This upcoming Warhammer game will finally let me live my dream of being a stinky evil rat

At Warhammer Skulls, one of the most interesting games revealed was Age of Sigmar: Deathmaster, a stealth-action platformer starring one of the sneaky, evil Skaven. Warhammer is best known for its sci-fi setting, but Age of Sigmar, the current mainline iteration of Games Workshop’s fantasy setting, has secretly enthralled me for months now. 40K is cool, but Age of Sigmar has inventive, imaginative models, an epic setting set across magical realms, and best of all: terrible little rats with evil plans. Finally, I get to play one of the Skaven as a hero. I had the chance to preview a demo of Deathmaster, and it’s a game all about the figurative rat race of climbing to the top.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Skaven are the antagonists of Fatshark’s Vermintide games, and they’re a craven, scheming race of rat-men who, despite constantly backstabbing each other and blowing themselves up with wildly unreliable tech, are one of the most dangerous factions in all of Warhammer’s fantasy settings. They’re fantastic antagonists: smelly, skrungly rats who flinch from the light and swarm under cover of darkness.

So, what’s it like when you end up playing one of the Skaven as a protagonist? The most immediate comparison that comes to mind is Carrion, the reverse-horror game where you play as a H.R. Giger-esque flesh monster freshly broken free from a scientific facility. At first, I’m unarmed and alone. I skitter through tunnels and hide in bushes. If one of the Skaven guard catches me, they knock me down and bash me to death with their shields. But eventually, I get a blade. Oh ho ho, the tables have turned now.

My prospects aren’t much better; after I score my first kill, I’m drafted into Clan Skrell as an assassin. The Skaven, as previously mentioned, are constantly hobbled by infighting, and they’ve divided themselves into four clans. Skrell are noted for their assassins, and now that I’ve picked up a blade, I’m given the chance to climb the ranks and become the titular Deathmaster myself. I stop at base to purchase my first upgrade, a grappling hook, and then I get to work ganking and shanking other rat-men.

The grappling hook gives me mobility, and the blade means I can finally eliminate other Skaven, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop being stealthy. Getting caught in an enemy’s line of sight for a second begins a countdown, and if I stay still, they’ll chase me down. I cannot win a face to face confrontation; they’ll instantly lock me down and kill me. If I dance on the edges of line of sight for too long, they start throwing projectiles which have the potential to stunlock me. I need to use the environment to my advantage. I scramble along ceilings and climb up chains, hide in bushes, and extinguish any fires I find. 

In the Hitman games, Agent 47 uses coins and soda cans as tools to distract guards. In Deathmaster, I can drag the corpses of Skaven along and use them to lure out my enemies, or chuck skulls as a makeshift projectile. It’s delightfully macabre. 

The only problem I had with the demo is that some sequences took me multiple tries, and every single time, I had to sit and watch the animation of my poor rat assassin being beaten to death. It’s only a couple of seconds, but when you’re on your fifth try of murdering your way through a tricky sequence, I wish I could just fast-forward to a fresh start.

Deathmaster is set to release on PC and consoles in 2027, and the demo shows a lot of potential. The Skaven deserve some time in the spotlight, and their presence soothes a lot of the usual problems that people joke about in stealth games. Of course the guard slowly forgets about my presence; he’s a silly little rat that I’m going to shank to death. The full game clearly offers different playstyles and upgrades, and I’m curious to see how powerful my assassin will be able to grow, and what obstacles I’ll have to gnaw through to become the Deathmaster.