Warhammer: Chaosbane

 

This game flew almost completely under my radar, and I think most ARPG fans radars. I somehow stumbled across it and was blown away by how promising the graphics looked. I was familliar with another Warhammer ARPG, Warhammer: Inquisitor, but that game had this overly generic sci-fi look to it whereas Chasobane looked more medevial knight type game. Chaosbane has a fully playable co-op campaign so thats what mainly peaked my interest. I got a Steam key for very cheap and started it up.

Upon starting it up youre greeted with some of these cutscenes immediately. The kind that i sort of hate. It's more of these cheap, budget friendly "college art student" type slideshow of jpgs. Generally uninspiring stuff. Then, you get prompted with a character selection screen. Theres a variety of like 8 different character types to choose from , like these Dwarf people, A typical rogue, A mage looking guy, a pirate, and then a more standard looking Warrior. Me and my co-op player both picked the standard Warrior guy, none of the other ones are appealing.

Joining eachother is simple enough, but the game has a difficulty selection, something that can be a red flag for unbalanced or generic level-scaling ARPG's. We opted to pick the hardest avalible difficulty, Very Hard, because we had briefly heard the game is easy anyways, and because we're pretty seasoned ARPG players by this point.

The immediate first impression is mixed. On the one hand the graphics are nice, but it has this cheap almost mobile phone feeling and control over everything, like some of the UI and how your character moves around with some specific places having these weird fixed cameras. But once I got past that the game was looking promising. You start off in this grungy village and then make your way to the first series of dungeons, a bunch of sewers. Ok, what kind of game puts a bunch of sewers as their introduction to a game? Sewers are typically the least favorite levels among players and theyre often mocked as being filler, but here in Chaosbane they proudly come right out the gate shoving a bunch of sewers in your face. Odd choice. The game has four acts, and pretty much all of act 1 consists of crawling around in these sewers. Combat felt fine and again, the graphics and monster types are decent enough, a bunch of goblins and typical RPG monsters.

But, hows the actual gameplay and the RPG mechanics and systems? at first, it was kinda hard to understand what they were going for. When you level up, you dont have any stats to increase like other ARPGs. No vitality, strength, dex etc. You do have this skill page of sorts, and this took me awhile to wrap my head around how it works. Basically, you can equip any skill at any time and 'fully respec' your entire character at a moments notice. You dont even unlock any of the abilities your self. The game essentially has almost zero commitments, decisions, or player agency to speak off. As you level up, you automatically unlock skills on the skill page, that you can then drag onto your two skill bars: Passives and Actives. Each skill takes up a certain amount of slot points, but you can change them around at any time. The only sort of player agency here is deciding what combination of passives and actives you want to use at any time. Once I realized how dumbed down and causal the leveling is, I really lost a lot of motivation for the game. Sure, I was almost entertaining the idea of giving it the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand what they were going for in a really casual ARPG, but there are even more critical design choices that just crippled any quality this game could have offered. The controls and combat is just ok. Sometimes it feels good to attack enemies, slam down a banner or two and ragdoll a bunch of monsters with some AOE attack. Theres a lot of real annoying problems with the controls, though. Often you can get 'locked' onto an enemy, like you cant cancel some animations once they are playing. Theres lots of times where I wanted to dodge out of the way or clicked away, but my character kept attacking anyway and he was stuck inside an animation. Theres even a dedicated move button (X) because if you left click you will accidentaly click on hordes of enemies when youre just trying to move. But really, the combat ends up feeling mostly awful because you have these constant slowdown effects. Enemies and especially bosses will FREQUENTLY do this thing where they put a debuff on your character where you move extremely slow and it just makes what little bit of the combat that could of been decent, completely awful. I mean, it happens once every 5 seconds kind of thing.

The skills also use that 'generator/spender' type system that Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 uses. I hate that shit. What it means is you have one skill thats a 'generator' thats weak that you just slap enemies with to fill your mana, then you have another skill thats a 'Spender' that uses the mana you just generated. So its a juggling match of being forced to use a shitty weak skill just to 'charge' your strong attack. It feels bad, I hate ARPGS that do this shit. Something funny is that the mana bar looks like a globe of semen, so I would keep calling it my semen meter and "Wait a sec, have to charge my semen meter" so theres that I guess.

Besides the butchered skill choices, does the game do anything else right? Not really. Before I talk about the loot and how interesting or uninteresting it is, I have to mention: I suspected the game might have a level scaling system, where no matter how strong or weak you are by leveling up, the enemies will always be around your same power level. Some RPGs like Oblivion, to a lesser extent Skyrim, and Diablo 3/4 are notorious for these lazy and shallow gameplay systems. Well, turns out I was right. Chaosbane does infact have monster level scaling. Essentially what that means is its like leveling up and "becoming more powerful" is almost this fake illusion - Because if you simply run past most enemies in the game, you still cant really be "underpowered". All you have to do after running past every single enemy for an hour straight, is just stop for 2 minutes and click a few item chests, kill a few groups of enemies and get the next batch of item drops and suddenly your character is very powerful again. It's a joke. The game is as deep as a puddle. They litter these item chests all over the place and they frequetly will just shit out the best tier of weapons and armor in the game so it almost makes killing groups of enemies largely pointless.

As for the actual items; at first I thought they were gonna be interesting. Before I realized the shallow level scaling and dumbed down  skill choices. The items can say stuff like +Cooldown reduction, +Maximum health, +armor, etc..standard stuff, really. But then after a few hours I realized that besides looking at stats on the items, theres a section where it simply says your overall Attack and Defense. So at a certain point I didnt even bother to look at stats anymore, but just randomly put on gear until my Attack and Defense went up. Very shallow. Like, I know that some minor things dont factor into the attack/defense tally, maybe like Cooldown reduction and Gold find or something, but I really didnt care enough to waste more time looking at stats when this is all you really had to do and you can breeze by the game.

Ontop of it being shallow, its also very buggy. Frequently quests will glitch out, either making you redo boss fights or have to quit to main menu and rejoin just to talk to some npc. This got to be a common occourance.

Eventually we got to act 2, which is probably the best part of the game. Act 1 was all these boring sewer crawling sections, but act 2 is winter landscape open world almost. I say almost open world because really, it dawned on me. All of the maps in the game are linear corridors. Theres no big open landscapes to run around. Everything is a hallway, straight line, with a few detours. Its bad. How the fuck did they make an ARPG thats quite literally just a series of hallways? So many things about this game are just fucked up. So while the art direction and graphics are visually impressive and appealing ,the actual game design and playing everything is a fuckup. The artists did their jobs, the designers were drunk or stoned or something I dont know.

Act 2 was a chore of fetch quests and constantly running back and forth from town to some other hallway section to grab some item. You cant even teleport back to town with a typical town portal. This game basically has nothing that makes ARPG's good. No town merchants, no buying and selling, no portals, no identify scrolls, no stats, no skill tree that makes you make tough decisions, no interesting loot, weak variety of weapons (Yeah theres not even 2 hand swords or axes or maces. Theres just Swords and Hammer) So what the hell does this game offer? I really dont know. A very casual shallow "Play this if youve never played an ARPG before" easy time?  Reminder we played on the hardest possible difficulty and yeah, we did die sometimes, but all we had to do to "catch up" was stop speedrunning once an hour, attack a few groups of mobs, click a few chests, and bam! we're powerful again. Because level scaling. The game is really such a trivial joke. Thats why, about halfway through the game, we pretty much decided to just speedrun and run past most of the rest of the game. We pretty much stopped fighting 95% of monsters, just sprinting to the next objective. Over and over. When you die you can just respawn on the spot using Gold or Fragments which are virtually infinite, so once again theres no consequence to your actions. We just ended up respawning all the time. You can help your co-op partner up, but theres not much point most of the time.
Eventually we'd make it to some big boss fight in an arena, where you cant respawn and your co-op parner has to help you, and these boss fights are probably the best part of the game. You actually have to work together to figure out the boss mechanics like destroying the healing totems or knowing where to stand. But some of these boss fights just have terrible "tells" or choreography to where its near impossible to figure out what the fuck the game expects you to do. Like this one boss towards the end of the game that places a big circle down on the arena that blasts the arena and one shots you. We died dozens of times to this shit and had no idea what to do. Eventually we realized theres this small orange elevated platform you have to stand on to avoid death. It was barely noticable.

At some point in the campaign you randomly unlock this God Skill tree passive tree. The game barely makes it obvious and we almost missed it entirely but luckily I saw it shortly after unlocking it. Finally, we have an actual skill tree to decide how to spec our characters? No, not really. It looks like a big skill web but this too is really trite. All you do is path around to unlock certain new skills. On the right side it will even show you what % stats its buffing. All I ended up doing is staring at the % Damage stat and increased it as much as possible by randomly clicking stat nodes. Because you see, the thing is, you can once again instantly refund any point. So nothing is concrete, theres no consequence, theres no penalty. You can just keep fucking around refunding points at a moments notice.

You know, games like Path of Exile are said to go too far with the complexity and punishing the player for their choices, and other games like Diablo 4 are said to be too simple and too rewarding and too casual. Well what the fuck is this game then? This game falls outside that whole spectrum, its like barely even a game. Its like teaching a preschooler how to use a mouse.

We made it to act 3 and I cant even remember what i was. Thats all I will say about that.
We made it to act 4 and its this mystical magical nebulous place, then you enter the dungeon of the town and surprise its another series of long hallways. Yawn. Run past 95% of monsters, complete the quest, turn it in. Ok it wants you to do it again.
Act 4 is just a series of backtracking and replaying the exact same dungeon 10 times and doing fetch quests. It sucks. Just too lazy to create new locations just reusing assets at this point. Terrible. Again, the visuals and graphics look kinda awesome, the backdrops and vistas, but yeah the game is just shit.

Towards the end of the game you unlock this gem system that lets you put combinations of gems into any item you have, buffing its stats. This is really simple too. All I did was put red gems into my sword to give %damage and blue gems into armor to give %armor. Wow. Oh yeah and you can of course undo this at a moments notice as well, because you know, the game has no consequence for anything, everything is meaningless basically.

We made it to the final boss being really worried we would be underpowered and die tons of times since we speedran past most of the rest of the game. To our surprise we walked into the boss arena and absolutely melted his health bar in like 45 seconds and End Credits. What? goes to show my suspicion that the game has cheap, pointless level scaling makes all of your fighting just an illusion of power. Most of this game is just an illusion of being an ARPG. Its very easy to get fooled by the impressive visuals and graphics but the actual core design here is just slop. I can say some positive things about the game, some of the abilities felt fun, I like the down to earth combat and low-fantasy almost. The graphics ofc are great, some of the best i've seen in ARPG seriously. I love how the light shimmers off your metal armor and stuff like that. The story and writing is decent, lots of stuff about cults and evil and shit, but at a certain point I realized the game was shit so I started skipping everything. The graphics add a lot of points for me. If this game looked like Torchlight, for example, It would probably be one of the worst games I've ever played. But since it looks the way it does, it really bumps it up a few points. It's short, about 12 hours, so you can play through an ARPG campaign with a buddy in a weekend its good for that. But it really is a shallow, trivial game underneath all the makeup. Why does this game even have an end game? You can keep playing after the last boss, and replay previous areas and grind for loot. Imagine how mentally ill you have to be to do that in this game. 

3/10