New mission dabbles in daemons, dysentery

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide continues to cling tightly, perhaps even aggressively, to my Steam installations, my occasionally waning interest repeatedly re-sparked by the addition of akimbo-autopistolling chem fiends or haughty toasterpeople. A live service sucker, it makes me. Today's Depths of the Damned update, the grimdark co-op shooter's biggest since the Skitarii rocked up, continues the trend: it's centered around a massive new mission that's as revolting as it is compelling.

Whereas most Darktide excursions take you through criss-crossing sectors of its impossibly gigantic Hive City, the new Spillway deployment dumps you in the gushing, thus-unexplored hell of Tertium's water treatment facility. It’s a spectacular place, in the sense that it's utterly horrible. Fetid green liquid rushes through its caverns as blasphemous new life sprouts from the moisture, dark moss covering the cages that the complex's former gangster ownership probably didn’t hang for aesthetic reasons. The current residents aren't much friendlier, taking full advantage of the space's long sightlines to pelt you with lasgun fire while their fellow crusty cultists charge into melee range.

The Spillway's guts are even nastier. I'd say they’re covered in daemonic growths, but that would suggest the existence of visible points where the Chaos meat first took root. It would be more accurate to say the growths have become structurally integral to the facility in general, entire rooms covered floor-to-ceiling in the muck. The pipe network, meanwhile, is so thickly coated that it starts resembling a badly diseased intestinal tract; a playable Fantastic Voyage, if Raquel Welch was an Ogryn.

Despite this, and with the caveat that I've only played through the new mission once, it doesn't have the radically different feel of certain other post-launch operation additions. 2024's Rolling Steel was a runaway train caper unlike anything Darktide had tried before, and the Hive Scum update's No Man's Land op successfully swapped metal corridors for muddy trenches in a breathless WW1-inspired rush. Spillway is, at least structurally, a much more conventional oscillation of fierce wave combat and quieter traversal.

Those other two missions, however, were comparatively tight, short-form jaunts. This is a full-length, maybe even bumper-sized new challenge, which does at least try to enact some smaller twists along the way. There's a spot of light memory-puzzling, for example, as you’re shown a particular daub of gang graffiti that will mark the safe-ish path through the mazelike pipes – if you can find it among all the other gang graffiti. I don’t know if it’s a guaranteed spawn, but I was also ambushed partway through the upper facility by a traitor Captain, a foe usually reserved as the final boss for Assassination and Rolling Steel runs.

Spillway's actual final boss, which I’m slightly loathe to spoil (outside of the odd screenshot, naturally), almost manages to be a burst of freshness in a warren of filth. He's probably the most bosslike among all of Darktide's chunkiest baddies, advancing through phases, throwing out ruinous AoE attacks, and cackling through invulnerable periods like the mad space wizard he is. May your squads be smarter and more attentive than my gang of AI bots, or you’ll end up like me: a psychically flayed corpse, fallen without glory inside a lair made of poo chutes.

It’s a tricky one, basically, even with my Welch-Orgyn equipping two of the update’s new weapons – both slightly overtuned, as is Darktide patch tradition. The Thugshot is a slug-firing, crowd-penetrating breachloader, capable of slicing through shamblers like it's hitting the 'Delete column' button in Excel, while the Cruncher sledgehammer can thwack lesser enemies clean off ledges in a satisfying sideswipe. Both pay for their heavy damage by imparting it slowly, but then that just encourages you to find the rhythm in Darktide’s swingin'.

Either way, I have unfinished business with Far Future Thames Water and their rotting, three-phase CEO. Attending to it, even with the greater time investment and/or firmer teeth-clenching requirements over previous new missions, seems like a good way to make the most of Darktide's continued SSD presence.