[ad_1]
Properly earlier than anointing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide as this month’s RPS Recreation Membership Recreation, I’ve needed to speak about its rock. The rock. The greatest rock. Finest Darktide rocks 2024, primary: the rock.
Philistines, most likely Psyker gamers, would possibly query the rock’s standing because the most interesting product of Darktide’s honking nice 2023 ability tree rework. Moreover being a mere slab of destroyed masonry, as quite than a cloaking system or magic throwing knife, is it not only a glorified reskin of the Ogryn’s unique grenade field throwable? An oafishly lobbed hunk o’ junk that’s solely good for letting the resident Huge Man smite a single heretic? Perhaps, on paper. In follow, nothing else in Darktide’s offensive toolbox sparks pleasure just like the rock. If Marie Kondo was a design lead at Fatshark, it will have a drawer all to itself.
I gained’t deny that the rock’s pleasures may be easy. As a single-target nuke, its harm potential is immense, knocking chunks out of bosses and dispatching most elite underlings in a single blow. It’s satisfying past phrases to show the tables on Ragers and Mutants, overwhelming their inhuman sturdiness in opposition to bullets and blades with a single brick to the chin.
Credit score to the Orgyn, additionally, for having such a superb arm. Rock throws have sufficient vary and accuracy on them to out-snipe Snipers, and when you can’t increase a smile each time that crimson laser sight goes darkish, your individual lump of hurled concrete crashing by the proprietor’s scope… properly, you clearly haven’t fought many Snipers. Equipping the rock over an precise go-boom grenade thus grants your Ogryn a long-range attain that far exceeds any of his precise weapons, and might even let him fill the staff’s personal designated marksman function when there aren’t any Veterans or Voidstrike Psykers available. Not a foul glow-up, for an underbiting abhuman.
Extra so than most ‘nade choices, the rock additionally feels such as you’re actively inspired to make use of it. Whereas explosives and flashbangs are consistently in brief provide, nudging gamers to avoid wasting them for that one excellent second of enemy clumping that may by no means even materialse, rocks replenish over time. Presumably, from the Orgyn quietly choosing up new ones to ask in the event that they’ll be his associates. Whereas this doesn’t imply you possibly can toss them out prefer it’s a Siberian snowball struggle, you might be free to use rocks to faces much more liberally than ammo-limited grenades, virtually turning them right into a second offhand weapon.
Think about the nightmare situation for any Darktidian: gun’s empty, dodge is on cooldown, and there’s a charging Mutant twelve toes away. For many lessons and loadouts, that’ll be a block of HP and a few corruption, please and thanks, however quickdrawing Ogryns can whip out a rock to place down that baddie immediately. And, for physics causes that appear specific to mid-charge Mutants, there’s a bonus: the affect will someway propel his limp carcass ahead, hurtling harmlessly by you and hanging the wall behind with a hilarious thunk.
See, that is the true crowning glory of the rock: it’s humorous. Not the harm, not the pliability it affords, and never the power to disregard grenade pickups. Nixing the bodywarped troopers of an eldritch plague god with an enormous pebble is pure bodily comedy, much more so than the precise joke (throwing a grenade field as an alternative of the grenades) that the rock changed. It’s a actually punchy punchline, a bathos-dripping anticlimax delivered to squadmates who metal themselves for a do-or-die duel in opposition to a towering elite and might solely snicker as he crumples down useless from an offscreen boulder. You then’ll snicker, and the remainder of the staff will snicker, and for one transient, great second, you’ll all overlook that you just’ve been despatched on a suicide mission within the type of doomed hellhole that even the God-Emperor has forsaken. And you will have the rock to thank for it.
[ad_2]
