I’ve spent half an hour or so trying to figure out a good way to start this review. It’s difficult, though, because of the way I feel about Chaosbane, and because of what Chaosbane does. The three versions of the intro I’ve written so far all meander around for whole paragraphs, blathering on and on about other recent ARPGs and their innovations in the space, largely because I’m doing my utmost to avoid talking about Chaosbane itself. Once upon a time that would have been fine; these days, however, I prefer to have a slightly punchier opening to my writing. A single sentence that sums up, as adequately as I can, how I feel about a game. And as far as Chaosbane is concerned I might as well use the message I sent to my game-playing friends immediately after my first sixty minutes with the game, because I knew one or two of them were considering trying it:

Do not buy Chaosbane under any circumstances.

I’ve since forced myself to put a few more hours into it, just to give the game a fair chance before taking it out back to work it over with a two-by-four, and that initial reaction from deep within my gut still very much stands. Warhammer Chaosbane is one of the dullest ARPGs I’ve ever played. It is certainly the worst game I’ve played this year so far — and remember, I put a dozen hours into Anthem, so that is really saying something. It is a game so bad, so utterly devoid of interest or imagination, that when faced with the prospect of actually having to boot it up again I look around for something, anything else to do with my time. If you asked me to choose between an hour spent playing Chaosbane and an hour spent staring at a blank wall painted entirely in white, I’d probably choose the wall. The wall has more going on.

But why is Chaosbane so bad? At first glance it appears to be a perfectly competent example of the hit-things-get-loot genre. It even somewhat feels like Diablo 3 during those opening moments thanks to having stolen the basic combat mechanics lock, stock and barrel. You have two skills bound to each mouse button and four skills on keyboard numbers 1-4 that can be swapped out at will. You have a dedicated button for swigging a health potion, which has infinite uses and is only gated by a cooldown time. Enemies will occasionally drop red orbs in combat which restore a bit of health in addition to charging up your Bloodlust meter, which can be activated when full for what is basically Berserk mode from Doom. Basic attacks feel fairly meaty and the special ones are impactful cause the corpses of your enemies to ragdoll away from your character in a very Diablo 3-esque manner. To use your special abilities you consume Energy, which is a renamed Rage mechanic; hitting enemies with basic attacks gives you Energy which you can spend on the special ones. Yes, for the first twenty minutes Chaosbane comes across as pleasingly violent, even though the systems you’re interacting with are just Diablo 3 with the serial numbers filed off.

So the hitting monsters part is fine — to start with, anyway. Chaosbane’s problems start when you go looking for the rest of the game, because that’s the point at which you’ll realise it doesn’t exist. Literally everything else about Chaosbane, from the fundamental game structure to the loot to the character levelling, is woefully inadequate to the point where it’s painfully obvious it’s yet another game that’s been released long before it was ready. There’s simply nothing there for a player to engage with, no reason to keep running along this endless treadmill of hitting monsters — and even that is an activity that gets increasingly annoying the more you do it. It’s a game with no spine, no internal support of any kind; just a jumble of incredibly basic building materials that the developer and publisher have attached a frankly ridiculous £40 price tag to.

Let’s start by tackling the game’s structure. Most ARPGs these days take place in an open overworld that’s full of dungeons to be delved into and explored, and with random events and named elite enemies scattered across the world to spice things up a little bit. It’s the Diablo 2 formula, one that came about from a recognition that seeing the same level tilesets over and over again got rather boring for the player and which tried to inject a little variety into proceedings to keep them hooked. It worked quite well twenty years ago; these days both Diablo 3 and Path Of Exile have moved things on from there quite considerably, but I can’t think of a single ARPG I’ve played in the last decade that hasn’t at least used the Diablo 2 game structure as a platform to build on. It’s tried and tested. It works.

Unfortunately Chaosbane doesn’t agree with me. From a certain point of view, Chaosbane is actually an interesting experiment: what would happen if you took all of the variety out of an ARPG’s game structure and instead replaced it with a repetitive, monotonous trek through a series of identikit dungeons that are all either set in a literal toilet or an environment that looks like one? Here, I’ll summarise the first act of the game for you to illustrate what Chaosbane’s game structure actually looks like:

1. High Mage Teclis asks me to find a Chaos cult camp. The Chaos cult camp is located in a sewer dungeon.
2. High Mage Teclis asks me to find a survivor of a Chaos assault. The survivor is located in a sewer dungeon.
3. High Mage Teclis asks me to find the leader of the beastmen helping the Chaos cult. The beastman leader is hiding in a sewer dungeon.
4. High Mage Teclis asks me to go with the beastman leader to find the leader of the chaos cult. The beastman leader leads me into an ambush. I then have to fight my way out through a sewer dungeon.
5. High Mage Teclis asks me to kill the leader of the Chaos cult, for real this time. The Chaos cult leader is hiding in a sewer dungeon.
6. High Mage Teclis asks me to find another, different Chaos cult camp. The Chaos cult camp is located in a sewer dungeon.
7. High Mage Teclis asks me to find another, different Chaos cult leader. The Chaos cult leader is located in a sewer dungeon.
8. High Mage Teclis asks me to kill the Chaos cult leader. This leads a bossfight where the developers have once again confused “difficulty” with “giving the boss a huge sack of hitpoints”, and, which took well over ten minutes to complete because that’s how long it takes to chop through it. The bossfight takes place in a sewer dungeon.
9. On my return from the sewer dungeon, High Mage Teclis teleports me to the cursed city of Praag, which has been overrun by Chaos forces. It looks an awful lot like a sewer dungeon.

And to be absolutely clear about the sewer dungeons, they don’t contain any of the flavour events other ARPGs do; no random events, no loot goblins, not even any elite enemies with interesting elemental affixes. Chaosbane has one thing to do, and one thing only: fight your way through a dungeon filled with regular mooks until you get to the end. That is it. Aside from the bossfights, that is all of the content this game has to offer — an endless trudge through PCG dungeons that are constructed out of the same 8-10 crossroad, passageway and dead-end tiles, and which themselves quickly grow repetitive. And for an ARPG in 2019, that is not enough. That is nowhere near close, and especially not for a game that costs £40, because Diablo 3 costs less than that and has much more for the player to do, and Path Of Exile costs nothing and also has much more for the player to do. Even if you had played both of those games utterly to death it still wouldn’t be worth playing Chaosbane, because you’d just be constantly reminded of how much better they did every single thing an ARPG does. Torchlight does it better. Van Helsing does it better. Hell, even Grim Dawn does it better; I did not like that game at all but even at its worst it was making far more of an effort to entertain the player than Chaosbane does here.

Still, I don’t even think Chaosbane having only a single trick would be fatal if there were some interesting progression systems built around it. That’s the other half of this genre, after all: the character builds and the loot that supports them. It is unfortunate, then, that Chaosbane arguably doesn’t have any progression systems to speak of. Oh, sure, your character levels up every now and again once they’ve killed enough monsters, and for the first few levels they’ll be unlocking new skills and filling out their skill bar. However, once they’ve unlocked the first tier of skills (which doesn’t take long at all considering there’s around 10 active skills per character) all that is left is to unlock higher tier versions of the same abilities you already have; this is bad enough on its own, but the higher tiers are the most miserly stat upgrades possible, being on the order of 5% increases to damage dealt or damage reduced. It’s really difficult to get excited about that, and the lack of imagination shown here means that there’s nothing to look forward to as you level up other than very slightly increasing your efficiency at killing stuff. Even if the higher tier skills were genuinely more powerful there’d be a much narrower range of builds possible thanks to the truncated number of them.

In particular there’s no concept of build archetypes in Chaosbane. For example, in most other games a warrior can choose to sword and board it, or to twat things in the face with a gigantic two-handed hammer, and the game will provide some skill options to support each of those playstyles. In Chaosbane, though, you have exactly one way to play each character and an extremely limited range of customisation around that playstyle. This has knock-on effects for the loot as there’s a much smaller range of items available for each character; the warrior can use a one-handed sword or a warhammer, but they’re both functionally identical and don’t have any special attributes thanks to being a sword or a warhammer, and for all other equipment slots there’s practically no difference between two items of the same level.The Middenheim trousers might be red and the Ostland trousers might be green and there might be one different stat affix on each pair, and that’s the sum total of the flexibility the game offers you around equipment loadouts¹. Certainly it’s impossible to build towards a specific character goal because there’s only one destination available to you; and this entirely linear journey along the progression railroad means that every new item you pick up is either a straight upgrade from what you have now, or not. There’s just no breadth to this equipment system. I can’t think of a better way to suck all the fun out of picking up loot in an ARPG than to take all of the choice out of which items you should keep and equip (or not), and as a final insult Chaosbane doesn’t even have any shops or crafters where you can offload your excess equipment. You have to clear out your inventory by donating it all to Oxfam instead².

So you spend your time in Chaosbane going through the same dungeon over and over again, picking up loot that you equip after glancing at it for half a second and seeing that it has mostly green stat improvements and giving it no more thought than that, being told that you’ve unlocked a new skill tier that does 1% more damage than it did previously and which you can’t equip anyway because you don’t have enough skill points, and hoovering up gold and gems that you can’t spend in shops or use in crafting. Instead these valuables are used to buy skill points in Chaosbane’s God Skill tree — this is a take on Path Of Exile’s bafflingly huge skill tree, and it’s also a very big believer in the power of 1% stat increases. It’s all laughably insubstantial, and because of that lack of substance elsewhere the cracks in the one thing Chaosbane appears to do passably well — the combat — start to widen alarmingly quickly.

Most enemies in Chaosbane are relatively weak chaff who obligingly crowd around you to be dispatched by your various AOE attacks, which is pleasing to watch even if it is astoundingly braindead as an activity. However, these chaff enemies are leavened with miniboss enemies that have huge pools of HP and take literal minutes to burn down, and who have attack patterns that appear to rely on the player dodging out of the way extremely quickly. Except you can’t do this, because they move at the speed of treacle and every enemy in Chaosbane has an absolutely massive collision hitbox. The usual escape abilities ARPGs offer are present and correct but — for the Warrior at least — they are absolutely no help because both of his charge abilities will be stopped in their tracks if he so much as clips an enemy that’s in the way. It’s honestly ridiculous, not to mention absurdly frustrating, to attempt to open combat with your big charge AOE slam on a big group of beastmen only to get hung up on a tiny Nurgling that happened to be in the way. For contrast, when my Diablo 3 Barbarian uses his big AOE slam ability to initiate combat/escape combat, do you know what he does? He just leaps over anything that happens to be in the way. That’s the thing that actually makes it viable as a skill, and it’s something that Chaosbane pointedly doesn’t do. And to go back to those minibosses for a second, the hitboxes may be huge for collision purposes but when you click on them to attack them you’ll discover that your character is very picky over which part of the miniboss they’ll consent to hit with their sword, taking a huge detour around tails and wings and any other extruding body parts just so that they can hit them in the centre of mass. Meanwhile you’ve eaten one of the minibosses attacks because they require precise movement in order to dodge them and your guy has just gone walkabout.

Eurgh. That’s the story of my time with Chaosbane: abject, excruciating boredom that quickly turned to frustration at how low-effort and slipshod the whole thing was. It doesn’t even leverage the Warhammer universe effectively; story and setting are always nothing more than window dressing in an ARPG, but Chaosbane’s feels especially generic and disposable, with each act being themed around a different Chaos god and having exactly the same structure of a bunch of dungeon runs capped off with a bossfight against a Greater Daemon. I played until level 30 (out of 50) on my Warrior, and during that time I saw absolutely nothing to convince me that the remaining 20 levels weren’t going to be exactly the same tedious, shallow, repetitive experience. I also played a few levels as the Mage just to see if it was any different, and while they appear to have a slightly better time of it thanks to more imagination being shown in their range of spell skills the equipment variety is just as narrowly restrictive. I played solo, which appears to be especially dull since a lot of the skill effects are outright stated to be applied to your party members only rather than yourself; I imagine it is more fun in co-op, as most things usually are, but this would require you to con somebody else into buying Chaosbane with you. And quite frankly, knowing what you do now after reading this review, that is a crime for which you should be tried at the Hague. Please, stay away from it. If you have a hankering for an ARPG, please try Path Of Exile, which is free, or if you don’t like Path Of Exile you can try, I don’t know, literally anything else. Just don’t buy Chaosbane, under any circumstances. You’ll regret it if you do.

The post Thoughts: Warhammer Chaosbane appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I think the idea of transplanting the Total War mechanics into Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy universe has been around almost exactly as long as Total War itself has. And for good reason since the tabletop version of Warhammer involves models grouped into units precisely as Total War’s are, and also has most of the same core mechanics like unit type counters, flank attacks and morale; it seems like it’s practically a 1:1 fit that would be very hard to screw up. What a lot of people forget, though, is that it’s been tried before, and the main reason nobody really remembers Mark of Chaos (apart from the perfect intro) is because it wasn’t very good. It is possible to do Warhammer with Total War-esque mechanics and fail, so the Creative Assembly’s job is doubly difficult: not only do they have to get the gameplay right, but they also have to redeem themselves after the fuckup of Rome 2 by releasing it in a state that’s playable at launch.

After 25 hours with Total War: Warhammer, I am pleased to report they’ve succeeded on both counts. Mostly, anyway.

First let’s dispense with the elephant in the room that tends to start trumpeting mournfully when it comes to modern Total War games: Rome 2 was an absolute disaster and fully deserved the kicking it got three years ago. It was a technical and mechanical mess from start to finish and for the most part didn’t even qualify as a fully functioning game on launch. Given that, I was somewhat astounded to discover that Total Warhammer is probably the most stable Total War game I have played. Ever. I haven’t had a single crash, framerates are smooth even with thousands of men on the screen at once, both the strategic and battle map AI works like a charm and is actually threatening (to be fair the strategic map AI gets a lot of help, but I’ll talk about that later), and they’ve even managed to cage the eternal bugbear that’s plagued every Total War since the original Rome: no longer do you have to have a book handy for when you hit the “End Turn” button, as the AI factions whip through their turns in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of minutes. They’ve had three years and one additional game (Attila) to work on the engine, but that work has paid off: it almost never got in the way of my enjoying the game, and for a Total War game that’s high praise indeed.

Total War: Warhammer is the first Total War game to completely depart from its historical settings to embrace a made-up fantasy one; this is a treat in several ways, as it lets the Creative Assembly’s designers do things they simply haven’t been able to do before as they were held back by pesky restrictions such as the real world not actually having any vampires or giant spiders in it, and it’s also pleasant to see the return of the classic Warhammer Fantasy setting after Games Workshop dropped a nuke on it several years back¹. The particular part of the Warhammer setting that Total Warhammer picks for its campaign map is the Old World and surrounding territories, and the core of the Old World is the Empire, which is a fantasy version of the 15th century Holy Roman Empire; they don’t get any Landsknecht, but they do get Doppelsoldners (although they’re just called Greatswords here) complete with puffy hat, along with the best cavalry and artillery in the game. Surrounding the Empire are a bunch of other fantasy pastiches of historical and mythical civilizations: to the south-east there’s the Bretonnians, a faction based around the 12th century chivalric ideal of France spliced together with Arthurian legend; to the far south lie Tilea and Estalia, who are 14th century Italian city-states and medieval Spain respectively. To the north are a bunch of dick Viking northmen who just love to raid the Empire, and sandwiched between the Empire and the Chaos Wastes to the far north-east is Kislev, who are Poland + Russia circa Ivan the Terrible.

In Total Warhammer all of these factions — save for the Empire, which is a special case — are minor non-playable factions. Nevertheless they serve to provide a lot of flavour that I’ve found the strictly historical variants of Total War have lacked; with the possible exception of Medieval and the first Rome, most factions in Total War games are pretty much identical, with only a few special units to distinguish them from the competition. They certainly didn’t have anything like the character that the Warhammer races do; not all of them get their own unit trees (Bretonnia does, but the Norsemen use what looks like a variant of the Chaos units and Estalia simply steals the Empire’s) but their cities and provinces do at least have their own distinct appearances on the campaign map. It’s thanks largely to this that the campaign level of Warhammer avoids feeling like a simple reskin of Medieval or Rome despite this part of the game being the closest like-for-like matching between the two properties — the underlying mechanics are probably 90% Total War, but it still successfully captures the character of Warhammer.

This is massively helped along by an extremely clever thing Total Warhammer does: instead of giving you a choice between four indistinguishable Celtic factions or three identical Roman factions, it cuts the number of playable factions right down to just five. I’m a firm believer in the idea that a key part of good design is having the courage to cut features if they’re not working, since to retain them will merely dilute development effort; I’m also a firm believer that having 10+ playable factions in previous Total War games was a huge waste of time since most of them weren’t distinctive enough to merit separate playthroughs. The Warhammer universe certainly has enough races to support that approach if the CA had decided to do it again, but by choosing to limit their scope to the Old World they already cut out a couple of the more exotic factions like Lizardmen and Tomb Kings — as well as all variants of Elves, and the fact that it’s only just occurred to me now that they’re not in the game shows how much I missed them — and by making most of the factions in the Old World AI-only they’ve made a conscious decision to try and focus all of their effort on making the five that they do have as different as possible. That’s a decision that pays off in spades; usually I do just one or two playthroughs of a Total War game and then assume that I’ve seen most of what the game has to offer, but in Total Warhammer’s case I plan to eventually play all five because they each have their own distinctive playstyle and unit roster. And because these are different races rather than different nations those differences can be played up to the nines; instead of the enemy fielding a unit of cavalry that is identical to yours apart from wearing a slightly different pair of trousers, the enemy cavalry is instead a group of enraged green orcs on slavering warboars. Or classic medieval knights riding war gryphons. Or undead ghost horses. Doing this sort of thing properly takes a huge amount of time, which is why Total Warhammer’s choice to “only” have five playable factions is so smart: not only does it let them do it properly, but because they do it properly the replayability of the game is actually massively increased instead of the other way around.

So who are the playable races of Total Warhammer? Well, the “good” guys of the setting are the Empire and the Dwarfs. These are the races that, on the campaign map, play most like a traditional Total War faction; their gameplay is based around taking and holding settlements and teching up both your economy and your units. The Dwarfs occupy the mountain ranges to the south and south-west of the Empire and have the heaviest focus on economy and technology; their armies are completely without cavalry and their units don’t move very quickly, but they practically never break and even their missile troops have a reasonable level of close-combat ability. And because they are dwarfs they have a lot of missile troops; you can’t approach a dwarf battle line without exposing yourself to a massive gunline. Their actual close-combat troops are horrors to face, as a lot of them have specific traits that make them effective against precisely the sort of monstrous troop type that you’d hope would finally break their formation. It is possible to eventually break a Dwarf army, but you’re not going to manage it without paying an expensive price first. The Dwarfs form a natural barrier between the Empire and the Greenskin tribes (i.e. Orcs) further south, so the first hundred turns of a Dwarf game is probably going to be spent locked in a bitter war with their natural enemy.

The Empire themselves are an interesting-spin on bog-standard humans; they have the units you’d expect — swordsmen, spearmen, halberdiers, knights — as well as more specialised/powerful variants and war machines, but the Empire is more of a confederation of city-states than it is one monolithic entity and this is reflected on the campaign map: each of the 15-odd provinces of the Empire is split into its own sub-faction and the Empire starts the game in a state of civil war, so things can get pretty chaotic pretty quickly. If you’re playing the Empire you have to convince the other provinces to join with you — and the nice thing about this is that the victory conditions don’t care how you do it. You can try and conquer the entire thing, you can vassalise the other Empire lords or form military alliances with them, or — if you send them enough money first — you can send them an offer for Confederation, which if accepted will cause all of that lord’s provinces and armies to join you peacefully at the cost of a diplomatic penalty with any remaining Empire lords. The Empire has less of a focus on technology, and what technologies it does have are dependent on particular buildings existing in your provinces; the Empire’s thing is economy above all else, and if built right they can bring in truly ridiculous amounts of money if they can just unite the warring factions and smack down anyone trying to raid or sack their cities.

To the southeast of the Empire lies the twin provinces of Sylvania, which are home to the Vampire Counts: this isn’t quite your classic undead faction as they mostly rely on monstrous slavering bat-things to do most of their actual damage, with the zombies, skeletons etc being used as entirely disposable chaff to tie up enemy forces while you maneuver your damage dealers around into the enemy flanks or rear — zombie units do fuck all damage and will be lucky to get even a couple of kills in a fight, but if you field enough of them to cover the flanks (and because they’re so cheap you will be fielding enough of them) they’ll last long enough to let your other units do their thing. They’re basically the Peasants from Medieval, except made actually useful by two of the Vampire faction gimmicks. One is that undead units do not break. Ever. They’re soulless horrors animated by death magic, so they don’t have a proper morale value and therefore cannot be routed from the field. Instead their morale is used to gauge how strong the magic binding them together is; all of the things that would normally affect morale affect binding, and if an undead unit’s binding reaches critical levels they’ll start to crumble and disintegrate instead of running. This means that your cheap cannon fodder gets wiped out a lot but they’ll hold the line to the last zombie, and of course the nice thing about all of your troops being undead is that if you win the battle you’ve just created a big pool of new recruits; this is reflected in the other Vampire gimmick, which is their ability to immediately raise basic skeleton and zombie units without any build time — and if you do it at the site of a big battle and a commensurately large pile of corpses you get access to more advanced unit types.

Other units the Vampires have access to: ghouls, Grave Guard (essentially armoured skeletons that are actually good in a fight), ghost cavalry, Dire Wolves, and a lot of monstrous units, some of which fly. A word about monstrous units in Total Warhammer: every unit now has a displayed HP value, and instead of having 5000HP spread out amongst ninety spearmen the monsters have 5000-6000 HP concentrated into nine units – or just one. This makes them difficult to put down and they do a lot of damage (as well as often causing terror amongst units they’re facing) but they cost a lot in terms of upkeep and there’s a fair range of units that have specific Anti-Large traits such as the Empire Halberdiers, so it’s not a good idea to go all-in on monsters. Anyway, the final Vampire faction trait is that they spread Vampiric Corruption in territories they control. Vampiric Corruption is good for the Vampires and bad for everyone who isn’t the Vampires, as a high level of corruption will give any non-Vampire province a substantial penalty to Public Order, and raising the corruption level above 50% will also cause any mortal armies in that territory to suffer constant attrition. This means taking territories from the Vampires is super-difficult as even if you successfully storm a settlement you have to leave a large garrison force there to maintain order and purge the corruption, slowing down your advance. Unfortunately for the Vampires their Corruption works both ways; if the Vampires try to take a territory that has a low level of Vampiric Corruption it is them who will suffer the attrition and the public order penalty. This makes slow expansion the order of the day; you need to spend time raising the Corruption level of neighbouring provinces with agents and buildings before the undead hordes can move on.

I can’t speak much as to how the Orcs play; my playthroughs so far have been as the Empire and the Vampires, and so I haven’t had much contact with them. They seem to rely on strong characters and strength in numbers; their boar cavalry is also a massive pain the ass. As you’d expect, they’re advertised as having limited diplomacy and technology/economy options and they have to constantly fight other factions to maintain public order. Chaos on the other hand I have seen a lot of since they’re basically the big boss of the campaign. Chaos doesn’t have settlements and instead recycles the horde mechanic from Attila, where each army is a self-sufficient whole and can periodically encamp to replace losses and build new units. Since they have no use for settlements they’ll just raze any city they capture to the ground — in fact I’ve seen more city razings in Total Warhammer than I have every other Total War combined, since settlements now have a faction affinity. The Empire and Vampire Counts can take any “human” settlement (that includes humans under the thrall of the undead). The Dwarfs and the Orcs can take the underground settlements they both seem to love so much. However, Dwarfs cannot take and occupy Vampire Count settlements and vice versa; all they can do is sack them or raze them to the ground, which makes the latter the only effective way to put their economy behind permanently. The AI will raze any settlement it doesn’t have a use for. You’ll quickly find yourself doing it too, and the Old World soon begins to look like a complete wreck littered with burned-out ruins. Fortunately you can re-colonise a wrecked settlement if you’re of the right racial affinity, although you’ll have to rebuild it from scratch, and the AI will start to get in on this action in the late-game so things do get built back up again. It does smack of a slightly artificial way to get factions fighting their natural enemies over the settlements they can actually occupy — Orcs vs Dwarfs, Empire vs Vampire Counts — but it’s undeniably effective at doing that and promotes a lot of interesting tactical decisions as to how you extend your reach into territory that you can’t colonise. It’s also terrifying to see the northern cities  gradually crumble under the Chaos advance — in neither of my games have I managed to meet Kislev, as Kislev has been put to the torch by the Chaos hordes long before I can get an army up there. You can gauge how well they’re doing just by looking at the wreckage through the fog of war.

As befits the setting, Total Warhammer is far more character driven than any previous Total War game. Each faction gets a Legendary Lord to lead it — for the Empire it’s Emperor Karl Franz, for the Vampires it’s Vampire Lord Mannfred von Carstein — each with their own unique skill tree and set of quests. These quests are essentially scripted battles against a tough opponent; if you win you get an appropriately awesome piece of equipment that you can attach to your Lord to boost his stats. Armies must now be led by a Lord, and while you can recruit bog standard Lords at any time they become increasingly more expensive in terms of upkeep; factor in the considerable costs of unit upkeep at the same time and you’ll find yourself only being able to support two armies at most at the start of the game, leading to lots of tricky decisions about where to commit your forces; as the Empire I was very aware that sending an army to Averheim would leave me wide open to invasion by my mortal enemies in Middenland, should they decide to choose that moment to attack, while my game as the Vampire Counts had me razing a string of Orcish strongholds to create a buffer zone that would let me expand north without worrying about having to watch my back too much. Each faction sports the usual array of agents, and one of the great changes Total Warhammer makes is that these characters will fight alongside the armies they’re embedded into as hero units. All named characters get their own skill tree and inventory, and so you end up with these rather nice groups of heroes leading armies throughout the campaign — my main Empire army was led by Karl Franz, an Empire Captain called Ulric the Stickler who had his skill points split into training/recruiting units and being a sick close combat machine, and Jimothius the Warrior Priest who was tagging along for his healing/anti-attrition skills. Embedded characters do take up a unit slot so you’re not getting anything for free, but they’re well worth the investment as long as you don’t go overboard.

Unfortunately while agents do have a lot of awesome points now they also bring me to the first negative one I have with the game: anything about them that’s been introduced to tie in with the new Warhammer mechanics is usually a good idea, but unfortunately they’ve been built on top of the Rome 2 agent system which was an absolute shitshow, and when you get down to it Total Warhammer is no different. All agents have 8-10 different abilities. Some of them are passive. Some of them are active. Some only work in enemy provinces. Some only work in your provinces. Crucially, a lot of them seem to overlap, meaning it’s not always clear as to why I want e.g. a Witch Hunter over a Warrior Priest. Certainly everyone can assassinate everyone else, which means a return to the bad old days where the only answer to enemy agents is to spam an equal or greater number of agents of your own at them. The computer is absolutely shameless about how it cheats with agents; it will spawn them into existence despite not having the buildings required to recruit them and it will use them every single turn it can despite each active ability use having a price tag attached to it. The base chance of e.g. a sabotage ability succeeding is actually quite low now, but that doesn’t matter to the AI; it’ll just try again and again until it works. Even if you send in agents specialised in assassination to clean out AI agents it’ll take several turns of trying as this only raises the odds of success to around 30-35% — and even if you succeed this will only provide temporary respite as that 35% chance is split into 5% chance of assassination, 30% chance of wounding. I gave up trying to manage them when my Witch Hunter assassin got outright killed by NPC agents he’d only been able to wound. I don’t know who at the Creative Assembly still thinks this is a fun system to deal with because I haven’t seen a single person who agrees with them; it’s really telling that one of the first mods to appear for Total Warhammer is an “only passive agent abilities” mod, and I’d say it’s absolutely required if you want to save yourself a ton of annoyance on the campaign map.

I have similar problems with the campaign map army AI, in that it will simply run away if it doesn’t think it can win a battle. Since all armies have the same movement range, this means that you’ll only catch them if you have multiple armies working together to pin them down or you get lucky with an Ambush action. This behaviour is bearable when you’re fighting a faction that has settlements you can take and destroy in lieu of killing the actual army, but it’s a huge problem when you’re fighting Chaos (who don’t have settlements) or one of the raiding Norsca factions whose settlements are really difficult to even get to, let alone destroy. They’ll spawn multiple stacks and make hit-and-run attacks to raze settlements and you just won’t be able to bring them to battle, especially since you probably don’t have all that many armies to commit to the task. It’s immensely frustrating to chase a single Skarland stack across the entire length of the Empire knowing that the moment you stop it’ll just turn around and beeline for any settlement it thinks is vulnerable. It might be the smartest way for the AI to play these factions, but it is most decidedly not fun.

The worst thing about this is that Chaos are allied with the Norsca factions and they coordinate their attacks in scripted waves that turn up every 20-odd turns past turn 40. Ordinarily this would throw an interesting spanner in the works as the world gradually bands together to fight the Chaos threat (as you get big diplomatic bonuses while the invasion in ongoing); in practice it works out to tying up most of your armies playing kiss chase across the northern wastelands. The one epic battle with Chaos I had was the final invasion wave against four full stacks led by named heroes; I repelled them with five stacks of my own in a titanic battle that ended up as a Pyrrhic Victory and shattered my armies, and it was only by merging the survivor units that I got enough unit cohesion to hunt down the fleeing remnants of the enemy before they regrouped. I wish the entire invasion had been like that, rather than this weird gamey bullshit the campaign map AI turns it into.

It’s so weird to me that so many good decisions could be made in adapting the Warhammer IP to fit Total War (and vice versa) and yet these stupid pain points — some of which have been around since Rome 2 — make it through into the finished product. There’s some definite flab in the rest of the game, sure, but nothing that’s quite as detrimental to my enjoyment as how the campaign map AI abuses the fact that it is an AI and has infinite patience for all of this fiddly bullshit that drives a human player nuts. Still, it’s not enough to stop me from calling this the best Total War since Fall of the Samurai, and the only reason it’s “since” instead of “ever” is because they’re doing very different things; Total Warhammer is carving out space in a whole new area for the series and it’s doing it really really well, albeit with a few bumps and niggles along the way. There’s a vast amount of stuff I just haven’t talked about because this review is already at 4000 words, but I think probably the best compliment I can pay Total Warhammer is this: after I completed the campaign objectives as the Empire I kept on playing. I never do that with strategy games, but I did it here because I felt like there was still more to do and see in the game. I hadn’t been to Bretonnia. Hadn’t really fought the Greenskins. Wanted to battle my way into the snowy wastes of the north and burn all of the fucking Norsca settlements to the ground in revenge for all the hassle they gave me. And once I am done with the Empire game there’s still the Vampire Counts game to finish and the Dwarfs and Orcs to tackle. Each of them will show me a whole different facet of the game; 25 hours in and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s the Total War I know and (used to) love; flabby in some places and decidedly uneven in others, but engrossing nevertheless and something that scratches the strategic itch in a way that nothing else really can.

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Well, if you want to try making a version of Left 4 Dead using the Warhammer IP, I suppose replacing all of the zombies with Skaven and the guns with actual giant warhammers is one way of doing it.

(The other way is first-person Space Hulk, but it looks like that might already be in hand. Anyway, as Space Hulk has a lot of guns and the closest Vermintide gets is black powder weapons, there’s room for both concepts to coexist quite comfortably.)

It’s a little unsettling how on-the-nose Vermintide is as a copy of Left 4 Dead. It’s been seven years since the original L4D was released, and while I’ve played plenty of games that have put their own spin on the four-player co-op concept (Payday and Killing Floor come to mind), none of them have followed quite as closely in its footsteps as Vermintide does. You’re one of a party of four heroes trapped in a city that’s been overrun by the Skaven – odious little rat-men who swarm you in huge packs, and who thus serve as admirable stand-ins for the zombies. From the inn that serves as your base of operations you can pick one of a selection of thirteen missions to attempt to foil the Skaven assault; each of these missions makes a fairly spirited attempt to mix things up a bit, but ultimately they each boil down to carrying out an objective while fending off wave after wave of Skaven, just like L4D’s panic events. Individual Skaven are easily slaughtered, but they outnumber you ten to one and have the help of four different types of special Skaven, three of whom are broadly analogous to the original special infected in L4D. There’s an AI director governing when the game is going to drop a Rat Ogre (read: Tank) on you, expendable bombs that you use on big hordes or tough enemies, medpacks (sorry, medical supplies) and pills (healing potions) – the list of similarities goes on and on. If this were everything that Vermintide is, I’d be pretty quick to call it a barefaced rip-off of L4D and move on to the next thing.

Fortunately, while Vermintide does have a surprising amount of L4D’s DNA lurking inside of it,  it’s eschewed resting on L4D’s laurels and instead uses this as a strong base on which to build new and interesting mechanics, and these changes do more than enough to comfortably distance it from its ancestor and lend it oodles of its own character. Probably the biggest mechanical switch-up is that Vermintide is primarily a melee-focused game – where L4D had you keeping the zombies as far away from you as possible, you *have* to close with the Skaven hordes in Vermintide because ammo for ranged weapons is scarce and you can’t possibly use bows and muskets to deal with them all. Developers Fatshark have plenty of previous experience in multiplayer medieval combat as they were responsible for the ill-fated War Of The Roses¹, and that experience shows through in Vermintide’s viscerally violent virtual rat slaughterhouse; the melee combat here is as satisfying as anything in Chivalry, and certainly far more so than the comparatively anaemic melee weapons in L4D2.  Heads pop, necks get sliced, and the two-handers can cleave through five or six ratmen at once.

Of course there’s twenty more rats right behind them, and so Vermintide’s melees can turn into surprisingly intelligent affairs as you attempt to manage the teeming mass of skaven that’s coming for you: you have to get up close and personal to kill them, but you also have to do it without losing too much health in the process. You can block, and if your connection is good enough you can stop mid-swing to raise your guard when you see a skaven in front of you winding up for an attack, but blocking uses stamina and you can’t keep your guard up indefinitely. This is where the third basic element of melee comes in: pushing. Attacking while you’re holding block will result in your character giving anything in front of it a meaty shove, which does no damage but sends rats sprawling back and creates space for you to work on actually killing them two or three at a time. Pushing also uses stamina so you have to break it up with attacks, and so defending against a horde attack is a matter of using blocks, pushes and positioning to prevent yourselves from being surrounded and dragged down while you thin out their numbers sufficiently to move forward.

Slaughtering skaven in Vermintide is perpetually satisfying and quite easy to sustain once you get into the rhythm of it; there is a reasonably high skill ceiling involved, but if you pay attention and fight smart you can weather entire waves of skaven without taking so much as a scratch. Unfortunately for you the lesser skaven are just a smokescreen for the far more dangerous special skaven types; while you’re dealing with a horde you’re much less likely to be able to notice them sneaking around in the back lines until they launch their attack, at which point it’s far, far too late. There’s four basic types: the Gutter Runner, who is a direct copy of the pouncing Hunter from L4D; the Poison Globadier, who hurls vials of deadly poison gas that damage anyone caught in the blast radius (including skaven) and block vision; the Ratling Gunner, who is an armoured rat with a minigun; and the Packmaster, who snags unwary heroes with a mancatcher and drags them off to the far reaches of the level. Of these only the Packmaster is truly dangerous on his own, and then only to players who have become separated from the rest of the group, but when you thrown any of these special skaven in with a horde they become so much worse.  A horde can cover for the Packmaster’s approach, and once he hooks somebody the horde will close in around him and make rescuing them a lot more difficult since you now have to cut your way through a crowd of angry skaven. Globadiers disorient players they hit and can temporarily split a party up with their gas to make them easier picking for other skaven, and the Ratling Gunners take a while to set up for an attack but can wipe out a player’s entire health bar if they don’t get into cover pretty sharpish. One of these specials is bad enough; encountering two or more at the same time as a horde is potentially game ending if you don’t spot and eliminate them quickly.

Vermintide also has a fifth type of special skaven: the Stormvermin. These aren’t lumped in with the rest of the specials as you’ll mostly encounter them sprinkled in with the basic clanrats infesting a level rather than spawning off on their own and beelining for the party. Stormvermin are bigger, tougher rats armed with glaives that can take off a quarter or more of your health bar in one swing, and armoured so that they’re immune to basic player attacks. For Stormvermin you have to aim for the head, or else use an attack with the armour-piercing property; nothing else is going to cut it. They’re mostly used to beef up the skaven ranks and keep the party on their toes (you can’t just run around assuming your basic opposition is going to be cannon fodder with them in the mix) but you’ll also occasionally encounter six-rat patrols of Stormvermin marching through an area. Fighting six Stormvermin at once is really dicey unless you’re loaded with bombs, so it’s best to avoid them completely if you can.

Special skaven like the Stormvermin often require special weapons to eliminate them efficiently, which makes this a great time to talk about the other thing Vermintide does that separates it from the basic Left 4 Dead experience: its class and loot system. Unlike L4D, where each of the survivors played identically to one another, each of the characters in Vermintide has access to a very different set of weapons, which affords them each a very different set of abilities. The Empire Soldier and the Dwarf Ranger share a fair amount of overlap; each of them gets access to shields, two-handed weapons and black powder firearms. The Dwarf is a little more defensively focused, being happiest when he has a shield and axe/hammer – the shield affords bonus stamina for blocking/pushing and makes pushes more effective as you bat skaven backwards with your shield — and the Soldier is best with his two-handed hammer, which can smash hordes aside and goes straight through Stormvermin armour, but they can each play the other’s role if they have the the right equipment. The Witch Hunter is another melee-focused class, but one played with much more finesse: his basic loadout is a rapier, which will slice heads with a light sweep and pierce armour with a charged thrust, but which is much less effective if you’re not great at aiming for the neck or head. The Elf Waywatcher has access to a variety of bows with plenty of ammo, but is also surprising good at blending skaven with her twin swords/daggers – she just has next to no staying power compared to the other characters and is basically the dictionary definition of “glass cannon”.

Finally there’s the Bright Wizard, who gets a paragraph all to herself because she has a mechanic all to herself: heat management. She gets a basic melee weapon like the rest, but this is only a backup to her magic staff. There’s several different types of staff available, each of which has a different basic and charged attack – a beam, a fiery bolt, a fireball to blast whole groups of skaven at once — but all of the wizard’s attacks generate heat instead of using ammo. If she generates too much heat she explodes, so she can’t spam fireballs indefinitely; once she reaches her limit she has to either switch to the backup melee weapon while she cools off – and she’s far less handy in close combat than the rest of the party — or else has to spend time manually venting the excess heat; this is faster, but she’s practically immobile while she does it and can potentially take damage while venting if she’s hugely overcharged with heat. The staff attacks are very powerful and some of the best crowd-control methods in the game, but the heat mechanic ensures the Wizard has to pick her targets same as everyone else; if she’s just spammed fireballs to take out a dozen clanrats it means she won’t have anything left to deal with the two Stormvermin who just showed up without bursting into flames herself.

There’s a fair quantity of equipment available to each character; I’d say each of them can equip at least seven or eight different melee and ranged weapons, and each of those weapons is very different from the others. For example, the Soldier’s ranged weapons consist of a blunderbuss (shotgun that blows away anything directly in front of him, but a bit redundant when he has the hammer), a repeater rifle (longer range, fires quickly and pierces multiple targets making it good against clanrats, but does comparatively little damage and is pretty useless against specials), and an arquebus (very long-range one-shot sniper rifle made for headshotting specials, but absolutely useless against hordes). The weapons give each of the classes certain options in combat, and by coordinating their equipment choices and working together in their chosen roles a party can be far more effective and actually stands a chance of making it to the end of the level on the higher difficulties.

But how do you get those weapons in the first place? Each class starts with a modest selection available, but you have to unlock the rest as you play the game, which brings me to the best (and worst) innovation Vermintide has to offer: its loot system. In its most basic form, when you make it to the end of a mission you roll seven dice, each of which has two successes and four blanks. There’s a seven tier loot table with basic white items at the bottom and more powerful green, blue, and even orange items at the top, and each success you roll on the loot dice moves your reward ticker from the bottom towards the top of the table. Each mission successfully completed is guaranteed to give you one piece of equipment (as zero successes will still yield a white item), while the dice roll determines how good that equipment is. Completing a mission on harder difficulty levels improves the basic loot tables, with orange Legendary items inching into the top of the table on hard and appearing at progressively lower tiers on Nightmare and Cataclysm, with less successes required to obtain them.

So far, so simple. Now for the really clever thing Vermintide does, though: while a harder difficulty level improves the quality of the basic loot table, there are items scattered throughout the longer missions in the game that replace your basic loot dice with better ones that are more likely to yield a success. Each of these is also a handicap in some way; for example, you can pick up Tomes on your way through a level that replace your healing item (which is obviously a little awkward), but each Tome that you successfully carried to the end rewards you with a dice that has four successes instead of the basic two. Grimoires take up your powerup slot and reduce your entire party’s maximum health by 25%, but yield dice that are a guaranteed success should you manage to exit the level carrying one. Finally – and most diabolically – you’ll occasionally see a rare type of special Skaven called a Pack Rat wandering around a level. He’s pretty tough, and as soon as you attack him he’ll try to scamper off somewhere out of sight where he can despawn, but if you manage to bring him down he’ll drop the contents of his loot sack which can contain one or more Cursed Loot Dice. A Cursed dice only has three successes on it, but this is often enough to cause one or more party members to lose all sense of logic or reason and pursue the Pack Rat single-mindedly through the level². This usually results in them triggering a horde that the party is out of position, which in turn results in the party getting murdered by specials. And if you die? Well, a failed mission means you don’t get to roll for loot at all, so all of those dice you just wiped the party to get were totally wasted.

I really like this system of taking voluntary handicaps in order to improve your chances of a good item at the end of the level; it’s a great risk/reward choice for the party to have to make, and encourages exploration of the levels to ensure you haven’t missed any extra bonus dice that might have been lying around. The loot system itself gives Vermintide a fair bit of replayability beyond simply completing all the missions – it’s perfectly fun to play on its own, but just as with Diablo it’s nice to have a long-term goal of better equipment to shoot for. However, it’s not all good news; for starters the loot tables are randomly generated and can yield any item for any character, which makes it a little tiresome when you spend 90% of your time playing the Soldier and you pick up your seventh pair of Waywatcher daggers. There is a lot of RNG involved despite your ability to improve the odds by picking up Tomes etc., and this is compounded by the higher difficulty levels all but requiring better-quality items in order to be effective; like I said before, the skill ceiling is fairly high and Hard is perfectly doable with white Common items as long as the party is sensible about it, but Nightmare is pretty much impossible without a decent set of greens; when even the basic clanrats take three or four hits to kill you’re going to get overwhelmed in fairly short order. I would hope this is an area that Fatshark pay attention to once they’ve smoothed over some of the rougher edges Vermintide has – the loot system has some fantastic ideas, but I have serious doubts about its long-term viability³.

Lastly I should talk about the missions themselves, and the use of the Warhammer Fantasy  setting as a whole. There’s thirteen missions in Vermintide, split roughly 50/50 between short missions that are completable in 15-20 minutes and more gruelling variants that take 30-40 minutes to finish. Most of the short missions spawn you into a relatively open area where you’re shown 3-4 objectives scattered about the level and left to get on with it; this can be anything from gathering gunpowder barrels and carrying it back to a ferry to smashing pillars to bring down the building sheltering a rat warren. By contrast the longer missions are much more like Left 4 Dead: you travel from point A to point B while fighting lots and lots of rats; when you get to point B you do some objective whilst under pressure from waves of skaven and specials (as with the short missions this usually involves gathering gunpowder/wheat or smashing breakable items), and then you run to the escape vehicle. Vermintide recycles its basic mission objectives in several different contexts, and I think this would wear pretty thin if the levels themselves didn’t have a few tricks up their sleeves in terms of design. The Wizard’s Tower is a particular standout here and does some really clever things with player perception, but the rest of them make a valiant effort to change things up in terms of setting and pace, from making the players run to the escape vehicle through a collapsing tunnel filled with enraged skaven to taking the unusual step of adding a point C in after completing the objective/horde event at point B. Visually it all looks pretty good and has some spectacular moments that are intended to impress; the palette is a little dull for my tastes, but it is set in the End Times variant of the Warhammer setting so I’ll accept it tending towards the grimdark end of the spectrum.

And that’s Vermintide. Loot system aside there are only two further criticisms I can reasonably make of the game. First is that the general netcode is mostly solid, but it still seems rather rough around the edges in places; Skaven specials have the occasional tendency to teleport around the map as the game updates their position, which is unsettling bordering on downright annoying, and while I hear it’s possible to bat a Gutter Runner away mid-leap I’ve never managed it because it requires split-second timing based on the Gutter Runner’s position that the netcode just isn’t up to providing. Second is that it deals with host migration terribly, which is to say that it doesn’t deal with host migration at all. If the host leaves, crashes, or otherwise drops from the game it’ll kick the rest of the players back to the start of the level, which is absolutely infuriating when you’re in the middle of one of the longer missions. This is not something that I should be experiencing in a videogame made in glorious space-year 2015. And finally the usual co-op caveat applies – in that co-op games are only going to be as good as the people you play them with. I played exclusively with friends and have had a whale of a time so far, which is why I’m wholeheartedly recommending the game if you too have a group of like-minded comrades; for the most part it’s a really smart fusion of L4D with fantasy melee combat, which makes it the best co-op experience I’ve had since Payday 2.

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