Warhammer 40K: Darktide's closed beta will take place in October
There's still time to sign up
Warhammer 40K: Darktide is surely one of the most exciting games still to release this year. Before everyone gets to wield chainswords on November 30th, developers Fatshark are running a closed beta weekend and they just announced the dates: October 14th-16th.
The closed beta test will be available to players via Steam and the Microsoft store and will offer a limited seleciton of the weapons, maps and enemy types from the full game. Your progression won't carry over to the final release, the FAQ explains.
If you're keen to get involved, you can still signup via the official site. You whack your email address into that form and then they email you to ask for more information, such as your PC hardware specs and what region you're in. Those answers will partly determine whether you get a space in the beta.
Our Ed had a play of Darktide at Gamescom a few weeks ago, and found it a "a good co-op FPS time" but a familiar one:
I'm unsure if gun feel and sumptuous sledgehammer smacks made up for a mission that hadn't particularly pushed the warboat out, you know? It was as you'd expect from a game of this type, a la Vermintide or Left 4 Dead: find the switch, upload the data while fending off waves up the wazoo, carry three barrels while fending off more waves up more wazoos. Maybe missions later down the line mix things up considerably, or our demo was purposefully predictable to keep things simple at a big show and showcase the core of the game, but I was hoping for a touch more evidence that the wave-bashing genre had progressed a bit.
Personally, I'm not sure I need the co-op wave basher to evolve, since it still feels underserved as a genre. I didn't get on with Back 4 Blood and I'm hoping for a better time with Darktide's extremely meaty experience.