You don’t need to pay to play the new Warhammer: Vermintide 2 levels

Looks like rat’s back on the menu, boys

It’s a good time to revisit Fatshark’s cathartic co-op slice-’em-up Warhammer: Vermintide 2. The game just got its first DLC, Shadows Over Bogenhafen, today on PC. Even if you aren’t ready to fork over $10 for the add-on, you can freely play both new levels — The Pit and The Cleansing — in Quickplay.

Paying players will be able to create matches, of course, and earn more hats, skins, and weapon illusions. Aside from cosmetics, Shadows Over Bogenhafen also brings quests and challenges.

Fatshark released a wide-ranging update, too. You’ll find loads of bug fixes, optimizations, audio reworks, level changes, a touched-up user interface, miscellaneous tweaks, and character balancing. There’s too much to summarize effectively, but here are a few standouts to give you an idea:

• All Career Skills, bar Huntsman and Shade, can now be cancelled by tapping the block button or reload button. There are now draw, hold, and cancel animations for weapon based Career Skills.

• Trolls turned out to be quite hard to kill on higher difficulties, especially when facing them alone. To balance this, we have changed the passive regeneration of Trolls to pause for 3 seconds after taking damage.

• Reloads have been overhauled. They should now more smoothly transition into other actions such as blocking after firing a ranged weapon, for example a longbow. This should fix issues where you would fire, switch weapon to try and block very rapidly and the block action getting eaten causing you to get hit by the enemies.

• When players join a party and replace a bot, they should now spawn closer to the rest of the group.

From everything I’ve seen, the DLC doesn’t particularly make its case for being all that original or elaborate or worth the price tag, so the main incentive here is supporting the developers for making such a kickass game. Shadows Over Bogenhafen is more Vermintide 2, and that’s dandy.