I was so ready to detest this game.

Here, prior to last week, were my thoughts on Full War: Warhammer:

  • I did not have the best time with the concluding Full War game, Rome II, finding it to be a swollen, soulless affair that undid much of the good work Artistic Assembly had done with Empire and Shogun.
  • The motion to Warhammer's fantasy world was seemingly getting rid of a large part of Total War's appeal: the history. TW fans, myself included, go every bit nuts virtually a game'due south setting as they exercise the game itself, and seeing the series walk away from the real world was a accident.
  • This isn't fifty-fifty the skilful Warhammer. Information technology'southward the dorky medieval ane.

Yet hither I am, the finished product in my mitt, and I'm a changed human. My misgivings counted for nothing. This is the best Total War game in years, and I was a fool for fearing otherwise.

I was worried that moving away from history would pull the rug out from under the series. That without the context it had founded itself upon the game would feel lost. Instead, Total War has been prepare free. No longer spring to recreating existent places and real people, Creative Assembly accept been able to experiment similar never earlier.

A lot stays the same, of form. This isn't a complete reinvention of the bike. Warhammer is nevertheless very much a Total State of war game: yous straight armies and an economy from a campaign map then, when the need arises, you switch to a 3D battlefield to take direct control over your forces.

That's a solid and successful formula, so all-time non mess with it. Which is why every Total War game since the original in 2000 has stuck with it, Creative Assembly taking each new game as a risk to rearrange the deckchairs, not the deck itself.

In the 2022 edition of the serial, and then, hither are the best ways Warhammer's chairs have been arranged:

World

Ane of Rome II's biggest problems was the world itself. Its map was too big, too boring, too unwieldy. Warhammer's earth, while nevertheless large, feels a lot more intimate, its regions a lot more connected.

It also looks incredible. Warhammer's fictional environments mean that the corners of the map can look wildly different, creating non just added challenges in navigating them, but memorable flair (skulls carved from mountains, pools of lava, aboriginal Dwarf ruins) that let you instantly recognise where y'all are in the world, regardless of where the camera has panned.

The best part though, at to the lowest degree for me as someone sick of Total State of war'due south dependence on grinding out large territorial gains, is that the earth map is quarantined between the factions. Humans can merely occupy settlements belonging to other humans or the undead, Dwarfs can only do the same for dwarf and Orc townships, etc. This stops the map from condign overwhelming, and too leads into a alter of focus that I'll get to in a minute...

Factions

While Total State of war games take long featured disparate factions—in Empire a regimented line of British soldiers could take on a rabble of pirates or stick-wielding tribesmen—Warhammer has actually gone to town in making each major race in the game an entirely different suggestion.

So non merely does each faction become their own unique roster of units, just those units have very dissimilar skillsets (the undead's bats are useless against Orks simply will scare humans shitless), significant each game you play can end up requiring entirely different approaches, both strategically and tactically.

It's as well just absurd seeing all the weird and wonderful units march beyond a battlefield. Dwarf artillery, human being knights, giants, zombies, the variety of looks you lot get on a battlefield in this game is a hoot.

Story

Hither'southward probably the unmarried biggest introduction in this game, and the nigh successful: Warhammer has a story. I don't mean background, I don't hateful a "when you win y'all are the winner of the world" kind of thing, I mean a tale that is told through actions on the entrada map and which can turn the unabridged game on its head.

I don't want to talk besides specifically virtually it, since it's more fun to discover the meat of information technology for yourselves, simply the way that the forces of Chaos introduce themselves while you're in the center of other stuff is i of the neatest tricks I've ever seen in a strategy game.

A weird side-event of cartoon me into the story of my faction (I played my primary review game equally the Empire) and Games Workshop's lore itself is that I've grown a little fonder of Warhammer. I used to find it completely naff, but the way this game'due south tone comes across here—somewhere betwixt Lord of the Rings' stiff upper lip and The Expendables oafish self-sensation—has about won me over.

In addition to the big stuff, in that location take been loads of smart, absurd fixes and tweaks to the game's other systems. The tech tree is cleaner. The balance between army size and the economy feels more than refined. The hassles of naval travel are mostly gone, since so much of the map is land-locked. Even the battlefield AI, long the series' Achilles Heel, feels smarter. Not perfect. Merely smarter.

The manner characters—your generals, agents and political leaders—are handled is also great. In previous games they've either been useless, annoying or irrelevant, but in keeping with Warhammer's history of a existence game with cool petty miniature people, here they're fun to have around and full of slots to equip them with magic swords and blessed armour. Oh, and because this game counts turns, not time (a primal distinction), they don't grow old and die, significant you lot tin really get to know and love your best guys by the end of a game.

This all adds upwardly to a game that, well-nigh from get-go to cease, is a challenge in the all-time sense of the give-and-take. Warhammer is always throwing something at you, whether it be a elementary binary conclusion to brand almost the governance of your lands or grander strategic woes similar trying to fight a war on two fronts, or even against the bigger narrative bug of the entrada. Yet you're rarely overwhelmed, or left feeling that it'due south all unfair. Instead, at that place's a sense that Creative Associates have pulled off a phenomenon and got the residuum just right, managing to create a strategy experience that remains interesting and active from your first tentative steps right through to your last battle. Not many PC strategy games, even the greats like Civilization, can make that claim.

Information technology's still a large map, but it never feels TOO big.

Before we get as well carried away, mostly out of surprise at how much this has surpassed my expectations, know that this game isn't perfect. Strategic AI tin can withal exist a little too unpredictable, especially in diplomacy. Some of Total War's systems, like ransoming captives after a battle, is a weird fit for such a life-and-death fantasy struggle (paying ransom doesn't seem like official Chaos policy). And as much fun every bit the main story made the entrada, it doesn't always finish as neatly every bit an action championship would. My main Empire campaign, for instance, ended not with a cataclysmic showdown against the forces of evil merely with me moving into an empty castle ruin, which ticked over my "regions controlled" count and triggered a victory. Massive anti-climax.

Total War games take always been tough to love. In the past, they've ever been almost accepting the bad and so yous could savour the skillful. There was scale and joy to exist had in combat, but the AI would suck and campaigns would become a grind. They looked amazing but would run like shit, etc.

Warhammer has cut away a lot of those negatives and given us a lot more to beloved, and information technology's almost shocking to survey the game in one case you realise that. For well over a decade fans of the series, myself included, take convinced ourselves that this was one of the finest strategy properties on the PC, so focused were we on what we loved from these unwieldy historic epics that nosotros'd too easily forgive the games' countless faults and flaws.

But this? Is this how good a Full State of war game can be when information technology doesn't have to bend itself to the whims of history? Does freeing the studio to shift sliders and systems around to suit the game and not the past get u.s. a better experience? Because if that's all it took to really low-cal a fire under Full State of war then I take back everything I've ever said about wanting more than games fix in the dusty past. I'll dunk the candles I've kept lit during my years-long vigil for a Victorian/Civil War Total War.

Make a Lord of the Rings version next if you have to. Then Conan. Then Game of Thrones. Then, I don't know, Krull. Whatever it takes to keep injecting that old strategy vs tactics formula with absurd story quirks and fantastic magical powers, I hope Creative Assembly keep doing it, because Total War: Warhammer has been a blast.