If Space Marine 2 has you curious about Warhammer 40K lore, try Darktide

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marines 2 is a hit, and it’s no surprise that players are having fun playing as one of the Emperor’s Angels, stomping and shooting their way through a battle of hungry Tyranids. One thing I didn’t expect was to see the Warhammer 40K setting through the eyes of people unfamiliar with the universe. Things that seem very status quo to me as a longtime fan of the franchise are intriguing and appealing to new players. Take, for example, the tens of thousands of candles stacked around religious sites, or the biomechanical babies flying around on angel wings.

If you’re one of those players who experiences the Imperium as Lieutenant Titus, I have one more game to recommend that really takes all the unique gothic industrial horror of the far future to 11. No game captures the atmosphere of 40K better than Dark flooda cooperative horde shooter set in the Hive City of Tertium, the capital of Atoma Prime.

In Dark floodYou play as a Reject, a prisoner who has been freed from a penal colony and used as a laborer. The group is made up of Ogryn, veteran guardsmen, fanatics, and psykers. Most of the Reject backstories really emphasize the casual cruelty of the Imperium of Man. Some of the offenses that get people jailed and sent to a penal colony are relatively understandable, like arson. Others are shockingly mundane, like giving someone a dirty look or saying something mildly critical of the God Emperor.

The Rejects eventually become a necessary source of recruitment when the Moebian Sixth, a group of Imperial Guards, go on a rampage and succumb to the influence of the Plague God Nurgle. In Dark floodGroups of four are sent out as assault teams by Tertium, tasked with achieving their objectives and slowly driving the heretics out of the city.

I can’t praise developer Fatshark enough for the time they’ve put into making the hive city feel authentic. Every level is lovingly realised, from the lower industrial levels of the city to the markets and apartment blocks and noble residences. The game is also told from the perspective of regular, ordinary mortals; Titus can smash through obstacles and wade into hordes of enemies, but the Rejects are relatively small and vulnerable.

The icing on the cake, The soundtrack of Jesper Kyd is wall-to-wall bangers, mixing classical and choral music with electronic and industrial beats. There’s nothing quite like the roar and kick of a bolter, or shooting lightning bolts from your fingers like Palpatine while pipe organs rage wildly in the background. If you want to see the Empire up close, including lobotomized amputees embedded in computer equipment to act as health stations, there’s no better way to see that world than a few rounds of Dark flood.