HomeFeaturesWarhammer 40,000: Darktide
Darktide’s melee combat is a rhythm game in disguiseStab, slash, it’s all in the mind
Stab, slash, it’s all in the mind
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fatshark
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fatshark
I know that “Made one guy admit he was wrong about a subgenre” isn’t the kind of achievement they put in accolade trailers, but I must creditWarhammer 40,000: Darktidewith tearing apart my blanket dislike of first-person melee fighters. Having spent months of stubbornly maining Veteran and sticking as closely as possible toFPSconvention, I’ve since found peace in the simple act of swinging knives/swords/giant electrified hammers into and through people. Mainly because it’s not so simple: for all its chaotic spectacle, the meleeing in Darktide (this month’sRPS Game Clubstar) works because it’s secretly been a rhythm game.
In addressing these limits, Darktide initially appears to shank itself in the foot, giving the bulk of its melee weapons a heavy, slow-swinging feel. The hardest kind to make fun! Sure enough, it’s all too easy to end up playing the melee game as a shallow, repetitive click spammer, a style that has more in common with mowing a lawn than it does with fighting a holy war. Button gets pressed, heretics fall down. Yawn.Where’s my rock?
Maggots? Maggots. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fatshark
Yet I can see, now, that to settle for this is to ignore even the slightest intricacies of Darktide’s brawling systems. In my defence, the game itself does a poor job of explaining this, but essentially each weapon has multiple unique swing patterns that vary according to a) whether the first attack in a chain is a light or heavy attack, and b) whether the preceding attack in a chain was light or heavy.
I don’t care what the meta says, Power Swords are great. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fatshark
It does pull other tricks to make itself a more enjoyable melee game. The sound design is excellent, which is to say it’s horrible, a meaty mashup of sickening flesh-tearing noises and weighty contact sounds befitting the brutality of a 40K armoury. And I’ve always enjoyed issuing the implied “Come on, then” threat that comes with activating the power-up modes on certain weapons. For me, though, it’s the rhythm of up-close fights that lifts Darktide above the usual pitfalls of first-person melee. Even those power-up activations feel like a double snare hit, lining up the drop into a massive chorus, while the Heavy Eviscerator (the aforementioned chain-greatsword) has a beautiful shove-into-cleave move that executes with the smoothness of a lead guitarist’s hammer-on and pull-off.
If you, too, have felt reticent to bring a knife to Darktide’s gunfights, my advice is to not just choose your loadout based on stats. Play around with each sword, axe, or club, and find the ones with combos that have you nodding your head along with each thrust. I’d say that getting lost in the rhythm makes Darktide a better game, but let’s be honest, it was always like this. I just had my eyes too deep in the Bolter sights to see it.
