A Match Made in Heaven | Total War: Warhammer Review

Full disclosure from the get go, this is the first Total War game that I have put my hands on and boy am I sad that I hadn’t picked up one before. Better yet, this excellent pairing of the high fantasy world of Warhammer with the deep strategic gameplay of the Total War series is a match made in heaven and one that which will hopefully have the developers at Creative Assembly scratching their heads, asking themselves why they hadn’t done this sooner. Despite some minor mishaps and flaws that come with each of the campaigns, the excellent gameplay, intriguing factions and epic battles outweigh the negatives immensely.

Despite each of the campaigns being unique to each of the factions, they all felt more like a means to an end, the story took the backseat as I began to spread my armies across the colossal map trying to devastate my competition. There may be some great story elements for fans of the Warhammer lore although none really gripped me as the same old man weaved his tale as my war advisor for each warring faction. It didn’t help that after a small number of the campaign story missions were completed, the story expected me to take my Lord and travel almost across the entirety of the giant map to complete the next mission, this unreasonable distance to travel would easily take my character a dozen days to reach and often leave my provinces unprotected, forcing me to decide that it was much more important to keep my provinces safe than completing the next elusive campaign mission. For a person that has never played a Total War game before, even on normal difficulty the game can become incredibly hard and unforgiving. However, after a little practise and time spent on the easier difficulty, my armies began to flourish against the tougher opponents.

Total War: Warhammer is split into two different varieties of gameplay, controlling your faction throughout the strategic map and battling your enemies on the battlefield. Controlling your faction is made up of aspects such as navigating the map, upgrading your bases, deciding your style of reign, building your army and recruiting Lords and Heroes. Lords can be recruited and have the ability to lead armies into battle. Having Lords are paramount when trying to overtake other factions. As you gain experience on the battlefield, you can upgrade your Lord’s skills, a deep skill tree with a vast number of abilities allows you to craft exactly the type of warrior you desire. Choosing what sort of Lord you want to take into battle can be the key to your success. You can focus on battle-heavy leaders, jumping head first into battle by upgrading their hit points, melee damage and leadership skills, or a magic using Lord that can not only devastate your opponent with powerful spells but also aid your battle units as they take the fight to your opponent. What race you decide to play as can also play heavily into what sort of Lord you will be training, Vampire units rely heavily on Magic whereas the Human Lord Karl Franz specialized in commanding his army and boosting their morale during battle.

Heroes can also be recruited into your ever-expanding army, their main mechanic is to move throughout the map attempting tasks at your command such as assassinations, destroying enemy units or infiltrating castles and destroying buildings. The success of these missions often depends on the level of your hero, their personal upgradable skills and the level of your enemy. Heroes can also be embedded within your Legendary Lord’s army. Heroes inserted within a Lord’s army and can join your character on the battlefield. Lords and Heroes are incredibly powerful in Total War: Warhammer and sometimes their presence and power on the battlefield is much more important and devastating than any type of unit. I would just sit back and watch as I witnessed my powerful Lord take on gargantuan armies almost single-handedly.

Each faction has their own unique style of play, although the Empire and Dwarven divisions cater to the more, straight and narrow kind of army. I found myself having a lot more fun with the Orcish Greenskins and the Vampire Counts. The Greenskins are a bold and brutal lot, their core mechanic comes in the way of their level of Fightiness, this mechanic implores you to take to the battlefield and tear through everything in your sight, inactivity and military defeats will allow your fightiness to fall and ultimately cause your units to fight amongst one another or even to turn against you. Whereas when your Fightiness hits the upper threshold it will spawn a WAAAGH! Army, which is an AI controlled army that will follow your Lord wherever they go, coming into battle as reinforcements and helping you demolish everything in front of you.

Vampire Counts’ Vampiric Corruption is what sets them apart from other factions, if a Vampire Lord sets foot in an untainted land, they will suffer attrition and they, along with all of their units, will be damaged each turn. This is why you will need to send Vampire Count Heroes into a new province before you, to sow the seeds of Vampiric Corruption allowing your Lords to blaze through. As Vampire Counts specialize in Necromancy they are able to return to the sight of huge battles and use the remains of the fallen to resurrect a new army, depending on how many units died in the previous battle determines what units can be resurrected from the remains. Early in one of my playthroughs, there was a battle where almost 4500 casualties occurred, most of them being the throngs of weak zombies I threw at my enemy. Despite the weak units I lost throughout that battle, I was able to summon some of the strongest of Vampire Count units, giving me a jump on all of the other factions within my grasp, allowing me to breeze through neighbouring provinces, crushing my opponents.

Often during the early stages of a campaign my provinces were only earning enough money for me to have two Lords patrolling the strategic map, this would often become frustrating because almost every time I would move to try and take over a new province I would have a faction sneak up behind me and take castles and towns that I had only just secured. This constant barrage of incoming enemy forces enforced me to take up peace treaties and alliances with rival factions just so I could get some breathing room for a few turns.

After a certain time in each campaign, The Chaos Warriors from the North would spring into action, hell bent on moving south and devastating absolutely everything in their path. Despite it feeling like this inevitable doom came a little early within each of the campaigns, this often forced my hand to band with previously enemy factions to help survive through the dark times ahead.

Propelling the Total War franchise into uncharted fantasy-themed waters makes we wonder why this hadn’t happened sooner. The highly acclaimed series feels right at home as I commanded my undead hordes into a wave of arachnid mounted goblins, all while casting fireballs and raising the dead. The shortcomings of the lacklustre campaigns don’t hold this entry in the series back. The addictive base-building, epic large scale battles and vastly upgradable Lords and Heroes shine through as the best parts, making me hope that the other factions of Warhammer are looked at in the future.

This review is based on a retail copy of the PC version of Total War: Warhammer developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA.