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Warhammer: Chaosbane
PC (Steam)
BORE-hammer: Chaos-BANAL
2/5 stars
Outside of Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer is one of the oldest, biggest, and longest-running tabletop gaming IPs out there. Unlike D&D, however, Warhammer has never had much in the way of a cRPG presence, probably because the IP is, at its core, a Wargame. While there have been continuous efforts for decades to launch Role-Playing, Skirmish, and other smaller-scale tabletop spinoffs, Warhammer as an IP has remained staunchly entrenched in Wargaming, successfully maintaining both Dark High Fantasy and Dark Space Opera settings which offer slight variations and twists on each other’s established tropes.
Oddly enough, while tabletop Warhammer remains a dyed-in-the-wool Wargame, computerized conversions of the IP tend to be all over the place and rarely remain true to the source material. The very first Warhammer Wargame computer adaptation was “Shadow of the Horned Rat,” which I played on the original PlayStation… and VIOLENTLY despised.
In far too many cases, it seems that whatever developers Games Workshop has tapped to make Warhammer videogames are afraid to stick to the turn-based, somewhat bizarre and idiosyncratic mechanics of Warhammer in favor of doing literally anything else, ranging from terrible RTS mechanics to nonsensical 4X mechanics to some of the worst FPS gameplay of the modern era. Occasionally these random developers do stick with the Rules as Written, giving us the improbably enjoyable ‘Warhammer Quest’ titles, but also the mindnumbing “Talisman” (based on one of Games Workshop’s games so old that it predates the Warhammer IP altogether).
As someone who cut his teeth on Fantasy and tabletop gaming with an idiosyncratic mix of D&D and Warhammer-smuggled-into-the-U.S.-disguised-as-HeroQuest, I have a long – if not spotty – history with Warhammer, and regardless of whether it’s on a tabletop or a screen, I keep wanting it to be good, in spite of the fact that it always fails me. Unfortunately, the IP’s second foray into the subgenre of Hack ‘n Slash RPGs with the 2019 release of “Warhammer: Chaosbane” (“Chaosbane”) does nothing to change the IP’s dismal track record.
Presentation
“Chaosbane’s” development was farmed out by Games Workshop to Eurojank French developer, Eko Sofware, with publishing handled by that infamous purveyor of trash, BigBen Interactive (now known as Nacon, and the current owner of Eko). Shockingly (or perhaps not), Eko Software built their own proprietary engine for “Chaosbane,” effectively building the entire thing from the ground up, with no need to make concessions to a canned engine like Unity or Unreal… So the fact that “Chaosbane’s” presentation is so overwhelmingly poor across the board is damning.
Visually, the game is rendered in 3D, but with a fixed isometric-style camera hearkening back to the days of the origins of the Hack ‘n Slash subgenre. However, environments all look incredibly samey and bland, and while there are recognizable enemies drawn straight from Warhammer lore (which I enjoyed calling out by name for the other guys), none of their unique styling really gets to stand out because the camera is so zoomed out and the action feels so far away. Chris, in particular, loved the fact that equipping different weapons and armor made them visible on his character model, but none of us could really tell any difference on each other’s characters, with the unique visuals of different loot appearing primarily on the equipment screen.
Audio is likewise bland and lifeless. The soundtrack may as well not exist. However, the game is fully voiced (at least in English), and the dialogs are reasonably well-performed. However, we frequently ran into a recurring glitch where NPC dialog scenes would just abruptly end before the NPC was done talking, and in many cases before we were even able to read the accompanying text boxes.
Technically, “Chaosbane” is… not quite a trainwreck, but still pretty awful. The game ostensibly supports Xinput controllers out of the box, but we frequently ran into issues where the game would stop recognizing a controller or not recognize a controller at launch, yet maintaining the controller GUI prompts and simultaneously disabling keyboard inputs, forcing a hard relaunch of the game. We played the GOG version because it was free at some point, and we all claimed it, and we found the networking features of GOG Galaxy to be an absolute joke compared to Steamworks. We experienced weird rubber-banding, ISP-based lag, frequent disconnects, guest players’ quest progress and/or achievements not keeping up with the host, and difficulties sending or receiving game invites. One would think that with GOG’s “just works on modern OSes” policy, they’d be more proactive in ensuring that a ‘new’ game from 2019 would at least work properly on their platform, but in the case of “Chaosbane,” the developer, the publisher, and the storefront all dropped the ball.
Story
“Chaosbane” tells an incredibly bland, formulaic, and predictable story about a group of heroes who must defeat the forces of the four branches of Chaos in order to save Emperor Sigmar from an ignoble death. I have not kept up with Warhammer lore or the Warhammer timeline since the early ‘90s, so I can’t say much about “Chaosbane’s” accuracy to the story content contained within the Age of Sigmar Edition of the Wargame, but the representation of the four Chaos-es came across as fairly half-assed.
The four Chaos Gods are Nurgle, God of Disease and Life; Khorne, God of Blood and War; Slaanesh, Goddess of Pleasure; and Tzeentch, God of Knowledge. Naturally, the players’ party of heroes will have to deal with the machinations of these beings over the course of four chapters, each culminating in a battle against an appropriate Greater Daemon from the faction in question. There is also a running sub-plot where a High Elf mage and an Imperial Witch Hunter lead the playable heroes along by the nose, playing heavily into the stereotypes of their groups.
Ultimately, I was hoping for an escalation of Chaos throughout the story, culminating in a grand conflict against Chaos Undivided and whatever non-Euclidian abominations Chaos could come up with if it wasn’t divided against itself, but alas, the game ends abruptly after a rather unexciting chapter 4.
Not to leave fans hanging, Eko released two DLC expansions for “Chaosbane,” with the first taking place in the desert and pitting the heroes against the forces of the Mummy Tomb Kings, and the second… just being another anticlimactic story arc about Nurgle taking over a steamtank factory, which is incredibly odd and out of character. I mean… really? Nurgle with tanks, not Nurgle with bioweapons?
In spite of how boring it is from a narrative perspective, “Chaosbane” is mercifully short. We completed the base game in around 15 hours, with another hour-and-a-half for the Tomb King DLC, and a laughable 40 minutes for the second DLC. While it is entirely possible to replay the stories on higher difficulties after clearing them once, as well as to grind procedural post-game maps with curse modifiers for better loot drops, I personally have no desire to ever touch this game again.
Gameplay
“Chaosbane” at first appears to be a fairly average Hack ‘n Slash RPG. Characters each have one or two unique weapon types they can equip, as well as a butt-load of armor slots for pieces like breastplates, boots, rings, and pants. Each piece of loot that drops follows a fairly typical rarity scale, with Common, Rare, Epic, and Heroic taking the places of more standard terminology, but remaining functionally identical to Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Legendary scales seen all over the subgenre. Each character will ONLY get drops for that character at the character’s current level. There is NO trading between players, and the player’s loot stash seems to be a completely superfluous feature.
Not only is stashing loot pointless, there’s no way to actually “sell” loot. Instead, players “donate” loot to a merchant for “reputation,” while gold must be collected from slain enemies and treasure chests. Of course, with the game’s seeming hatred of Capitalism, you can’t spend gold to buy new weapons or armor either. Instead, gold is only spent to run random grinding dungeons that may-or-may-not drop better quality loot based on the number of curse modifiers the players are willing to deal with before jumping in. We spent many hours pondering what gold was used for and when we might unlock said feature before figuring it out. Needless to say, we were highly disappointed.
Another mysterious currency that we couldn’t figure out for many hours is Fragments, which hare little bits of gemstone that can be slotted into any piece of gear in order to apply various “blessings” to said gear. Up to 10 Fragments can be applied in a single blessing, granting various basic stat boosts that are all show clearly to the player before committing to them, and the player is free to re-bless any item again, only losing out on the Fragments consumed in the previous blessing.
Outside of loot, “Chaosbane” has a fairly convoluted character build system, in which a variety of skills unlock as characters gain levels, but must be slotted into the character’s skill loadout based on how many points they consume out of a given total (which also increases with character level). Each character skill has three different tiers, with each tier consuming more points within a loadout. In addition, players can also apply points in a God Skill tree to unlock a wide variety of passives as well as a handful of God Skills unique to each character, with skills following the same points rule as basic skills. There are plenty of passive skills too, with a number of them being effectively “free” in that they consume no points within a loadout for marginal effects. However, none of these menus are intuitive, and the game does nothing to tutorialize how these systems work, so it took us a while to blindly stumble onto these mechanics while twiddling our thumbs during the requisite Loot Bag Triage breaks between story missions.
In spite of the appearance of depth and complexity in “Chaosbane’s” mechanics, I found the overall experience to be incredibly simplistic and repetitive, with me largely holding down one of two different buttons in combat, occasionally firing off other skills as they would come off cooldown. However, the game’s basic enemy design and difficulty curve seem to be mainly at fault here. While there are tons of different Chaos Daemons and cultists who should do interesting things, nearly every enemy in the game just runs stupidly toward the nearest player character and flails away with basic melee attacks. While this lack of strategy serves enemies well enough in the first two chapters of the base game, by the time we got to chapter three and started fighting Slaanesh’s forces, not only did they fail to bring anything uniquely Slaanesh-like to the table, our characters had grown powerful enough that the game’s difficulty curve was revealed to be completely flat.
Instead of facing increased peril from Slaanesh and Tzeentch (and the Mummy Tomb King), we found ourselves no longer taking any damage, while we were able to one-shot any basic enemy (even in large groups). Likewise, boss battles, each of which possesses three life bars, were over in a matter of seconds. We seriously obliterated the Mummy Tomb King boss in 6 seconds (2 seconds per health bar), and thought we had bugged the game because it took longer than that for NPCs to receive the quest flag updates required to let them know we had won the day. I’ll never say that a game needs to be a slog, battle of wills, or require perfect precision to complete, but it seemed like none of the enemies in “Chaosbane” actually scale properly, and the developers didn’t seem capable of estimating the general power levels of players at any given point in the campaign.
Overall
“Warhammer: Chaosbane” is one of the most boring, banal, and uninspired Hack ‘n Slash games I’ve had to suffer through due to the fact that other members of the MJ Crew love the subgenre. I never would have picked it up to play myself, and I definitely feel like that would have been the correct decision. I wouldn’t recommend this game to non-Warhammer fans looking to get their feet wet. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend it to existing Warhammer fans, as its overwhelming blandness might make you question why you like Warhammer at all.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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