REVIEW : Warhammer: Chaosbane Slayer Edition (XBOX Series X)
Warhammer the new Chaosbane Slayer Edition featuring all DLC and releasing on the two Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5. Sitting securely in the hack-and-slash genre, Chaosbane tasks you with defeating the hordes of Chaos while playing as a diversity of different characters.
One of the advantages of placing a game in an already existing universe such as Warhammer is the fact that there isn’t much of a requirement to set up the world and have a comparatively slow opening full of exposition. Chaosbane gets directly into the thick of the action: following a former war, your job is to mop up remnants of the Chaos hordes and stop them from growing and threatening the world once again. There’s still a slower pace to the earlier missions than to the encounters that you’ll have later in the game, but this is more because of typical videogame mechanics required to show players the ropes and to get a handle on their chosen character.
There are six distinct characters to pick from in Chaosbane, each with their particular character, class and set of skills. New to the Slayer Edition is the Witch Hunter class, but you are also able to choose from a Warrior, Mage, Slayer, Scout and Engineer if you needed to stick with one of the original offerings. Chaosbane is also able to be played in up to 4-player co-op as well, meaning that you can mix and match your party’s strategy to create a smoothly operating war machine should you incline.
There is a great number of ways in which to customize your character in Chaosbane which means that by the end stages of the game, your character can feel quite distinct even from a different build in the same class. While the focus of plucking up, sorting through and implementing various pieces of weaponry will be well-known to anyone who has played a game in the genre before, Chaosbane features several subsystems that allow you to get involved in the nuts and bolts of how your character operates. This ranges from a variety of skills (both active and passive) that can be equipped and upgraded to the ability to Bless certain pieces of equipment to skew their stats towards a particular area of effectiveness. On top of this, you can choose to donate your undesired items instead of trading them, which will stop you from getting a monetary return but promises rewards of a different kind further down the road.
Chaosbane seems intent on allowing the player to experience the game however they wish, and while there are certain elements of this approach that are deserving of praise, it does result in the overall experience feeling a little disjointed at points. This implies that you’re ready to regularly turn up the experience if you wish, reducing the difficulty if you’re striving or pushing it up a notch or two if you’re willing to risk your wellbeing for a chance at better equipment.
There are four chapters within the main game, with two extra DLC chapters included as part of the Slayer Edition package, and while there is the main narrative that flows through the chapters, I never discovered myself to be specially endowed in it. I think that the principal goal for this was because no matter what was happening in the story as a whole, I was regularly being asked to revisit areas that I had previously been and take part in exercises that I had previously done. While each chapter takes spot in a different region, the vast majority of missions in each area will see you visiting the identical places time and again. Chapters One and Two, for instance, see you visiting drains and city roads respectively, and with up to ten missions in each chapter, it feels like you’re going over the same ground over and over. There isn’t much here that will blow your brain and make you comforted that you wished to play on the Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5, but there are still a couple of notes that are worth mentioning. Firstly, the detailing in scenes is impressive, and I barely noticed any slowdown, even with numerous enemies on screen and multiple effects happening both in the foreground and background. For a game such as Chaosbane, where short bursts of gameplay serve the setup most effectively, this is a welcome change that adds a lot to the experience.
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