Years after launch, Darktide's soundtrack is still the best in the biz

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a hectic game; the screen is often filled with swarms of enemies and flailing limbs. Darktide is a Left 4 Dead-style gauntlet set in the 40K universe, with most matches lasting somewhere between twenty and forty minutes. While the game has been out since 2022, there’s a major part of it that’s still criminally underappreciated: the soundtrack. Composer Jesper Kyd has created a feast for the ears, and helped define the audio of the Imperium. 

Kyd has done a lot of well-regarded work; he scored a bunch of Assassin’s Creed games, the State of Decay franchise, the mid-2000s Hitman installments, and a couple of Borderlands. Fatshark first worked with him on Vermintide, but it’s his work on Darktide that really drew my interest, because it absolutely fucks. Darktide is set in a hive city, a massive structure that houses trillions of beleaguered souls. 

There’s the terrible and magnificent grandeur of the 40K setting, but you don’t play as a Space Marine or a Rogue Trader; you’re a street level scum enlisted to kill heretic cultists burrowed into a decaying urban structure. The players are Rejects, sentenced to die for trivial crimes like being mildly rude to the wrong officer. The war for the hive city of Tertium is so desperate that the Inquisition, the Imperium of Man’s secret police, free and enlist you to serve as a kill team behind enemy lines. 

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve been sprung from prison and sent to war. You’ve fought your way past hundreds of poxwalkers and mutants, still wearing rough prison garb, clutching borrowed arms. Your four person squad stumbles into the lair of a traitor captain, and this starts playing: