When comparing Warhammer: Vermintide 2 vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best hack and slash PC games?” NieR: Automata is ranked 2nd while Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Dynamic enemy placements to keep the action exciting
This game always keeps you on your toes by having enemies that can appear anywhere. Whether you've just turned a corner, climbed a ladder, or destroyed a wall with a cannon, there's no telling when and where the monsters will spring a chaotic ambush. This is accomplished through an overhead AI system that watches your path and pace through the level, placing enemies dynamically wherever you tread. As a result, replaying levels often leads to wildly different experiences, preventing the action from going stale for a long time.
Pro Weapon choice actually matters with each weapon type providing its own playstyle
Weapons have their own stats and special bonuses like critical strike based on what random stats your loot happened to roll, but what's especially interesting is the weapon type themselves vary in their physical combat capabilities like speed, damage, and swing arc. For example, swords have a wider swing arc than maces, making them better for taking out large groups of monsters. Daggers are quick and require timing to use properly. Spears are slow but have a huge arc and can knock down enemies. This adds a strategic element to play as you'll have to choose the right weapon to get the job done.
Pro No microtransactions
Everything is completely available and included in the cost the game. It has no microtransactions. All loot and loot boxes are earned via normal gameplay by completing levels and leveling up your character.
Pro Heroic Deeds give you the opportunity to replay levels in new and exciting ways
A Heroic Deed is a consumable item that lets you replay levels with specific challenges and modifiers. For example, the enemies might be tougher or more numerous, you can't use certain weapons or abilities, or you will see a new storyline play out. Upon completion, you will get bonus experience and loot, making them a way to replay levels in a rewarding new way. This adds a nice degree of replayability and keeps gameplay fresh by playing old levels in new ways.
Pro Intense melee focused combat
Vermintide 2 really draws you into the action by having up close and personal encounters with monsters. You hack, slash, and skewer enemies to pieces with axe, sword, or spear, which can feel quite unnerving as opposed to throwing a fireball from a safe distance. The tension is further reinforced by the unpredictability of the enemies, since you never know from which side they'll strike. Some enemies can even sneak up in your party's blind spot, dragging away an unsuspecting member. The end result is a very intense combat experience, where you're always in the middle of the action.
Pro The skill system is detailed and diverse with a bunch of different builds
Using the diverse talent system, you can pretty much make any kind of character you want to suit your playstyle.
There are five different character classes, each with a series of abilities that are unlocked every 5 levels. Additionally, at levels 9 and 12, you can split off your talent tree into subclasses which opens up a whole new tree of active and passive skills - meaning each class has access to 3 distinct subspecs with 25 skills each for a whopping 75 talents to choose from.
Pro The difficulty levels are far more than just tougher enemies
Rather than just making the enemies tougher, a lot of work went into making sure each difficulty setting adds something new to the mix. There's 4 difficulty levels total to choose from, and as you increase the difficulty, the enemies will obviously hit harder and have larger health pools, but the game goes beyond that. Item drops also become more scarce and the loot is better quality overall. On the harder difficulty levels friendly fire exists, so you can't just swing wildly. Your hits and spells will have to be timed and precise so you don't kill your friends or your AI teammates on accident.
Pro With the crafting system, getting loot is rewarding even if you can't use it
The crafting system is flexible, allowing players to craft their own gear and weapons with the stats or bonuses they want if RNG has been unkind. If you get any loot you don't want or can't use, you can salvage it into raw crafting materials. These materials can then be used to forge new weapons, upgrade existing ones, reroll the stats and bonuses on a weapon, or give the weapon a cosmetic illusion effect. For example, if you find a weapon with a cool glowing effect but it's a downgrade for you, you can transfer the cosmetic effect to your weapon of choice.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Rare enemy spawns will sometimes break your immersion
Occasionally a rare Chaos Warrior will appear seemingly out of thin air. It kind of ruins the immersion a bit when you can see an enemy literally spawn into the game world right in front of you.
Con Some of the side objectives are tedious or don't match the level theme
At times, you are asked to do some side objectives like lighting a cannon, but they don't really fit in with the overall theme of the level. In this case, you would have to search for the cannonball and then find the cannon itself. It feels like a way to inflate the play time in some cases, and some are rather boring as they detract from the otherwise fast paced action.
Con Some of the passive skills are uninspired
Some of the passive abilities like a small bonus to dodge feel boring as they require no input from the player, there's no animation attached to it, and the effect in-game is negligible at best.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.