Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Review: Five Heroes, Fifteen Careers, and a Loot Loop That Holds Up

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a co-op game about hitting rat-men with swords, and it is very good at that. Fatshark built the 2018 sequel on the same first-person melee that made 2015’s Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide a critically acclaimed release, then added Chaos, careers and a loot grind. It holds up.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Five Heroes, Fifteen Careers

The pitch is simple. Five characters, first-person perspective, cooperative missions against the Skaven and the Chaos army. The characters are Markus Kruber, Victor Saltzpyre, Bardin Goreksson, Sienna Fuegonasus and Kerillian. Each splits into three careers, 15 total in the base game, 20 with DLC. Every career gets its own skills and abilities.

That structure is the smartest thing Fatshark did here. A career is not a costume. It changes what you do when the horde closes in, and it gives a group a reason to talk before the mission starts instead of after it fails.

The base game ships with 13 missions, more than 20 enemy types and more than 50 weapons. That is a lot of content for a 2018 release. Melee in Warhammer: Vermintide 2 carries the combat, and the game is built around intense world-class melee action.

The Skittergate and the Rotbloods

The story picks up after the first game. Grey Seer Rasknitt, the antagonist of the original who was presumed dead, has captured the five Heroes of Ubersreik. With the heroes out of the way, Ubersreik fell to Clan Fester.

Rasknitt ordered the construction of the Skittergate, a portal meant to let the Chaos Champion Bödvarr Ribspreader move his Rotblood army into the border-city of Helmgart. The portal keeps failing. When it fails badly enough, the destruction frees Kruber from captivity. He fights through the Skaven lair and regathers the others: Saltzpyre the witch hunter, Goreksson the dwarf ranger, Fuegonasus the fire witch, Kerillian the wood elf.

The group escapes to a ruined keep and links up with Franz Lohner, a former innkeeper who directs missions, and Olesya Pimenova, the witch who makes the bridge of shadows that moves them around. From there they work to stop the Skaven and Chaos together.

The Rotbloods are a Chaos Warband dedicated to Nurgle, the Chaos God of Disease and Decay. That detail does a lot of work. It explains why the game’s second enemy faction feels different from the rats even when the two are standing in the same room.

Winds of Magic Brings the Beastmen

The expansion “Winds of Magic” added the Beastmen, a herd of Chaos mutated humanoids hunting an object called the Herdstone. That is the expansion’s contribution to the enemy roster.

The campaign has its set pieces. The heroes kill the sorcerer lord Burblespue Halescourge, who tried to run a ritual that would have unleashed a massive plague on Helmgart. They beat the Skaven warlord Skarrik Spinemanglr, who had set up in a fallen dwarf hold. Bödvarr eventually sends most of his forces to find the heroes’ keep and wipe them out, which leaves his war camp lightly defended. The heroes attack it.

That is a plot built to justify missions, and it does the job. The campaign moves the group from one fight to the next without asking them to stop.

A Loot System That Earns Its Place

Finish a mission and you get rewards through a randomized loot system. The loop is mission, reward, mission. The 15 careers and the 50-plus weapons give the loot somewhere to go.

The comparison that matters is against the first game. Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide established the formula. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 adds more enemy types, more careers, a second faction in the Chaos army, and the Beastmen later.

Dates, Platforms and a Successor

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 came to Windows on 8 March 2018. Xbox One followed on 11 July 2018, PlayStation 4 on 18 December 2018, and Xbox Series X/S on 3 December 2020. Fatshark developed and published it. It is a shooter, an RPG, an adventure and an indie game, played solo or in multiplayer co-op.

A spiritual successor, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, arrived in 2022. That is the honest context for this review. Fatshark took what it learned here and moved to a different universe.

Key facts
– Release: 8 March 2018 (Windows), 11 July 2018 (Xbox One), 18 December 2018 (PS4), 3 December 2020 (Xbox Series X/S)
– Developer and publisher: Fatshark
– Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5, Xbox One
– Base content: 13 missions, over 20 enemy types, over 50 weapons
– Characters: 5, divided into 15 careers (20 with DLC)
– Modes: single player, multiplayer, co-operative
– Perspective: first person
– Critic aggregate: 8.1/10 (IGDB, 9 outlets)

What Holds Up and What Does Not

The case against Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is that it is a machine you have to keep feeding. Randomized loot plus 15 careers plus 50-plus weapons is a lot of inventory to manage. The plot is a frame for missions.

The case for it is stronger. The five characters each have their own career paths, and the enemy roster — Skaven, Rotbloods, Beastmen — gives a group plenty to fight.

The Skittergate is the tell. A portal that keeps failing is a plot device, but it is also the game’s design in miniature: pressure that builds, breaks, and forces the heroes to move. That is what a good co-op game does. It does not let a team settle.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is not a game you finish. It is a game you return to with the same four people, and the careers and the weapons keep giving you reasons to. The 2015 original established the formula. The sequel builds on it.

The part worth watching is the career system. It is the difference between a sequel that adds content and a sequel that adds decisions, and Fatshark chose decisions. Darktide followed in 2022.

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