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The last date you remember is some time during the year 2522. The end times are here, you’ve been struggling for a while. Another moon sets, and you get up for another day of slaughter. There is no happy ending, there is no chance of success, you are not going to be a hero. Your only desire is to simply see another day, any chance of you living out your life in a cottage next to a river, all gone. This is not a nightmare, this is Grim Dark. This is Warhammer: End Times; welcome to the Vermintide. Hopefully that helps set the mood.

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide is a grim dark tale told in the Warhammer universe by Fatshark Entertainment. With a raggedy group of previously mortal enemies banded together just to make it through the night, on the off chance they could complete their quests before their impending death catches up to them. You’re five great warriors destined to live out your final days slaughtering horde after horde of ratmen clamoring to the surface who desire nothing but death and destruction.

If I were to give as short of summary as possible, it would be “Left4Dead with a melee focus set in Warhammer.” The gameplay experience is a co-operative survival for 4 players, with 5 unique heroes to choose from, each getting their own vast arsenal of weapons to divvying playstyles even more. Your pick between swords, great swords, daggers, axes, hammers, shields, bows, crossbows, handguns, repeaters, magic, and everything in between. The game chronicles an Epic Quest across 13 levels with a story fit for its world, taking you across a massive array of maps and environments, from the peaks of stone walls, to the Magnus Tower, to the trenches in fields, all the way to the gutters and the prisons. Variety is never something I desired more of during my play throughs. And that’s not even touching the story DLC. Don’t have friends? The AI is suitable to carry through as well, for the singleplayer fans.

Skaven bring a unique new platform to fight endless hordes of, with their impressive mobility and constant, unrelenting threat. These aren’t just everyday zombies for your endless horde brawler, these are a serious liability. With staple co-op monsters making an appearance and other “hard to kill” mobs, the Dynamic Spawn System makes a wonderful appearance, or rather, a great job pulling the strings behind the scenes. Between the gutter runners and the packmasters, you’ll need someone to watch your back. The Poison Wind Globadiers and the Rat Ogres will give your entire team something to look out for too, requiring solid teamwork to take them down – Along with a few dozen hits from a hefty hammer. With Skaven, nowhere is safe, there is no hiding.

The levels bring variety in your objectives, from finding relics, to setting back the Skaven camps by destroying their siege, to just trying to get a little food. My favorite has been the Wizards Tower, during which you hunt down a wizard to earn protection for the Red Moon Inn, the home base for the Ubersreik resistance; the force you lead. During which, you trudge through a now defunct potion shop, wander through some halls, and come to the Chamber of Gnignol, something impressive that changes based on which character you play through it with. Your screen won’t match your friends. You then march through a twisted and warped library, with stairs and chests climbing the walls and ceiling, and fire burning upside-down. That’s where I’ll leave that, even if it isn’t the end. It’s one of the first three missions, and it’s all uphill from here.

In addition to the story based content, there is a free endless-wave Survival mode DLC in which you protect an arena and last as long as you can, for glory, loot, and leaderboard. With no hope of rescue, the heroes are making a last desperate stand, fighting increasingly difficult hordes of Skaven. The longer you last, the better your loot and the more impressive your trophy.

Progress is delivered in the form of better weapons, trinkets, and cosmetic headgear. Weapons are not a stat race, they simply get mildly better damage and access to more traits for you to unlock. Weapon traits are handled through the Forge, requiring you to burn up excess loot to earn upgrade components and unlock them. Traits can be anything from double damage from behind, to more ammunition, to healing you when you get a hit, to improving stagger from bashes. A very wide variety of loot to choose from and grind for, if you’re into it. If not, you can work your way through the entire game perfectly fine with the standard loot if you so desire. Trinkets offer enhancements to item pickups, to raw buffs, to protection against certain elements, and even purely cosmetic flair for those who don’t need any help.

Now lets leave the gameplay a minute and talk about graphics and sound. The graphics are wonderful, albeit not top of the line. They don’t leave you lusting for a generational leap, but they also won’t make you look back on it in nostalgia for its era. There are plenty of extremely impressive vistas and awe factor moments that are truly well-done locations worth stopping a moment to stare, and none of the assets in the game stand out as poor quality. The engine handles well enough and scores a respectable framerate on my aged rig, however it is an aged engine and will see occasional dips and a few unreasonably demanding settings.

Next up: Sound. The sound in this game is wonderful, however it does leave a small bit to be desired. The meaty sounds of a blade thunking into the flesh of a clanrat is a satisfying sound of metal separating flesh, and the bashes of shields against their skulls is a suitable thud that fits the action as well as giving much needed feedback and heft to the player to confirm the hit. Fire and cinder sound effects are engaging and feel like you’re there, and are handled wonderfully in surround. Passive sound effects like footsteps and skittering are subtle but noticeable, a perfect balance for immersion. Voice lines are well written, crystal clear, with proper ambience applied to make you feel like you’re there. But that’s where the desire for more comes in. Voice lines are few, and repeated frequently enough that they all become a joke. But then again, how many voice lines would you really need for your few hundred playthroughs of the same content?

Overall, the game is a wonderful slaughtering ground for those of us who just need to get a little rat-bashing out of our systems. A decent story paired with iconic heroes and meaty melee combat, with incentive to play through again and again. Easily a dozen hours of content even for a one-time pass, and a few dozen more for a repeat co-op experience. For those desiring more content, there’s a handful of new missions available through DLC to sate your thirst, bringing with them new zones, trinkets and weapons to discover. With more DLC yet to come this November, giving us even more rats to exterminate. Definitely worth it’s $30 asking price, and well worth picking up for the price of lunch, the game has been in many bundles and continues to see steep sales on many storefronts. In addition, it has a Sequel coming out next year, so if you thrust through all the content it has on offer and just can’t get enough, there’s more yet to come.