I explained in the 40k: Fireteam review, I’m always looking for a 40k adjacent game that let’s me play around a little bit more in the fuller universe than just Necromunda setting. And my criteria is usually something with a low miniature count and, hopefully, a nice degree of replayability. Doesn’t have to be infinitely replayable but it would be nice if I had someone over, we crack a bourbon, want to play a game, and my experience with it isn’t exactly the same as the last time I played it.
Cursed City has this but Cursed City is also a much bigger game with a much more arduous set up. It’s not “beer and pretzels” as people like to say.
Darktide looked to fit the bill. In terms of models, there are ten corrupted guardsmen, six poxwalkers, and four heroes. That’s a manageable number. And the format of the game, being cooperative, having a campaign system built in, seemed to say “replayable” even if no expansions ever came out for it. So far, so good!
So why isn’t everyone playing this game?
A big complaint is that the four heroes included aren’t the four heroes on the game’s cover or video game’s key art.
Well… I think it has to do more with politics than the game itself.
There were people disappointed that the game didn’t hue closer to the video game in terms of tone, story, and characters. A big complaint is that the four heroes included aren’t the four heroes on the game’s cover or video game’s key art.
Also, there was the problem that none of the miniatures in this box were original. Every single one had been included elsewhere. The corrupted guardsmen have their own box you can buy with a champion. These pox walkers aren’t as nice as the ones in the store and had already been included with other games. Even the heroes were all known quantities. So a lot of people saw this as GW trying to sell us miniatures people already owned with the inclusion of rules that weren’t really Darktide.
Maybe! Maybe it’s all true.
To me, though, it kinda didn’t matter. I didn’t own any of these models. I also didn’t play Darktide, the video game. So it’s entirely possible I’m the outlier here. But the idea of a cooperative game in the 40k setting piqued my interest because my wife doesn’t like competitive games but she liked Cursed City because we cooperate against the bad guys. And… it has a one player mode… which became relevant since my wife has still never played a game of it with me…
If you’ve seen my piece on brainleaf zombies, you’ll be aware that for minis I don’t have a big use for, I try to find shortcuts to get things done faster. In this case, that was the guardsmen and the poxwalkers. Look, I’m glad to have them and I might use them Necromunda at a later point for something story or other but for this game, I really just wanted painted game pieces to play with sooner rather than later. So I turned to our old friend Slap Chop.
I think the poxwalkers came out looking real nice. In fairness, I spent a little more time on them, for instance, using some washes on their push and boils to pull out a really sick appearance. They were fun to paint though and I just let their trousers ride with how the orange came out of the pot. The traitor guardsmen came out a little dark for my taste and I probably could have done more to bring out some highlights. But… it also did more or less what I wanted and elements like furs and capes often provide the visual contrast the paint didn’t.
Then, for my heroes, I just did traditional layer painting. Not my best work, at all. But good enough to get the job done. I felt these four were worth the effort since they’d be the miniatures people would look at and handle the most often. And by “people”, of course I mean me.
So how does this game play?
Pretty good, actually! I admit that I’ve never gotten around to finishing the campaign but I got most of the way through it and despite terrain being limited to four double-sized boards of octagons and some octagon pieces to put where the book tells you to, every scenario feels interesting and different and unique enough that a few stick out in my head as ones I’d like to replay if showing the game to someone. The shooting and save rules are clear and easy to apply, as are the enemy-AI rules. The only place where its troublesome is the melee combat. It’s not that you can’t make sense of them but you kind of have to re-read them four or five times and then chart out in steps what it is saying to fully understand. This one thing could have been a lot clearer and an example would have been nice.
As I pointed out, I was satisfied with the miniatures in this game and there is a lot more on the sprue than gets used on these miniatures so its a nice way to fill out your bits box. If I have one minor thing I’d ding them for is this is supposed to be a miniatures game, it says it on the box (more on that in a second). But not very far into the campaign, one of the objectives is to protect a servo skull as it does its tasks. It would have been nice if that wasn’t just a token but an actual servo skull model. It’s something I keep thinking about building and adding just because it’s used throughout.
So how does this game play? Pretty good, actually!
And my last minor complaint: up until now my experience with GW games has either been with Blood Bowl, Necromunda, or the “book store” games they put out. With the exception of the Hive Secondus box, the boxes they’ve come in have always been high quality cardboard that you can use for years to pack your game away in. Darktide came in a thin card box that seemed thinner than what the average squad box came in and, I swear, was already ripped before it got to me. It was useless and recycled as soon as I had assembled my miniatures because it would have protected nothing and fallen all the way apart probably not that much later. It’s weird because it was priced more expensive than a book shop game but book shop games actually come in quality boxes like any board game would.
Whatever, I keep mine in a Feldherr case, so it doesn’t matter. But it was disappointing.
Over all though, I would recommend Darktide. Just not to someone who likes the video game. Or already has the minis.
