If you’ve ever been obsessed with a co-op game, you know the hardest part of playing one: convincing your good-for-nothing friends to buy a copy and join the fun. I have great news for you if you’ve ever experienced this particular pain point with Warhammer Vermintide 2—the game is free to own on Steam until Nov 24.
It’s just the base game and not the monolith of DLC that followed its release, but that DLC is at a steep discount to complement the free weekend. You might think that everyone’s moved on to the game’s Warhammer 40,000 flavored successor, Darktide, but Vermintide 2 remains alive and well. It got a new free level as recently as last week and, as SteamDB shows, it still accrues a peak of several thousand concurrent players each day.
If you’re not familiar with the game, we called it the best co-op game of 2018. In his review, PC Gamer writer Steven Messner called it “gleefully gory” and said it “succeeds on the merits of its stellar combat and level design.” Modeled after Left 4 Dead, the game sees you and a few mates trawl around the ruins of Warhammer Fantasy’s apocalypse, cleaving rats into chunks in first-person. Just try not to get anyone else killed.
It’s all to celebrate “10 years of tide,” commemorating the original game’s release in 2015. It’s one of the few great things to come out of Warhammer: The End Times, the polarizing narrative gestation that eventually begat Age of Sigmar. You can’t get the original on sale at the moment, but if I’m being honest, the second one is all you need after all these years of updates.
Vermintide 2 can be claimed for free on Steam.
