Warhammer 40K: Darktide has some of the best video game dialogue of 2022

Warhammer 40,000: DarktideYour three best friends and you are the only ones standing in between an army Chaos-infested Mutants and the destruction a huge sci-fi city. It’s a compelling premise that plays out in Right 4 DeadStyle missions and the pre-order beta currently shows great promise. This is the most enjoyable part of the game so far. Watching the four heroes — well, no one’s Really a hero in 40K — bicker and banter amongst themselves.

DarktideThe four main classes are Psyker (Zealot), Veteran (Veteran), and Ogryn. Players also get to choose their origins and life paths — along with a few inciting incidents throughout their path — which lead to a much wider array of personalities. In fact, there are 21 voice-over and personality combos at launch — and boy howdy, there are some largeThese personalities are on display.

The Zealot is a holy warrior wielding the God Emperor’s wrath, but the other classes often deride them as being either obnoxiously loud or straight-up delusional. The Veteran can be a jocular guy supporting his team with some “just walk it off” wisdom, or an embittered, battle-hardened husk who hates everyone around him. There is no one really likes the Psyker, since in Warhammer 40K lore, demons sometimes erupt out of these guys’ foreheads.

The most friendly and charming class already appears to be the Ogryn, a big, bulky warrior who charges into battle and takes up an inordinate amount of the dropship’s cramped space. My Ogryn have understood the task well. They’ve usually picked a name like “Krunt” or “Gort,” and if you’re lucky enough to get two of them in a match, they’ll spam crouch while facing each other in the dance of their people.

Fatshark, via The Game Awards/YouTube

Multiplayer games can be difficult to master barks, which are short bits of dialogue that communicate important information such as an enemy appearing or an ally running low on ammo. If you make it too complicated, the information can become confusing. It can also become very monotonous if you make it too complicated. (I think of the above at least once per month. Division looters who always scream “They got Alex!”)

So it’s a delight to see how well DarktideThese lines are handled by the company. They’re loaded with world-building while remaining snappy. In one instance, my Psyker snarls at a Zealot she’s saving from certain death: “Against Both our instincts, allow me to help.” The Veteran sighs with relief when I ping ammo for him. “Ammo, a soldier’s best friend.” At one point, an Ogryn helps me up from a fight and is oddly gentle as he tells me not to worry.

In elevators or quarantine zones, there are many more lines. Zealots and Psykers are usually at each other’s throats, bickering over the sins of the Imperium. The characters will have philosophical debates in between waves of Chaos monsters, and occasionally a character will interrupt with a line like “There’s a right answer, and an answer that gets you shot.”

It’s a fine line to dance on. It’d be easy to go too far and have the cast be a bunch of unlikable chumps, but I’ve grown quite fond of many of my companions. We’re all in the muck together, climbing through sewers and escaping death by the skin of our teeth. None of us is a selected one, nor a protagonist. We’re all just a bunch of losers, strung together by fate and Fatshark’s queue, and I’m just enjoying the ride.