Warhammer: Chaosbane
A BY-THE-NUMBERS WARHAMMER ACTION RPG. PS4, Xbox, PC | US$49.99 | warhammerchaosbane.com
CHAOSBANE IS EXACTLY what you’d expect if you heard the words “mid-budget Warhammer Diablo clone”. No more, no less. You pick one of four heroes, you kill endless hordes of creatures and you loot progressively shinier trousers, stopping occasionally to fight a larger, tougher monster with an annoying area attack. That’s it. I wouldn’t call it a bad game, but it is a mediocre and derivative one, and far too repetitive for its own good. It’s Diablo, but Warhammer.
The Warhammer licence does help a little, particularly in the enemy design. Each Act is framed as a battle against followers of a different chaos god (representing war, magic, disease and sexy times respectively), and there’s a deep pool of appropriate monsters to draw from for each, including a big end of level boss. I particularly enjoyed fighting Slaanesh, whose agile followers would backflip out of combat and manoeuvre around, preventing fights from descending into one big mosh pit.
Technically there’s a story that links these acts together, but it’s so basic my eyes started glazing over in the very first cutscene. I didn’t expect a compelling narrative, but after the cheerful banter of Vermintide and Mechanicus, I was hoping for something at least mildly entertaining. The standard is pretty high for Warhammer tie-ins nowadays, and Chaosbane fails to reach them.
Chaosbane’s big problem is repetition. There’s so little variation in the combat. Despite a handful of new skills unlocking my basic approach, hold down attack, hit an area attack when surrounded and a health draining attack when hurt, didn’t change much between hour one and hour fifteen, despite the ability to swap around skills at will. One of my attacks noted that it ignored armour, but since there was no real indicator which enemies were heavily armoured and which were not, it was impossible to figure out when to use it effectively, and I soon traded it for another big area attack.
It’s hard to blame Chaosbane for just being an unoriginal action RPG, but ultimately I found myself asking over and over, ‘Why don’t I just play Diablo instead?’