In Darktide’s gruesome co-op, my greatest ally is a rock

Well before anointing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide as this month’s RPS Game Club game, I’ve wanted to talk about its rock. The rock. The best rock. Best Darktide rocks 2024, number one: the rock.

Philistines, probably Psyker players, might question the rock’s status as the finest product of Darktide’s honking great 2023 skill tree rework. Besides being a mere slab of destroyed masonry, as rather than a cloaking device or magic throwing knife, is it not just a glorified reskin of the Ogryn’s original grenade box throwable? An oafishly lobbed hunk o’ junk that’s only good for letting the resident Big Guy smite a single heretic? Maybe, on paper. In practice, nothing else in Darktide’s offensive toolbox sparks joy like the rock. If Marie Kondo was a design lead at Fatshark, it would have a drawer all to itself.

I won’t deny that the rock’s pleasures can be simple. As a single-target nuke, its damage potential is immense, knocking chunks out of bosses and dispatching most elite underlings in one blow. It is satisfying beyond words to turn the tables on Ragers and Mutants, overwhelming their inhuman sturdiness against bullets and blades with a single brick to the chin.

Credit to the Orgyn, also, for having such a good arm. Rock throws have enough range and accuracy on them to out-snipe Snipers, and if you can’t raise a smile every time that red laser sight goes dark, your own lump of hurled concrete crashing through the owner’s scope... well, you clearly haven’t fought many Snipers. Equipping the rock over an actual go-boom grenade thus grants your Ogryn a long-range reach that far exceeds any of his actual guns, and can even let him fill the team’s own designated marksman role when there aren’t any Veterans or Voidstrike Psykers on hand. Not a bad glow-up, for an underbiting abhuman.

More so than most ‘nade options, the rock also feels like you’re actively encouraged to use it. Whereas explosives and flashbangs are constantly in short supply, nudging players to save them for that one perfect moment of enemy clumping that might never even materialse, rocks replenish over time. Presumably, from the Orgyn quietly picking up new ones to ask if they’ll be his friends. While this doesn’t mean you can toss them out like it’s a Siberian snowball fight, you are free to apply rocks to faces far more liberally than ammo-limited grenades, almost turning them into a second offhand weapon.

Imagine the nightmare scenario for any Darktidian: gun’s empty, dodge is on cooldown, and there’s a charging Mutant twelve feet away. For most classes and loadouts, that’ll be a block of HP and some corruption, please and thank you, but quickdrawing Ogryns can whip out a rock to put down that baddie in an instant. And, for physics reasons that seem particular to mid-charge Mutants, there’s a bonus: the impact will somehow propel his limp carcass forward, hurtling harmlessly through you and striking the wall behind with a hilarious thunk.

See, this is the real crowning glory of the rock: it’s funny. Not the damage, not the flexibility it affords, and not the ability to ignore grenade pickups. Nixing the bodywarped soldiers of an eldritch plague god with a big pebble is pure physical comedy, even more so than the actual joke (throwing a grenade box instead of the grenades) that the rock replaced. It’s a literally punchy punchline, a bathos-dripping anticlimax delivered to squadmates who steel themselves for a do-or-die duel against a towering elite and can only laugh as he crumples down dead from an offscreen boulder. Then you’ll laugh, and the rest of the team will laugh, and for one brief, wonderful moment, you’ll all forget that you’ve been sent on a suicide mission in the kind of doomed hellhole that even the God-Emperor has forsaken. And you'll have the rock to thank for it.