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.

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.

For implements of murder and mayhem, the real standouts for me were the Arc Maul, Galvanic Rifle, and Paired Transonic Blades. As a Zealot and Arbites player I am sick to high heaven of mauls, but the Arc one is rather nifty. When you activate its special action, you charge it with Arc, a new electricity type that hops between enemies (available via the Arc Rifle and Arc Grenades also). The only downside is that this period doesn't last very long and you have to wait for it to charge up again.

The Galvanic Rifle and Paired Transonic Blades are both masterworks of *chef kiss* weapon feel. As Fatshark noted in the preview I attended, the rifle is essentially an M1 Garand, the videogame classic, and it feels so satisfying to fire and reload, cracking off arc bullets into enemies before slotting in a new clip with a delicious metallic click. I sometimes animation cancel the reload just so I can enjoy it again.

Though usually reserved for Sicarian Ruststalkers, the powers that be also allowed Fatshark to give the Skitarii a Transonic sword and dagger combo, which (sorry Hive Scum mains) makes the dual shivs feel like garbage. This blender has two settings—a series of horizontal slashes for groups, and downward strikes and stabs for chunky single-entities. Having two entirely different movesets for one weapon feels super versatile, especially when you can weave the switch into the rhythm of melee combat.

I really hope the Skitarii is just a taste of what we can come to expect from future Darktide classes. It's certainly better than the Hive Scum, and for me, just about edges out the Arbites (a class I love) with its sheer uniqueness. It'll be a fair while before murderbot-ing my way through Tertium grows stale I think.