Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is the sequel to 2015's critically acclaimed Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide. Fight together with your friends against the forces of Chaos and Skaven in this epic 4-player co-op game set in the Warhammer Fantasy Battles world. Vermintide 2 expands the intense first-person combat with a brand new enemy faction, 15 new career paths, talent trees, new weapons, an improved loot system, and more...

Stripped down to its bare bones, a lazy description of Vermintide 2 would be to compare it to a Left 4 Dead clone set in the Warhammer universe. It's a first-person action game that sees you teaming up with three other characters as you set out to accomplish various quests.

The aim of each quest is to complete a series of goals along the way before reaching your end target. But you'll also come into contact with the environment's beasts who will, if they see you, attack you.

You start the game with a brief tutorial, which also introduces you to the main characters. Markus Kruber, Victor Saltzpyre, Bardin Goreksson, Sienna Fuegonasus and Kerillian. Once this is complete you're transported to your HQ where you can eventually level up, craft items and stock up on ammo and magic potions for your quests. You can play online with three other gamers, or offline with bots.

I started off playing online and the first game took an age to find any other players. After that, with future games, it was hit and miss whether I'd be disconnected halfway through a quest or not - which made it incredibly frustrating. In the end I decided to play offline (you can still level up) and the offline bots were actually better at keeping each other alive than the online players. I never finished a quest online, but I finished the first one I attempted offline. Plus playing online can be a little annoying if you want to use a character you're trying to level up, as sometimes your character will already be taken and you'll have to chose one of the others. I don't know why the developers didn't let everyone play as the same character if they wanted to, but just switched the graphics around so that instead of you seeing three other players as Kruber, you saw three of the other characters.

As you progress through the game you also unlock rooms and areas of your base. This means that you don't get lost in a maze of corridors, as it's slowly introduced to you.

Each quest is pretty much the same. You travel the environment cutting down wave after wave of enemy monsters. Get to the end and you'll receive random rewards which can be new weapons or elements that increase your power.

The graphics are impressive - watching your enemies being brutally sliced and killed in various ways never gets old. But once you get to the point where you realise you're just going through the motions, and don't really care about levelling up any more... I can imagine that the game will get tiresome rather quickly.

Personally, I found it a lot of fun, and with the promise of future DLCs for new quests, this should keep most Warhammer fans happy for quite some time.

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Nick Smithson