So I love this game. Love love love it. It's everything that was great about the L4D formula without everything that sucked so much balls about it. I liked the idea of L4D a lot, and really had fun with it at first, but man did it get old. After we finished playing it the first time, like I just never wanted to touch it again. I tried L4D2, but I really didn't care for it, and didn't feel it was in any way a proper sequel. The gameplay just didn't do enough to distinguish itself, felt real samey all the time.
Vermintide manages to deal with this in a variety of ways, which I'm sure are all well-documented now for anyone who cares, but my own two cents:
* More and better content, or at least this is how it seems from everything I've watched and read. I'm a bit early yet, but the levels I've tried have felt fairly different.
* Way, way better and more satisfying combat. The melee has real heft to it, and the weapons feel very different—the stabby elf knives are quick and smooth, slicing quickly and without resistance, and the dwarf's axes feel like they basically get stuck in enemies when you hit them, a real chunky feeling. The ranged weapons too do great with differentiating themselves. The soldier's big blunderbuss has great weight to it, and the elf's bow feels very light and quick. Even the dwarf's crossbow feels substantially different from the elf's bow.
* Characters! They all feel quite different, in part because of the combat stuff mentioned above, but also like ... the dwarf is actually super short. Your camera will be low. The elf is taller. And the witch hunter is even taller. I thought I noticed this so actually went and compared against a railing in the inn with each one. I thought maybe just the dwarf would be short and everyone else would be the same, but not the case. Which is quite cool, and a nice change from L4D, where each player was more or less identical. I also hated all the L4D characters for the most part, and the personalities of the Vermintide characters are a bit more entertaining.
* Giant gibbering ratmen are better than zombies. Seriously. The zombies in L4D are very one-note, and these rat dudes have a lot of personality, and attack with different weapons, etc. The special monster types are almost directly grabbed from L4D, like honestly to a fault, but I feel like they really do work better here.
* Goals! It's nice to have the loot and experience systems to kinda drive you on. That progression is very important to a game like this, and I think it works really, really well here.
Anyway, if you've been on the fence about this or curious, definitely give it a try.
I will caution you that the game still has bugs. In my first 4 matches, 3 of them ended due to bugs. Two that were in-game nonsense, and one that was a CTD. I've had another 2 CTDs since but nothing else gameplay-wise. The CTDs MAY be related to my videocard or something, I don't know. This is a brand-new PC and I literally have played no other games on it yet, so I don't know what's up exactly. The game reported that my card's driver stopped working. Will report back after more playtime.
But yeah, this game is awesome.
EDIT - I'd more or less agree with that PC Gamer review. I do hope Fatshark just uses this as a launching platform to kind of expand into newer and more interesting territory. But as it stands, this is the game that I always wished L4D was, so I'm not at all bothered by some of what was stolen from it. If you played a fuckload of L4D, you might feel differently, but not necessarily. The combat and characters being so different certainly does a ton to set this apart.
