Warhammer_ Chaosbane - The Review (2019) Part 1

This isn't the first Warhammer RPG I reviewed last year. I reviewed Warhammer 40k Inquisitor MARTA, a completely different game from a completely different developer, set in a completely different part of the Warhammer universe. I've described this game as flawed but worthwhile because while it failed to achieve most of what it set out to do, it really was quite the goal, positioning itself as a tactical RPG that focuses on high-health enemies , to make combat feel more tense and focused than the RPG speedruns the genre has focused on, it featured deep RPG systems with different damage types and a wide range of stats to draw from, had unique mechanics per class like the mage, who was constantly trying to push his power to the limit without ever pushing so hard that he let it fizzle out, had broader mechanics like a cover-based system and destructible environments in this really awesome campaign that you'll find in both drawn into the narrative as well as into the warhammer 40k law there was just a lot of really interesting There was more innovative stuff in the mix, and as a very big fan of the RPG genre, I enjoyed seeing all of these new ideas in motion, and I didn't mind that most didn't play particularly well because I did appreciated that the developers were trying to move in a different direction than the genre was usually used to. I bring all of this up because Warhammer Chaos Bane is the complete opposite of Inquisitor Matta in that it plays beautifully and feels really wonderful At times there is absolutely nothing new here and the game feels so stripped down, dumped and streamlined that that I couldn't wait to finish it after 30 hours of play I can't think of a single reason

Would recommend it to you over the many, much more deserving RPGs out there right now, unless you were such a die-hard RPG fan that you just wanted to try something different for 30-40 hours before committing to one Returning to your reliable mainstays, this is obviously a harsh criticism for a game that's doing pretty well on Metacritic, so I'll break that down in great detail. I usually hold things pretty high when reviewing games that focus more on the experience than the gist, but RPGs are all about the minute

They hope Chaos Bane would deliver

a convincing rendition of the Warhammer universe, you will be very disappointed. The game is set after a powerful evil has been crushed and you return home triumphant when the Emperor Magnus has been placed under a powerful spell that accuses you of casting this enchantment, but in the same cutscene you prove your innocence and it it's up to you to figure out who's behind this whole mess and break that spell or not like magnus for example if i look it up he's a really big deal with that huge story and all that power and he's a little bit one big deal the guy i see on screen in game even though he's just a normal guy the way he is he's the same guy i don't know i didn't know anything about him or anyone throughout this entire playthrough learned from others, and when I say someone else, I just mean other NPCs and some random boss enemies that seem to exist the way I have something new to hunt down or kill the Stor y is a meandering mess of nothing, there are four chapters and at the start of each of them you have no idea what's going on so you're asked to kill goons until you finally get up stumbling upon the name of the big villain and then chasing him down As he slices you through level after level and then kills him when he's in his final boss form, rather than building an overarching narrative, the game just constantly fools you with meaningless ones Revelations after meaningless revelations. It's very difficult to stay invested Given how random the whole thing feels, a lot of that in this story is made worse by the voice acting. In the case of the elf character, which was the character I spent the most time with, her voice is just oh boy in his stone forest there's nowhere to hide from me at Shadow and steal the cult who will pay for what he did ibrarian asks you to keep it low. She's just the worst thing beyond storytelling

repetitively, there are four acts in the game, each bringing unique environmental settings from city sewers to a ruined city to an arctic tundra to a demonic realm. The problem is that these environments are just so small and reused so many times, if you think back you might remember Diablo 3. You start in the city, go to a field, clear a graveyard, go to a monastery, move to another field, visit an old estate, explore the dungeons, free ghosts from a prison before clearing the final dungeon room, and then It's Boss Time, that's 9 different distinctive play areas in just Act 1, of which everyone has enemies unique to that space. For example, in Chaos Payne Act 3 there is only one snow area, same snow area, same snow area, gothic looking area, back to same snow area, back for the same gothic area boss, there is so little environmental variety here that I am tempted by the fact that the Game was forced to remember large parts of the map before I had even completed the storyline. I have to visit these areas so often that this really makes the very lackluster storytelling even more grating, because the game sends you to the snow area for a mission and draws You back into town so you can go through a really pointless exhibition and then sends you back to the same snowy terrain you just were in to do almost exactly the same thing you were doing before you really felt like that the game is actively wasting your time when you keep being called back to camp to advance the story Knowing what's waiting for you on the other side of these dialogues is just more of what you've already experienced. Some of that could have been mitigated with interesting and diverse enemy designs, but again, big corners have been cut. So few enemy types per area, but worse, they don't feel distinct across the different acts. The hordes of enemies just coming your way all feel identical whether in an Act 1 or Act 4 and a specific enemy design is copied and pasted onto different enemy skins. For example, the mounted enemies in Act 1 are functionally identical to the

mounted enemies in Act 3 they just

I don't know anything about Warhammer, but if you're a fan of this world I can't see how you would enjoy the way this game is handled. Story law, world building and world design, none of it is memorable or distinctive and the amount of repurposed real estate and enemy types show that the developers haven't drank much from the vast well of law they had access to in the Warhammer License, just one glancing through the warhammer wiki could fill me with more interest in this world then this game could flag after 30 hours of play and if that isn't a sign of how much this game wasted the warhammer franchise and i know not what most of us don't buy this type of games for their stories and law we buy them for the gameplay unfortunately chaos pain has spoiled the rpg side of the rpg formulas so much but i can't see it appealing to the core of any RPG community at all, or even anyone but the most casual fan really needs to be said. Chaos Pain's greatest achievement is how reactive it is nsfast does the game feel as you boot up one of the genre's classics, and I'd bet Chaos Pain rivals them in terms of how snappy the characters' movement feels overall, how fast the movement speed feels, the Animations smooth audio are design and feedback are on point one of Marta's main flaws was how clunky it felt, here it's the opposite with a few exceptions. I think most people will appreciate how comfortable playing through Chaos Pain feels, so these exceptions relate to specific class mechanics there. There are four classes to choose from, an Elven Archer, a High Elf Mage, a Dwarven Slayer and a Human Warrior. Each of them plays exactly as you would expect, which I think is a problem in itself, if I were to give an AR PG fan five minutes to guess what abilities these characters had I suppose