Depths of the Damned sends Darktide squads into a diseased water treatment facility

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide's Depths of the Damned update continues the live service shooter's steady stream of post-launch content with its largest addition since the Skitarii arrived. The centerpiece is the Spillway, a new full-length mission that takes players away from the Hive City's metal corridors and into Tertium's unexplored water treatment facility.

The Spillway is a revolting spectacle. Fetid green liquid rushes through caverns as blasphemous life sprouts from the moisture, with dark moss covering cages left behind by the facility's former gangster owners. Entire rooms are covered floor-to-ceiling in daemonic growths, while the pipe network is so thickly coated it resembles a diseased intestinal tract. Cultists and other enemies take full advantage of the space's long sightlines to attack from range or charge into melee.

Structurally, the Spillway plays closer to Darktide's core formula than some recent additions. Where 2024's Rolling Steel offered a runaway train caper and the Hive Scum update's No Man's Land swapped corridors for muddy trenches, Spillway oscillates between fierce wave combat and quieter traversal. It does include some smaller twists: a light memory-puzzle using gang graffiti to mark safe paths through the maze-like pipes, and a mid-run ambush from a traitor Captain, a boss usually reserved for other specific missions.

The Spillway's final boss represents the update's most significant departure. Unlike Darktide's earlier chunk-sized enemies, this one advances through phases, throws out ruinous area-of-effect attacks, and cycles through invulnerable periods. According to Rock Paper Shotgun's hands-on experience, it's substantially trickier than previous mission finales.

The update introduces two new weapons: the Thugshot, a slug-firing breachloader that penetrates crowds, and the Cruncher sledgehammer that can knock lighter enemies off ledges. Both are described as slightly overtuned, following Darktide's patch tradition of launching new weapons with high damage output that declines over time as the community adjusts.

The full-length mission size represents a time investment larger than previous post-launch operations, though the core loop remains familiar for Darktide veterans.