Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide (PlayStation 4)

Warhammer: The End Times – Vermintide is a 4-player co-op first-person action game, similar to Left 4 Dead in terms of gameplay mechanics, set in the Warhammer fantasy universe.

The End Times is the apocalypse that is prophesied to end the world of Warhammer. The players assume roles of five different characters: an Empire Soldier (Markus Kruber), a Wood Elf Waywatcher (Kerillian), a Bright Wizard (Sienna Fuegonasus), a Witch Hunter (Victor Saltzpyre) and a Dwarven Ranger (Bardin Goreksson), trying to survive in this world. Each of the characters features some unique abilities that allow to use different weapons, which affect the play style. Players get to interact with each other while helping an incapacitated character stand up, pulling up characters hanging on the ledges, exchanging medical resources etc.

The game is objective based. Every scenario features some specific tasks, like reaching certain spot, collecting resources from the area (like barrels with black powder or grain sacks), fending off enemy attack, then going to extraction point etc. Most of the time players need to withstand hordes of Skaven. Players encounter common enemies, like the Clan Rats, occasional special enemies, a Ratling Gunner capable of firing damaging suppressive fire, or the ninja-like Gutter Runner that gets to pounce players and pin them to the ground, and rare boss enemies, like the giant Rat Ogre.

Vermintide features a character progression system, that allows to equip additional and more powerful items. These equippable items (which include weapons of all kinds, helmets and trinkets that give a variety of minor bonuses) drop randomly as a reward after completing each scenario. Even if the reward turns out to be an item unusable by a specific character, player can use the Forge to recycle the item and use it to upgrade another item or fuse a bunch of different items of the same rarity to get an even more rare item.