhammer, or are a big completionist). Based on what my brother (who has completed the game) has told me, it sounds like there is about 10-20 hours of gameplay in the base game depending on where you fall on the Exploration vs Action scale. Perhaps the DLC adds quite a lot to the game, but until that goes on sale I can’t be certain.
- Gameplay – 9/10
- Mechanics – 8/10
- Story – 3/10
- Price – 4/10 (9/10 on sale)
- Enjoyment* – 7/10
OVERALL – 6.2/10
*Enjoyment is a personal measure of how much I enjoyed the game, more of a “gut feeling” than the empirical approach I try to take with the other ratings.
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