Warhammer: The End Times - Vermintide: Karak Azgaraz (PC) Review

Things are looking grim for the dwarves. One can easily predict why. Their women sport beards, the top shelves are an eternal enigma to them, and with the rise of the skaven, a lot of people (well, one over-reactive critic playing as an elf, really) keep shooting at them, mistaking them for rats - and now the rats are actually at their doorstep and in their tunnels! Can things get any worse? Wait. That elf who keeps on accidentally shooting dwarves and claiming that she thought that they were Skaven because they are short and hairy is coming their way? Well… Ain't that just peachy?

Taking place in the dwarven land of 'Karak Azgaraz,' the Skaven are up to what they always do best: destroying stuff and being massive annoyances that really need to be killed en masse because of just how annoying and evil they are. Featuring several new levels/stories set in these new lands, it's time to go slaughtering rats! Sadly, it's… really not that impressive.

Don't be mistaken. Karak Azgaraz isn't a bad bit of DLC for Warhammer: The End Times - Vermintide by any means, but it's kind of 'more of the same' than would be ideal. The idea of pest control in the snow and tunnels is interesting and, thankfully, the game manages to avoid feeling like a flat-out rehash or uninspired mess that far too many expansions of this sort of thing often fall into. It's just that it doesn't really offer too much more outside of that. Rats come, rats go, and nothing has really changed beyond that.

The story, sadly, is rather thin once more. While an immense and immersive story was not expected, that doesn't change that the world fails to really distinguish itself, and that's part of what's to blame. What is actually at stake in the story? Well, it's easy to forget, since so much focus will be on killing more rats. There is some stuff about a cursed rune, saving dwarves, and all that other nice stuff, but the expansion has pretty much the exact same problem the base game of Vermintide had when it comes to story - namely that it's not in the driver's seat or even the back seat, but, rather, the baby seat, with the multiplayer shooting taking the front seat.

For that, it does its job rather well. People sick and tired of the old content will love the new and improved stuff, and there is no doubt at all that it is an enjoyable bit of rodent population reduction. It's just that its strength comes from the core game, and this is a bit more of an add-on designed to keep people interested who may have lost interest than something that will likely bring newcomers into the fold.