Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide sends you and up to three friends into Ubersreik, a city being swallowed by Skaven. You can play the campaign online with up to four people. If your group wants a grim fantasy spin on a team survival run, the main draw is how each mission turns a familiar route into a crowded melee where a teammate can be pulled away in a moment.
Five heroes, one collapsing city
The Skaven are not a distant threat here. Rat-men flood streets, buildings, walls, and underground passages while your team pushes through 13 main missions. The setting moves from the upper reaches of Magnus Tower to the tunnels beneath the city. The heroes are five mismatched survivors with their own voices and arsenals: Markus Kruber, Bardin Goreksson, Kerillian, Sienna Fuegonasus, and Victor Saltzpyre, known respectively as the Empire Soldier, Dwarf Ranger, Waywatcher, Bright Wizard, and Witch Hunter. You choose one at the hub before setting out, and a friend choosing a different hero brings another set of weapons and abilities into the run. Across the five arsenals, the weapon pool ranges from swords, daggers, axes, and hammers to bows, guns, and magical staves.
The differences are practical as well as theatrical. Kruber can take swords, shields, hammers, or handguns; Kerillian’s bows reach across a room while paired blades keep her dangerous up close. Bardin brings heavy axes and hammers alongside crossbows or guns. Sienna’s staves channel fire, but excess heat can hurt her; Saltzpyre’s rapiers, pistols, and crossbows suit precise attacks against dangerous targets. Kerillian’s bow can also strike two enemies lined up in its path, while shields give Kruber another way to hold a press of Skaven. Weapons belong to particular heroes, so changing characters means changing the tools you bring. You are not swapping between five cosmetic skins of the same fighter.
That variety matters because the team is usually surrounded. A sword or hammer handles a close press of clan-rats, while a gun, bow, or staff can thin a group at range. Melee includes regular and heavy attacks, blocking, pushes while blocking, and dodges. Those options matter in tight spaces: enemies can crowd a doorway while more arrive from behind. Your group’s weapons shape how it answers that pressure, but no character turns the mission into a solo showcase. The run revolves around advancing together, clearing space along the route, and reacting when a threat can split the formation.
A rescue can become the objective
Most missions give your team a route through the city and a concrete task along the way. Some ask you to gather resources, reach a destination, or defend a key position against waves. The 13 core levels change their scenery and objectives, moving between rooftops, streets, interiors, and subterranean spaces, from the Dwarven Bridge and Gardens of Morr to Magnus Tower and the tunnels below. The group alternates between pushing through a route, searching side areas, and holding ground as Skaven press in. That gives a run more shape than a string of identical arena fights: the team advances, searches or defends, then tries to reach safety as the Skaven keep pressing.
Enemy placement is not simply a fixed set of groups standing in your path. The game uses a dynamic spawn system, so a familiar passage can become dangerous in a different way on another run. Ordinary clan-rats fill the space and keep your attention split. Armored Stormvermin wield halberds and can withstand more punishment than the horde; a Rat Ogre changes a crowded fight into a larger boss encounter, charging through the melee with enough force to knock heroes aside. Special enemies make the party’s position matter even more. A Gutter Runner can pin a hero, leaving the rest of the team to free them. A gas globadier can make a patch of ground unsafe, while a Ratling Gunner pins the team behind cover with a stream of fire.
Those attacks make separation costly. If a friend is dragged off or trapped, the rest of the group has to make space to reach them. A mission can change from advancing toward the objective to getting one person back on their feet. This is the game’s most direct co-op interaction: the danger does not politely wait while everyone finishes their own fight. It comes from several directions, and one specialized enemy can make the person who noticed it first everyone’s problem.
There are no separate character classes that assign one friend to healing or defense; the five heroes instead bring different weapons and abilities into the same melee. A teammate’s position can matter more than their chosen hero when someone is pinned or a gas cloud cuts off a route. That keeps the cooperation grounded in the shared space: the group is not managing separate lanes from safety, but reacting to threats that can reach any of them.
Five difficulty settings reinforce that pressure. Lower settings are less punishing; harder runs increase the threat and leave less room for mistakes. At the highest difficulties, tougher enemies make a run less forgiving, especially when a special enemy interrupts the team’s response to the horde. AI companions can fill party slots, but they cannot respond like human teammates to sudden special enemies or rescue calls.
Optional risks, randomized rewards
Between missions, the Red Moon Inn is a shared hub where you can pick a character, look over equipment, and prepare for another route. That pause gives the group a place to compare a new weapon or trinket before choosing the next mission. The campaign’s progression revolves around post-mission rewards rather than a long skill tree. Each successful mission awards seven base loot dice in Ranald’s Bones. The dice roll successes or failures; more successes raise the tier of the weapon, trinket, or headgear reward. Found loot dice and side objectives can add to the roll, so one player’s detour can improve the result for everyone. The outcome is randomized, and a run may improve a loadout or leave it unchanged. The party shares the payoff even though each hero later equips their own weapons.
Tomes and grimoires add a sharper risk-and-reward choice. These hidden pickups improve the team’s reward chances, but each takes an inventory slot away from a consumable. A tome displaces a healing item, while a grimoire also reduces the party’s health. Carrying them to the end of a mission improves its loot roll, so the reward comes with a real cost rather than being a free collectible.
The forge lets you combine or dismantle equipment, turning duplicate or unwanted items into materials and upgrades. It can fuse five weapons of the same rarity into a higher-tier weapon, salvage old gear for components, and use those components to unlock weapon traits. Weapons can carry up to three traits, including effects that alter damage or healing, and each added trait raises its component cost. New weapons can change your range, speed, or feel in a fight, though rewards still depend on random rolls and repetition. The campaign remains playable without treating every side objective as mandatory, but the additional dice give repeat runs a reason to check corners and routes you skipped before.
There is more than the core campaign. Last Stand is a separate survival mode in which you and your team face escalating waves and see how long you can hold out. Its rewards include experience, tokens, and Inn decorations; Last Stand includes Town Meeting, while The Fall is unlocked through the separate Schluesselschloss add-on. Town Meeting opens as repairs in the city draw to a close before a Skaven attack, while The Fall takes the fight to a fortress outside Ubersreik. It is a different kind of session from advancing through a mission: the goal is endurance rather than reaching the next story objective. The core game’s 13 missions remain the main campaign structure.
A grim co-op night, with practical limits
Vermintide’s mood is close, dirty, and frequently chaotic. Narrow streets, damp tunnels, and looming stone structures make Ubersreik feel as if it is being consumed from the edges inward. The Skaven are loud and quick; distant chittering can turn into a swarm before the team has much breathing room. The five heroes add a contrasting layer of banter and personality, so the party is not entirely grim even when the city is. If your group enjoys fantasy violence with lots of melee impact, the tone and sound design support the constant sense of being outnumbered.
Windows PC sessions require broadband internet and have no local split-screen, so each player joins from a separate computer. The version offers partial controller support alongside keyboard-and-mouse controls; not every menu or action is guaranteed to work equally well with a controller.
The game supports drop-in, drop-out online play, and AI heroes fill open party slots, so a mission can start with fewer than four human players. Public teammate availability can vary, and open matchmaking may not always provide a full human party.
For groups that enjoy close-range fantasy combat, mission routes, loot decisions, and teammate rescues all unfold in the same noisy press of Skaven. The campaign keeps these choices inside the same fight, so the party’s equipment and position matter alongside the mission objective.