Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Warhammer Vermintide 2 is a beautifully dark game, and I'm in love with its hard-hitting, meaty melee weapons. It's a gorgeous game with tons of fun play styles and customization options to uncover, even if most of the loot you earn for your efforts is a letdown. But thankfully you don't need to pay much attention to it to simply enjoy the hack-n-slash, Left 4 Dead-inspired co-op fun of bashing hordes of rats and zombies to a pulp.

A highly accomplished sequel that innovates without losing sight of what made the first one great.

Vermintide 2's combat and level design are so feverishly fun that I'll put up with its bad matchmaking and RPG progression if it means chopping more ratmen in half.

The Chaos Wastes introduces a mass of randomness and unpredictability to your playthrough, changing up things as fundamental as the construction of levels, with certain paths being blocked off, or starting and ending points being moved about or even reversed. Loot also takes on a more significant role, as the game isn’t afraid to let you become overpowered, or even just oddly built, with bizarre combinations of boons. All is stripped away after completion. This is Vermintide 2’s endgame — and its best facet. Forget all the cosmetics; forget your “Power Level,” specific equipment, or career. Jump into the Chaos Wastes, with friends, and smash your way through the hordes, relishing in the fact that you’ve no idea what’s next. Since the beginning, Vermintide 2 has had a solid core, capturing much of what makes these kinds of horde games so enduringly popular. But it’s also proven, over time, that it has something new to offer, with The Chaos Wastes adding some much-needed volatility to this endless procession of fantasy brawls.

Vermintide 2 is a bucket of gory fun made even better by a solid progression and loot system.

Vermintide 2 might be shameless about its inspiration, but, critically, it recreates it really, really well, at a spectacular scale. I can't speak to whether I'll still be showering the land with rat legs a few months from now, but I fully expect to happily spend the next few weeks, at least, knee-deep in the rodent dead.

Vermintide 2 is an improvement over its predecessor with more beautifully designed sprawling levels, more varied enemy types, an addicting loot system, and a whole lot of character skills to try out. The sequel is at its best when it's creating tense moments, even if it can quickly get a little bit overwhelming. I also apologize to all of those I left to die in matchmaking.

Even with a few minor and infrequent hiccups, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 serves as an excellent platform for players keen on first-person cooperative action. The number of missions and environments, to say nothing of the different characters and classes, should provide enough content and customization to keep fans happy for the foreseeable future. As for cutting through the rising and falling ranks of the vicious Vermintide; well, it just feels good.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a fantastic package in 2026. You can frequently get the game on a deep discount and it's loaded with free and paid additional content to give you even more content to enjoy. As usual with these types of games, they really shine brightest when you're playing them with friends, though I never really had any problem with the AI bots. I was also easily able to find additional players via matchmaking every time that I played. If you're still hungry for that Left 4 Dead style action and enjoy the grimdark world of Warhammer Fantasy, you owe it to yourself to try Vermintide 2.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 definitely made a good impression. This is a better and more entertaining first-person version of L4D2. The game has taken the best of the first game and refined the earlier slightly clunky mechanics. Compared to its predecessor, there is a great variety of environments and a higher difficulty level. The result is a wonderfully playable work that delivers hundreds of hours of fun for both solo players and a group of friends.