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Warhammer: Chaosbane review
Meh
by NafaryusDestiny

Warhammer Chaosbane is nothing special. It's probably the worst ARPG I've played, and I'd only recommend it if you have nothing else to play (Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Diablo 3, Torchlight, etc.), but it does do some things well.

The primary thing it does well is it's skill system. Each class has a unique skill tree (two if you get the DLC), a unique class skill, and plenty of passives and active skills to use. I had fun buildcrafting on my Engineer. There's plenty of roles to fill that would work well in multiplayer.

The combat is good, but not good enough. It starts dreadfully slow, and doesn't get much faster by the endgame. Most skills feel good to use, although many are clunky and hamper your movement.

The itemization is decent. There's not a lot of variety, and the best stats are clearly crit rate and crit damage. Finding the right stats on gear for endgame builds is a massive pain. Crafting or modifying gear would help a lot.

The stats and tooltips are awful. Detailed information on your DPS, attack speed, recovery, damage reduction, etc. would have been extremely useful, but it wasn't there.

Game length is short. There is a severe lack of content. The presentation is top notch (as usual for Warhammer titles) with voice acting and pretty environments and cool bosses. Best picked up at a discount.

Other reviews5

I would hold this up as an example of why quantity over quality is such a losing game. This game is nothing but a Diablo clone with absolutely no creativity. It has your basic archetypes, ranger, barbarian, warrior and a caster. There are also a few more unique dlc characters added after launch. The only two that had interesting abilities were the engineer that had a steam/flamethrower and the caster who could directly control the path of his spells. I'm pretty sure the caster in Dungeon Siege 3 could do the same, this was also the first game I thought of while play Chaosbane. Yet another boring ass Diablo clone. I played as the ranger mainly because it's my preferred class and she had the highest DPS. I played through the entire game while listening to podcasts. I skipped the two added acts because I just couldn't take anymore. As far as a podcast game goes, it's good for that. There were mechanics they didn't explain well like the blessings for items. The whole game you could just upgrade whenever if you had the gems, then at a certain level it required tokens randomly. You also collect gold throughout the whole game and the only thing you use it on is some end game stuff like boss rush and invasions. With how poorly it tries to be a Diablo style game, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to even complete this game, let alone keep playing after.
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«Waste of time»
I finished Warhammer: Chaosbane mostly out of principal; I paid full price for this ($79.99 CAD!) when it dropped because I'm a huge sucker for Diablo-likes and read a couple fairly positive reviews of this. For a brief moment, it seemed like I had found my new favourite. Chaosbane nails something that a lot of Diablo-likes do not: the feel. It's smooth, plays well, and has overall a really great foundation with solid abilities.

Unfortunately, it suffers hugely from repetition and overall blandness; the story is, well, nothing special would be putting it nicely. The loot is OK but really does not stand out, nor does it really feel like you are optimizing your build in any fun way other than selecting what seems to give you the best boost. I enjoyed the skill-tree and the points-system for your abilities with added some level of strategic thinking to your character.

Otherwise, it's a slog through the same areas over and over again - even within each quest you'll find yourself running through very similar "pieces" I'll say of the layout (almost like everything was build from a small set of area-types so you run up the same kind or stairwell or run around the same kind of corner again and again.)

Honestly, with some work on more varied quests and a better end-game, this would be one of the more solid-feeling Diablo-like ARPGs out there right now. A lower price would have helped, for $15 or $20 bucks this will be a fine distraction but full price was just not worth it. I'd rather steer you towards something like Vikings - Wolves of Midgard to be perfectly honest.
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Game looks unfinished, content is lacking, boring and repetitive.
I finished the game with the dwarf, but was hard to keep my eyes open during the whole process.
The game is based on 4 maps that you have to run over and over again.
Monsters are limited to only about 4-5 minions re-skinned for the different acts.
Main bosses are OK, game mechanics are OK, controller support is perfect.
This looks like an overpriced indie game. I wouldn't buy it again, unless I could find it for max 20$.
«Boooring»