Warhammer 40,000: Darktide throws you into the role of a disposable convict-turned-asset — a “Reject” pressed into service by the Inquisition to keep the hive city of Tertium from collapsing under cult uprisings and daemonic corruption. The tone is pure 40K: hopeless, industrial, and grim, with just enough gallows humour to keep the whole thing moving.

Gameplay is built on a simple idea: four players, one objective, and a lot of bodies in between. You choose a class — Veteran, Zealot, Ogryn, Psyker, and later additions like the Arbitrator — and build around their strengths using weapons, feats, and perks. Veterans bring disciplined ranged fire, Zealots dive into melee and martyrdom, Ogryns act as walking tanks, and Psykers weaponise the warp with high-risk, high-reward abilities. Team composition matters; you feel it immediately when someone isn’t doing their job.

Darktide’s missions are set across different sectors of Tertium: manufactorums, hab-blocks, transit hubs, refineries, and cathedrals. Multiple objectives reuse the same areas with different twists and side objectives, so you learn the layout but not the exact flow. Horde pacing, elites, and specials are tuned so that positioning, stagger control, and stamina management are as important as raw DPS. The melee system carries over Vermintide’s weight and readability, while ranged weapons add suppression, recoil management, and target priority into the mix.

Progression runs through gear rarity, weapon perks, and blessings, all tied into the Shrine crafting system. You can consecrate weapons to improve their sanctity (and stats), pull blessings off items to reuse later, combine them, or refine rolls to push a favourite gun or melee weapon into a proper endgame piece. It’s not an ARPG loot flood; it’s a more focused grind where a good roll on a trusted weapon feels like a real gain.

As a live service, Darktide keeps evolving: new classes, operations, roguelite-style modes like Mortis Trials, expanded narrative arcs, and rotating modifiers reshape the experience over time. The core loop never changes — four Rejects, one mission, don’t die — but the context and pressure do.

In the Vault, Darktide is the go-to pick for when you want to feel the grind of 40K from the bottom up. No heroes, no relics, no glory — just four broken people with bad odds and worse gear, trying to hold a line no one will remember.