Hey gamers! So today I find myself back on planet AVRAAX once again. I hope you're all doing great. And the reason I'm back here is because I'm tackling the third PvE mission, where we have to push deep into the city to find the source of the Voco inhibition signal and purify the heresy spreading through the place. Let's get into it.
Pushing into the city
So, the first thing we have to do is push into the city, fighting through wave after wave of enemies in order to find the Chaos altars scattered throughout the place. Right from the start, you can feel the atmosphere shift compared to other missions. This city has this corrupted, decaying vibe to it, with Chaos symbols scratched into walls, strange red glows coming from certain buildings, and heretics patrolling the streets like they already own the place.
The combat here comes in constant waves. You clear one group of heretics, take a few steps forward, and another wave spawns in from side streets or rooftops, keeping you on your toes the whole way through. It's a good mix of ranged fights in open plazas and tighter melee skirmishes once you funnel into narrower streets, so you end up using pretty much your entire arsenal just to make it through to the first altar.
Capturing and purifying the altars
This time we have to fight and capture the altars so we can later destroy them. These altars aren't just sitting there waiting for you either, the heretics actively defend them, so the moment you get close, you're dealing with reinforcements rushing in from every direction trying to stop you from holding the position long enough to capture it.
Once you do manage to capture an altar, there's genuine satisfaction in watching it get purified and then destroyed right in front of you. It's a small narrative detail, but it reinforces that sense of actually cleansing this corrupted city step by step instead of just running through a checklist of objectives. Each altar you take down feels like chipping away at whatever dark presence is trying to take root here, and the game does a good job making that feel meaningful instead of repetitive, mostly thanks to how different the surrounding combat arenas are for each one.
Advancing toward the cathedral
Once the first altars are destroyed, we have to fight our way to the cathedral, eliminating tons of enemies and entire waves of heretics along the way. This stretch really ramps up the intensity. The closer you get to the cathedral, the more heretics show up, and you start noticing more elite enemies mixed into the regular waves, forcing you to actually prioritize targets instead of just mowing down everything in front of you.
The cathedral itself looms over the whole approach, this massive, imposing structure that makes it very clear something important, and probably very dangerous, is waiting inside. Getting there isn't just a straight walk either, you're constantly fighting through choke points, dealing with enemies taking cover behind rubble, and pushing forward inch by inch until you finally reach the entrance.
Heading to the lower levels of the Cathedral
Once we're inside, we have to fix the elevator system that'll let us descend into the cathedral's lower levels. This section slows things down just enough to let you catch your breath after that brutal push through the city, but it's still got that creeping tension to it, since you know whatever's waiting below is going to be worse than what you just fought through.
Getting the elevator working involves dealing with a bit of light puzzle solving mixed in with fending off a few stray enemies that catch up to you while you're working on it. It's a nice change of pace that breaks up the constant combat, and it also gives the game a chance to show off more of the cathedral's interior, which, like everything else in this game, is dripping with atmosphere, candlelight, Chaos iconography, and that constant sense of dread building the deeper you go.
Eliminating the 4 Chaos altars to take down the Daemon
So, once we reach the lower level, we have to eliminate and capture 4 more Chaos altars in order to take down the Daemon that the heretics are trying to free. This final stretch is where everything ramps up to its peak. The enemies down here hit harder, come in bigger numbers, and the altars themselves are defended way more aggressively than the ones up in the city.
Every altar captured here feels like it matters more too, since you can tell you're getting closer to stopping whatever ritual these heretics have been building toward this entire mission. By the time you take down that fourth altar, there's this real sense of accomplishment, like you just shut down something genuinely dangerous before it had the chance to fully manifest. The tension of fighting through increasingly tough waves while racing to stop a Daemon from being summoned gives this whole final section a weight that the earlier parts of the mission were clearly building up to.
We've now finished 3 missions in this PvE mode, and I'm hoping to get mission number 4 done today so I can keep moving forward and bring you more adventures from this absolutely brutal mode. See you in a next post!
