Playing this and first impressions are really meh so far. The intro on Vermintide 1 was much better, you quickly got sense of where you were, what you were doing and the importance of it, Vermintide 2 start on a really confusing way, first, they removed the map from the mission selection screen, this is idiotic because now you have no idea where the missions you are doing take place on the game world, so the narrator goes... "you need to rescue farmers on the biggest farms nearby Ussingen.", just a question... where is Ussingen? You have no idea, maybe if you are a warhammer buff, what I'm not. Okay, later you do a mission to destroy a grain storehouse on the destroyed town of Ussingen that you have no fucking clue where it is, everyone in the city is dead, the city is in ruin and this is it, you go from rescuing generic peasants on a ruined farm to destroy grain on a ruined town you don't even know where it is and why it is important... Not mentioning, that going on generic farmland and generic ruins and generic forests is confusing and far from what I think is exciting.
Vermintide 1 was much better at creating context, you had a feeling of helping the city defend against the invasion while doing the missions, not saying all missions on that game were good, but here, many of the missions I played so far are really formulaic. The first mission on Vermintide 1 had you trying to blow the horn of Magnus and while you were going through the city, you hear cries, sounds of explosions and warning bells as the city got finaly aware of the invasion. Enviromental storytelling on this game is really weak so far in comparison with the previous one and it hurts the game because you don't feel like you finished a really cool mini adventure on Warhammer fantasy when you end a mission, just that you fulfilled random MMO goals for loot.
They had the brilliant idea of spoiling the end goal of the game right on the tutorial mission, never, never show the end goal of your story and then just do formulaic steps to reach that goal without any kind of twist, it kills curiosity, maybe I'm being unjust as I didn't play the later missions yet but if I go doing random missions against random goals then just go doing the end goal that was already spoiled on the start of the game... really, those guys know nothing.
Really, in terms of gameplay... they have this stat now, power, you gather power with better gear but you have zero clue what this power stat really do, I started with zero power and now have 100 power, from what I've seen, I didn't notice a big change on the effectiveness of my attacks. Another problem, some weapons and abilities are really useless, the repeating pistol of the inquisitor requires five shots to the body of a rotblood chaos soldier to kill it, I only have 68 shots playing with the ranged focused subclass, it is useless against armor (why a crossbow can penetrate armor while a fucking bullet can't is a mystery.) so you need to headshot alot to make this weapon useful but why to waste ammo on trash and why use it if a crossbow is better at killing elite enemies as it is much more precise and has better range?
This overbalance nerfing into making many weapons broken is everywhere, it is kinda funny, while on the past, many developers made unbalanced games in the sense of making you too powerful, they are over correcting on the other direction making your options feel quite pointless. Many weapons just don't feel fun to use, a big problem on a Left for Dead clone, if you use a big axe or a warhammer, only your power attacks do area of effect and they are slow as fuck, to balance that, they can easily dispatch armored enemies but armored enemies are a rarity on Recruit (good luck trying to find a public game on the higher difficulties) so you feel like you are letting your team down by having a inferior weapon that is really outclassed by quicker one handed weapons (I never played a game where the ranger or the fire mage weren't the top killers).
So far, I'm having more fun playing with the Ai because on contrary than expectations suggest, a few C++ lines of codes are smarter than quite a few players that think they are playing Call of Duty Warhammer Edition.
Not sure if this is better than Vermintide 1 so far.
HUR DURR 
