Total War: Warhammer review: Variety and Vampire Counts breathe new life into Total War - danielsmundint

The scenes are similar in the a la mode Add War, but the actors have all changed. Where once I light-emitting diode legions of blade-wielding Hastati into the barbarian ranks, now a aggroup of zombies shuffles down the hillside. Scout horse have been replaced with massive bats that dive and swoop up through enemy troops. A flanking charge is conducted by wolves, backed up by skeletons on shadowy steeds.

And above information technology all, the guttural cries of the oblique Vampire Count Mannfred Von Carstein, true lord of Sylvania. He wades into foes alongside a Vargheist (a ten-foot tall bat) and a banshee, killing soldiery with a single blow and then feasting on their parentage to regenerate his own health.

That's way cooler than anything the irksome ol' Roman Empire ever did.

Further reading: Total Warfare: Warhammer DirectX 12 performance preview: Radeon reigns supreme

To war

This is Total War: Warhammer ($60 along Amazon)or, As it'll glucinium known for the rest of this clause, Total Warhammer. Atomic number 3 you've no doubt guessed from the title, it brings a piece of the fantastical Warhammer tabletop existence to Creative Assemblage's Total State of war series.

Information technology's a big trill-up, following on fifteen-odd years of historical crossed-4X/RTS campaigns. The maps and factions and units of Gross Warhammer make for a massive shift later Japan (twice), Medieval Europe (twice), Roma (two-and-a-one-half times), the Colonial Era, and the Napoleonic Age.

More important: IT's a refreshing shake-up. Tot up Warhammer not only surpasses the low, low-growing bar of "Best gamey in the serial publication since Shogun 2," IT also represents a direction the serial should embrace more generally.

Which is not to say Creative Assembly should intercept making Total State of war games based in chronicle. I'd love to imag another Medieval game or, you make love, an Ancient Greece or Existence War II surgery whatever the hell Ca wants to dabble in. And obviously those settings are affected by human history, so no ten-foot tall bat units or zombies or what have you.

Even so, there's quite an spot to like about Total Warhammer. For ane, the fact that all four (cardinal, with DLC) campaigns swordplay measurably different. Dwarfs, for case, field small numbers of high-upkeep, high-power units—Hammerers, Longbeards, et cetera. A standing regular army is expensive, but they counter that by mining for gems and precious metals.

Vampire Counts, on the other hand, field heavy armies of skeletons and zombies to overwhelm with numbers. Some of your units died? No job, just raise the dead on your next turn and you'll regai a component part of your lost forte.

And it goes beyond combat. Total Warhammer is great at making the set-up of each sect feel important. The Dwarf campaign focuses on High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer, assail restoring his people to their former aura. Doing so means reuniting ancient kingdoms and taking back lands stolen aside the Greenskins, and as such you'Re encouraged to ally with your fellow Shadow lords early and fight in collaboration.

Our Vampire friend Mannfred Von Carstein is in the opposite situation. He returns to Sylvania to find a pretender ruling over his domain. Your goal is to dismantle this touch's false imperium. Internal struggle.

Information technology's not that Total War has never experimented with asymmetrical factions. Go way cover to the ahead of time days and you'll find camarilla-specific units, or even full armies that favored a unique style of play (wagerer cavalry, speedier pes soldiers, and the like). More new, Total War: Attila introduced Nomadic Tribes—factions where armies were synonymous with cities.

But Total Warhammer takes entirely those half-ideas and formalizes them, wraps them into the lore. Dwarfs get a public order penalty the Sir Thomas More battles they lose, carefully noting every stew down in a hefty tome. The Empire forms from a loose confederacy into an unstoppable tide. Vampire Counts fight internally until there's no one left to oppose, then decide to kill everyone else and defile their lands for bully mensuration. Greenskins armies start suffering detrition if they haven't been in enough battles recently.

Crazier still, each faction has lore-specific regions information technology can conquer. You can attack and wipe out whoever you'd corresponding, only you'atomic number 75 only allowed to have territory (occupy cities) in certain regions. For the Dwarfs, that means some land currently controlled by the Greenskins, a.k.a. traditional Dwarf strongholds, lost to the encroaching armies. Vampires can exclusive capture land belonging to other Vampire Counts and The Conglomerate. No use making an early play for Dwarf lands (though you'll eventually have to wipe them away to achieve the Vampire bring home the bacon conditions.)

On the one hand, this tendency towards categorisation makes the map feel littler, more strained. Along the other, it way the early game is a pile more manageable—you deliver a intelligibly defined goal and a reasonably good guess how to go about achieving it before the game opens into full-happening sandbox for the larger ending-game goals.

Plus it helps line factions, grounds them in some sort of faux-reality, and gives weight to what are supposed to be old conflicts between these groups—an aspect assisted by the institution of new "Quest Battles."

Sect leaders now influence the story Total Warhammer tells. An early Dwarf request combat, for instance, pits you against a Greenskin ambush in the depths of the Underway, a network of ulterior tunnels. Others unlock as you level your hero, sending you on a quest to conk see that character's legendary items and ordinarily culminating in a similarly climactic battle.

These are drawn from Warhammer's big lore, with names and identifiable locations and acquainted setups. It's a bare minimum amount of storytelling, only it's there and helps brin credence to the world. And the battles themselves are spectacular, often throwing multiple stacks of units dormy against each other. This is Entire Warhammer's real-time aspect at its most blown-out and impressive, and it's tattle that the game doesn't let you auto-conclude these battles.

Put it all at once—different units, army styles, leaders, territories, quest battles—and Total Warhammer seems a massive cut aboveAttila's tentative forays into asymmetrical play, to say nothing of the doldrums of Rome 2. It feels like four different games. Four good games.

(Pull note: From a technical point of view the game's been rock solid. Frame rates have been smooth on some the campaign screen and in battles, and AI turns are quick. I've seen some scattered reports of server issues today simply I assume those are the customary set up day blues and leave serene ascending soon. I did have one moment where I sentiment an enemy army had bugged out and disappeared—past I complete they'd lost into the Underway and traversed nether a lashing. Crafty Greenskins.)

Sure, there are still issues. The notably-poor Artificial insemination hasn't been thus much overhauled for Total Warhammer as it's been disguised. Units can be slow to respond, but now it's a pack of dogs instead of a sloppy horse cavalry explosive charge. Pathfinding gets broken but its Hammerers stuck on Grudgebearer's farcical cart instead of Hastati on Hoplites. You'll still see opposing factions wee-wee stupid decisions, and in that location's a particularly annoying tendency for enemies to sue for ataraxis on every single turn if you'Ra winning a war, requiring you to dismiss their entreaties later all move—particularly annoying if you're laying siege to a city and all you're doing is repeatedly tapping "End Turn."

It's Total War.

Keister parentage

But it's so much more than just Total War. Even with Attila fashioning close on some of Roma II's forebode, I ground myself dreading drawn-out engagements and increasingly bored with the Total War formula. Total Warhammer doesn't monkey with much, but it injects enough personality to recreate a series that's been steadily collapsing under its own weight.

The question now is whether see both of its better ideas brought back into Total War proper. A Medieval gage with the Battle of Hastings or Falkirk. Another stab at Little Corpora, but focused in on the differences betwixt factions. Again, it's not like I expect to see ten-substructure tall bats stalking the fields of circa-1800 France, but Total Warhammer proves a piece more variety is the cure to Overall War's woes.