Warhammer - Vermintide 2

The pitch

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is Fatshark's four-player co-op action game set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe's End Times, tasking a party of five playable heroes with fighting through melee-focused, wave-based combat against hordes of Skaven ratmen and Chaos forces, in the tradition established by Left 4 Dead.

Combat that keeps people playing for hundreds of hours

Reviewers across years of coverage describe this game's combat as genuinely exceptional. "The devs said they designed this game for 80-100 hours of playtime, so I guess it's a bit more fun than intended," reads a 1,005-vote review, a joke repeated by multiple other reviewers reporting hundreds of hours logged. "I own hundreds of games; I rank Vermintide 2 as number one. When you get a team of skillful folk together for a wild ride through its world, nothing beats it," reads another. "The melee is much cleaner than Left 4 Dead 2 and where this game shines," reads a third, crediting the game with meaningfully improving on its clearest inspiration rather than simply copying it.

The dominant serious complaint: kernel-level anti-cheat in a PvE game

Set against that praise, the most serious recurring criticism in this corpus concerns EasyAntiCheat's kernel-level access, applied to a game that's almost entirely cooperative rather than competitive. "The anti-cheat protection is absolutely bonkers. Buddy was opening some chests and the game crashed. Anti-cheat somehow thought this was shady and he was issued a perma ban. When he appealed he was informed the dev team doesn't reverse bans," reads a 1,083-vote review. A separate 1,031-vote review states it just as directly: "I was banned after playing for only 2 hours! That's right, I was banned for cheating in a PVE game." This isn't a one-time launch problem — a review posted in May 2026 raises the same kernel-level concern, showing the complaint has persisted for years rather than being resolved.

A pattern of reworking what wasn't broken

Beyond the anti-cheat issue, reviewers describe a recurring, years-long pattern of Fatshark altering systems the community was satisfied with. "TLDR: After the impressive success of the second instalment in the Vermintide series... developer Fatshark has successfully mismanaged, overpromised... underdelivered and continually broken the game balance," reads a 1,250-vote review. "I love this game to death but unfortunately the only promise the devs have been able to keep is the release date," reads another, with over 1,200 votes. More recent reviews, from late 2024 through 2025, describe a specific progression-system rework making the grind harder for newer players: "Reworked the Progression System actually makes the grind harder for new players... Now it is [worse]," reads a detailed 168-vote review breaking down the specific mechanical change.

An ownership change reviewers connect to that pattern

Fatshark's ownership is directly relevant here: Tencent acquired roughly a 36% stake in the studio in January 2019 and a majority stake in January 2021, making Fatshark a Tencent subsidiary. Several reviewers connect that timeline to the grindier reworks described above: "Tencent, a Chinese company infamous for massive amounts of grinding in their games, has bought up 36% of Fatshark," reads one review, made specifically in the context of a progression-reset update. Whether or not that connection is the actual cause, it's a recurring theory in this game's own review corpus rather than an isolated complaint.

Connectivity, less dramatic but persistent

A more ordinary technical complaint concerns host migration: "If the host disconnects either due to a connection problem (common) or a ragequit (common), the game will [end the session for everyone]," reads a 645-vote review — a longstanding structural limitation of the game's peer-hosted networking rather than a recent regression.

Where sentiment sits now

Recent English review sentiment — the 100 most recent reviews, spanning late July to mid-August 2026 — runs 85% positive, modestly below the 89.7% lifetime score. That gap is consistent with the ongoing anti-cheat and progression-rework complaints being real and persistent rather than resolved, without being severe enough to outweigh combat most reviewers still rate highly. Achievement data shows solid engagement: the median across 26 achievements is 20.7%, with early milestones over 70%.

Value

At NZ$43.59 for the base game, this is a strong value proposition given the hundreds of hours reviewers commonly report; the large DLC catalogue is mostly cosmetic and career content rather than anything affecting core PvE balance, and monetisation itself draws few direct complaints in this corpus.

Verdict

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 delivers some of the best co-op melee combat in its genre, and reviewers who've stuck with it for hundreds of hours make that case convincingly. What tempers a stronger recommendation is a genuine trust problem: kernel-level anti-cheat that reviewers say has produced irreversible false-positive bans in a cooperative game, layered on top of a years-long pattern of progression reworks the community didn't ask for. Buy it for the combat. Go in with eyes open about the rest.