WARHAMMER 40 K: DARK TIDE

A confident, carnage-filled step forward from Vermintide

- Wes Fenlon

My favourite thing in Darktide is the skull. OK, let me clarify – there’s definitely more than one skull. But I was enamoured with one in particular: the skull decoder, a grinning cranium with spider-like legs used to interface with computers. There won’t be a better interaction prompt this year than “Press E to prepare Skull Decoder”.

“There’s no hacking in 40K,” says Fatshark head of design Victor Magnuson, who spent about two hours talking to me while we played through a few missions. Thankfully 40K does have skull decoding – or at least it does now. “Everything we do we check with Games Workshop. They check every asset, every voice line, everything. It’s a back and forth. But especially since we’ve done Vermintide, they trust us.”