Nurgle's Rot

Warhammer: Chaosbane Is A By The Numbers Action RPG.

- Tom Hatfield

Chaosbane is exactly what you’d expect if you heard the words “mid-budget Warhammer Diablo clone”. You pick one of four heroes, you kill endless hordes of creatures and you loot progressively shinier trousers, stopping occasionally to fight a larger, tougher monster with an annoying area attack. That’s it. I wouldn’t call it a bad game, but it is a mediocre and derivative one, and far too repetitive for its own good. It’s Diablo, but Warhammer.

The Warhammer licence does help a little, particularly in the enemy design. Each act is framed as a battle against followers of a different chaos god (representing war, magic, disease and sexytimes respectively), and there’s a deep pool of appropriate monsters to draw from for each including a big end-of-level boss. I particularly enjoyed fighting Slaanesh, whose agile followers would backflip out of combat and manoeuvre around, preventing fights from descending into one big mosh pit.

Technically there’s a story, that links these acts together, but it’s so basic my eyes started glazing over in the very first cutscene. I didn’t expect a compelling narrative, but after the cheerful banter of Vermintide and Mechanicus I was hoping for something mildly entertaining.