Staff – June 4, 2019 at 3:48 PM
The Warhammer Fantasy Battle name carries with it more than 35 years of history. What began as a tabletop wargame has ballooned through the decades into a sprawling pop-culture universe: novels, comic books, video games, a 2010 feature film starring John Hurt. Numerous creators have returned to and built upon Warhammer’s rich high-fantasy lore, telling stories about everything from racial strife to trade disputes, rogue artificial intelligence to disastrous plagues. Its world has been examined through so many mediums and lenses that it seems to now breathe all on its own.
With Warhammer: Chaosbane, Eko Software has created the first action RPG set in the Warhammer universe. Following a successful war against Chaos, a supernatural force that’s constantly threatening humanity, Magnus the Pious, leader of the fledgling Empire, has been afflicted with a life-threatening curse. The player is tasked with finding a remedy for it, and they have to make haste. If Magnus dies, the Empire will die with him.
“We’re exploring a really exciting time in the Fantasy Battle history. However, it’s one that is relatively unexplored,” Game Director Jean-George Levieux told us. “This allows us the creative freedom to meet notable characters and craft one of the untold stories of the Old World.”
This is a treat for Warhammer aficionados, but even if Chaosbane is your first encounter with the series, the game is an absorbing experience because it takes place in a setting that’s far from generic. It’s a fully realized domain rather than a thicket of proper nouns and vague personalities. “The Warhammer universe is well-established,” Levieux said, “with a deep backstory, characters, and daemons to draw inspiration from.”
The game action itself is fast and finely tuned. You’ll spend most of your time hacking and slashing through increasingly large swarms of enemies, hunting down loot, and braving the occasional boss brawl. Chaosbane keeps the mayhem satisfying with more than seventy types of monsters to trouble the player and its four character classes are satisfyingly distinct.
Each protagonist has their own peculiar strengths and a unique ability that significantly impacts how they fight. You wreak a much different type of chaos as Elontir, a high elf mage with powerfully destructive spellcasting abilities, than you do as Konrad Vollen, a close-combat specialist who controls crowds with a shield bash and a blade. Figuring out which strategies work best for your particular build is a rewarding challenge.
You also have a great degree of flexibility in terms of how your character progresses as you level them up. This is due in large part to God Skills, which are ultra-potent abilities with long cooldowns and heavy resource costs. God Skills cost quite a few fragments (the currency slain foes drop), so you have to choose each one carefully, evolving your character in the direction you see fit.
As Elessa the ranger-like wood elf, for example, Levieux explained that “you can opt for a more defensive blessing, calling upon Isha’s power in order to bless a section of land, and heal your allies within it. Or you can opt for screaming out ‘I am root!’ and summoning a small army of Dryads who will attack the enemy.” In short, you can develop her into an indispensable support character or a damage-dealing dynamo depending on which God Skills you pursue.
You might alter your build depending on whether you’re playing with friends or not, which Eko has made extremely easy. “We’ve designed the game around both the co-op and solo play experience,” Levieux said. “We’ve adapted the screen and game to support players dropping in or out at any time in the game.” The seamlessness of this is impressive, and it’s clear that there’s been a lot of work put into making Chaosbane run smoothly no matter how you’re playing it or whom you’re playing it with. A minor but telling feature: when you’re in multiplayer, the action doesn’t stop when your buddy is fussing with their inventory or organizing their spells.
It’s this attention to getting the small stuff right that makes Chaosbane exceptional. Against the towering scale of the Warhammer universe, Eko Studios has created a dungeon-crawler that’s solid down to the last detail.
Warhammer: Chaosbane will be available for PC on June 4th.
Recommended specs:
- OS: Windows® 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel® Core i5 or AMD FX 8150
- RAM: 6GB of system memory
- Graphics card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780 or AMD® Radeon™ R9 290
- GPU RAM: 2GB of video memory
- Storage: 20GB of available space
- DirectX: Version 11
