// PC GAMER — GAMING
Blending my way through Hive Tertium's tunnels as a towering murderbot might make the Skitarii my favorite Darktide class yet
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During the 250+ hours I've spent eviscerating Darktide's hordes of poxwalkers and nurglefied hive inhabitants, few classes have gripped me as much as the Zealot. Is it the sweet purr of the chainsword as I grind off a Mauler's face? Is it that rush as I slide into melee range with a squad of traitor guardsmen and de-limb them as they feebly try to bayonet me? Whatever it is, it never gets old. I'm as surprised as anyone, then, that Darktide's new Skitarii class might have finally converted me to praising the Omnissiah full time.
I've always had a fondness for the cogboys in red, but Fatshark has really excelled itself with this cyborg warrior. First off, it's bloody huge. It's not clear in the trailers, but the smallest Skitarri is the size of the tallest Darktide human, making its tallest variant more like playing an Ogryn without the chunkiness. And I have to say, I take great pleasure in looming over enemies, ominously burbling binharic cant as I bat them aside with my Arc Maul.
I've played Darktide through thick-and-thin since it first launched back in 2022. That was no easy task early on, but as a longtime Vermintide 2 player, I knew that releasing a game and then slowly improving it was (for better or worse) Fatshark's development style. It's heartening to see how far Darktide has come, but also how much more Fatshark still has scope yet to add.
The Skitarii's voice is one of my favorite components. During character creation, you can choose a Forge World (including the Moebian 'Branx' created for Darktide), and what bits and bobs you want welded onto your robot man, including Voxcaster Tuning. Here, you pick one of four voices as usual, but you can mess around with it to create a unique variant just for you. It's a nice way of avoiding those awkward matching teammates, especially when we all know it's going to be nothing but full Skitarii teams for the next month.
Skill-wise, Skitarii come in a few different flavours. If you're an Arbites who loves micro-ing your pooch, you'll be eyeing up the trio of Servo Skulls you can bring. I didn't find them particularly strong damage-wise, but they offer lots of utility, allowing you to rez allies at range, deploy a flamethrower to chokepoint corridors, or you can even have them solve the Data Interrogation minigames—a pretty tempting prospect, right?
But as a melee-loving Zealot, I settled for the Chordclaw, which lets you skewer enemies with an extendable stabby hand. I love how wacky it looks, as if you've opened a jack-in-the-box hidden in your trench coat, but instead of a boxing glove, it fires out a giant clawed appendage. It's essentially an "I want this to die" button, letting you end anything big and bad on demand, plus its guaranteed crit, application of bleed and electrify, plus three potential hits, means it chunks through bosses.
I coupled this with the Integrated Refraction Emitter, a shield that consumes grenade charges to make you immune to ranged damage. It also electrocutes enemies around you periodically, making it the perfect ability when you come face-to-face with a bristling wall of guns. One of the advantages of the Skitarii's radial skill tree (versus previous classes' descending ones), is that there's a lot more freedom.
Skitarii can automatically acquire and shoot targets with Advanced Combat Doctrines, or emit electrifying explosions with the Voltaic Emitter. Electrifying enemies and gaining buffs against said enemies is a big part of the Skitarii class, as is the 'charge' mechanic. Your ability has up to three charges, which you gain via acquiring capacitance, and you'll unlock buffs in the skill tree based on how low or high your charge count is. It's not perfect, but it's by far the most unique skill tree I've seen Fatshark attempt in Darktide, which gives me a lot of faith in terms of future class design.
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