Previews
[Preview] ‘Warhammer Chaosbane’ is a Polished Diablo-Style Dungeon Crawler, But Level Design Needs Work
The world of Warhammer goes dungeon crawling, but can it emulate Blizzard’s benchmark series? Discover why there’s a lot of potential for a grand game in Bloody Disgusting’s Warhammer Chaosbane preview.
In all fairness, the dungeon crawler genre has always seemed like a snug fit for Games Workshop’s fantasy Warhammer setting so it comes as little surprise that, even at this early juncture, Warhammer: Chaosbane is looking to do a commendable job of marrying the two together with savage aplomb.
The premise of Warhammer: Chaosbane is pleasingly simple. Those horrid Chaos-lads are at it again as they’ve decided that they want to batter everything that’s breathing in the world into a fine red mist. As the representative of an alliance of races comprising of Humans, Dwarves, High Elves and Wood Elves, you (and your buddies, if you have them) are tasked with putting magical swords/axes/arrows and spells into the faces of your grotesque foes with a view to driving them back to 90s Death Metal World forever and ever.
So far, so Diablo then really.
In the closed beta client that I had access to in order to author this preview, there were two different characters on offer; High Elf mage Elontir and Human imperial knight Konrad Vollen. Because I prefer the intimacy of ramming blades where they shouldn’t go into the anatomies of demonic evil-doers, I naturally elected to strap on my sword and shield as the good Sir Vollen.
With the entirety of the first act available (it *is* one of the more sizable betas I’ve ever got stuck into, that’s for sure), I was able to clock in a good three hours with the beta build of Warhammer: Chaosbane before all was said and done. The first thing you notice is just how polished everything is. From the easy to navigate menus, through to the detailed environments and the resolutely silky smooth 60 frames per second action that is a world away from the jerky, turtle-plod of recent franchise Diablo-like Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr, it’s clear that Chaosbane is already a very polished looking effort even this early on.
As to the core of the game itself, Warhammer: Chaosbane doesn’t appear to be making any big, genre-shattering moves at this point – preferring instead to closely follow the template established by Blizzard Entertainment’s dungeon crawling, magnum opus. With a camera that follows you from a roaming isometric perspective, you are tasked with carving and blasting your way through the Nurgle horde – a particularly unpleasant (and unkempt) branch of the series longtime Chaos antagonists.
It’s simple stuff too – a quick tap of a button executes a standard strike, while more exotic and damaging attacks can be mapped to other keys and pad buttons and chained into combinations with ease. Just like Diablo, Warhammer: Chaosbane also uses an energy system whereby those more powerful attacks consume varying amounts of energy which can, in turn, only be generated by hitting monsters in the face as hard as you possibly can, over and over again.
In case you find yourself overwhelmed and on a one-way trip to Beatdown Town, healing comes in the form of an infinite healing potion that when used triggers a cooldown, and so its use must be tempered well lest you find yourself without a pick me up when you need it the most. Speaking of pick me ups, should you succumb to a beastly beating, you can elect to resurrect yourself with shards that are found in plentiful quantity, or, elect to quit and return to the beginning of the dungeon.
Elsewhere, the progression system appears to be impressively layered. With a robust range of unlockable abilities and skills that can be plucked from a number of different progression trees, there is no shortage of incentives to keep pushing through the levels and crushing your enemies.
Supplementing the incentive yet further, on top of the regular skills, each class also has an archetype ability which defines their vocation. Our Sir Vollen, for example, fires out a magical shield that stuns enemies caught in its path for a few seconds, allowing for an easy set of kills. Finally, Chaosbane’s Bloodlust mechanic pretty much functions like the rage meter we all know and love – when it fills from collecting pockets of red matter, you can trigger it at any time and for a short period, your character morphs into an invincible and unrelenting tornado of face-smashing violence. Happy days.
Though supremely polished and a lot of fun to play, there are a few things that aren’t quite so appealing about Warhammer: Chaosbane at this point in time, too. The first of these is the level design. Though impressive to gawk at from a technical standpoint, Chaosbane seems fond of repeating huge sections of its play area from one quest to the next. Compounding this repetition is the revelation that roughly 85-90% of Choasbane’s first act takes place in that tried and tested introductory bastion of evil – the sewers, whereupon dull grey and mildly depressing green are the order of the day.
Then there’s the hub area. Whereas in Diablo III, you could wander around the Town of Tristram and speak to various folks, get an idea of the local flavor, chat to numerous vendors and even take on side-quests, Chaosbane’s hub area is, by comparison, rather limited to say the least. With just one vendor to speak to, no additional folk to really chinwag with and a seeming complete lack of side missions to get stuck into (which would hopefully *not* take place in the sewers), here’s hoping that this is merely a content issue which will be addressed in the final code.
Another issue, albeit a small one at this point, is how this game deals with loot and more pressingly, loot collection. Chaosbane has automatic loot equip, however, there is no option to enable automatic equip when you find better items, as instead, you need to go back into your menu each time to equip new gear. Yes, it sounds like I’m being a lazy bastard (and to an extent, I am admittedly), but when most other titles in the genre offer this feature as standard, its omission should be noted. Something for the final product or the inevitable day one patch, perhaps?
Further afield, destroyable barrels yield the usual sprinklings of gold and other minor loots one might expect, but anyone expecting the free-range, wholesale destruction of furniture and other elements of the environment as seen in Diablo III, will be disappointed. Though again, such nagging issues are ones that could be reflective of the current build status, rather than a systemic issue which will manifest in the finished product.
Based on this rather large morsel then, Warhammer: Chaosbane suitably impresses. It’s far more polished than I thought it would be, has oodles of satisfying combat and rounds it all off with decent loot and progression systems. Though not perfect on account of its level design and other minor seeming shortcomings, it still manages to confidently stake its claim as one of the most lustrous takes on the Warhammer license seen to date and I’m eager to see more, certainly.
Warhammer Chaosbane preview code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
Warhammer Chaosbane is out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC June 4, 2019. The beta is available now via pre-order.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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