New Total War game: Warhammer

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-warhammer-review/

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER REVIEW

Dwarfs line the walls of the Everpeak, weapons ready. They fire bolt and lead at the incoming Orcs, but to the Giant lummoxing forward at the head of the green horde it may as well be a light smither of rain. The Giant crashes into the gates, stumbles back and crashes into them again. It bursts through to be faced by massed units of Longbeards, fearless Dwarf veterans, who mob the Giant like dogs harassing an elephant.

They win, because in the rock, paper, scissors of Total War: Warhammer the Longbeards' immunity to psychological effects makes them good at fighting fear-causing Giants. Slayers would be even better as they have the Anti-Large trait as well as Unbreakable, but this is a game where paper can beat scissors so long as there's enough of it.

Moldy Old World
Until now Total War has recreated historical eras, and so the tactics have been based on simplified versions of real-world tactics, whether deployed by Rome or Napoleon. Cavalry flank and race ahead to attack missile units before they get too many shots off; spears defend and resist cavalry charges; missile units pour volleys into dense infantry units as they slowly advance. Here, things are more complicated.

The Warhammer World is a fantasy setting, one loosely based on Renaissance Europe but with the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, H. P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber funnelled into it through industrial pipes while copies of 2000 AD and heavy metal album covers are scattered on top. It's a mish-mash of everything someone at Games Workshop ever thought was cool, and it's both familiar and really weird.

There's plenty of crossover between fans of historical wargames and Warhammer, as shown by two of the previous Total War games receiving fan-made mods that squeeze Warhammer armies into them. This is something else though, a ground-up alteration of the Total War formula to make it suit the fantasy setting of the Old World (and it's moddable too, so someone out there must be itching to reverse the trend and put historical armies back in). That formula comes in two halves. The first is a turn-based grand campaign about marching armies across a map and managing provinces through construction, research, and taxation, trying to balance the economy and people's happiness with army-building. The second happens when those armies meet and drop into a real-time, though pausable, battle.

In previous Total War games the factions played in a relatively similar way, but not any more. For instance, the Greenskins have a meter measuring each army's Fightiness. Win battles, and it rises. Lose, or squat in your hovels like a coward, and it drops. If Fightiness is high enough, and there are at least 17 out of a maximum 20 units in the stack, all that sweet victory encourages other Orcs to band together in a bonus force called a Waaagh! For other species buying and maintaining multiple armies is a huge expense, but for Greenskins can earn them free, which encourages a state of constant aggression that's entirely appropriate.

Dwarfs on the other hand have to keep track of grudges. They never forget a slight, carefully noting each in a massive book of bitterness. Any time their land is raided or attacked or Dwarfs are hindered in any way some scholar back at the capital sucks in air over his teeth and says, “That's going in the book.” While revenge earns rewards, having too many unavenged grudges drops public order as people lose faith in their leader. It breeds a playstyle all about defence, limiting fronts on which the Dwarfs can be attacked and only marching off to make new enemies when old ones have been thoroughly dealt with.

Meanwhile, the Vampire Counts rely on spreading corruption in the form of a grey, sickly taint on the map. Other factions suffer attrition when moving across corrupted land while Vampire Counts armies are diminished by marching across uncorrupted land. The Vampire Counts can also raise the dead to fill armies instantly rather than waiting (like in Rome II, armies are generated by generals rather than settlements, but cost extra away from the buildings that produce specialists). It's not as much of a game-changer as you'd expect. Unlike the Heroes Of Might & Magic games where the undead grow and grow as they incorporate the fallen into their hordes, Warhammer's Vampire Counts are still reliant on the old-fashioned way to get decent troops, though provinces where large battles have been fought provide a better class of corpses to recruit.

The final of the four playable factions (Bretonnians exist as NPCs but can be used in multiplayer, while Chaos Warriors are available free to those who pre-ordered or buy Total War: Warhammer in its first week and will be paid DLC later) is The Empire. Modelled on the Roman-German Empire, the humans are the most traditional faction, with starting units including crossbowmen, spearmen, and knights that will be more familiar to Total War players than Terrorgheists and Arachnaroks. Imperials get weirder as they go on, with Steam Tanks and knights who trade horses for eagle-headed Demigryphs while their leader Karl Franz can upgrade to a flying Griffon.

All these differences dramatically affected the way I played. As the Greenskins I fought just to keep armies Fighty and raided neighbors without regard for what they thought because that's a significant part of the Orc income even though it went against what I learned with other factions and my regular tendencies. It's not the kind of game where replaying as a different side means "focusing slightly more on missile weapons because they have +1 with bows". Each faction is almost a different game, and that's kept me interested.

Fantasy battles
There's variance between factions in both the turn-based campaign game and the real-time battles. Dwarfs don't have wizards but are blessed with plenty of artillery, and are generally more of a defensive, come-get-me-you-lanky-bastards force. Vampire Counts don't have missile units (not even skeleton archers), though their wizards have a decent Wind Of Death spell. For them it's all about lurching forward, targeting specific enemies with flying units and Black Knights while the skeletons and zombies shamble up to fill the gaps. The Greenskins have a bit of everything, but can be hard to control. When their Leadership drops due to being flanked or attacked by enemies who cause fear they have a tendency to scarper, but recover quickly and need to be shepherded back into the fray for wave after wave.

The effect of spellcasting on battles is less than expected. There's a limited pool of Winds Of Magic to draw from, with goofy blue haze wafting over the campaign map to show where it's strongest this turn, and individual spell effects feel slight compared to the impact of a flanking manoeuvre or well-timed charge. The Raise Dead spell can summon a unit of zombies out of the ground, which is suggested by the handy in-game guide as a good way of blocking a charge, but also works to bog missile units down or pull off a flank attack. Zombies are weak combatants, however, and the spell can only be cast if you're at less than 20 units. Plus, even if those fragile zombies survive they'll be gone at the end of the battle.

In the first trailer for Total War: Warhammer a single spell obliterated an undamaged Steam Tank, but things seem to have been toned down since then. That's for the best, as now spells are useful additions to the arsenal but won't win a battle on their own. It's something the tabletop game has struggled with in the past, with different editions of the rules swinging back and forth on how powerful magic should be, but I prefer it like this. One magical zap is no more effective than a volley of cannonfire.

Most of the other spells are variations on projectile attacks, buffs, or debuffs, with flavour text to differentiate them—Goblin Shamans can cause distracting itchiness, while Necromancers make enemy soldiers age by years. There are magic items for your Lords and Heroes too, and banners to your troops, most of which give percentage boosts to abilities. Those Lords and Heroes are powerful combatants, though. Unlike in previous Total War games where the general led from the back, close enough to provide benefits but not close enough to be slaughtered, in Warhammer they're some of your best fighters. Though their loss is devastating to morale, and undead armies can crumble after their general's death, I charge in anyway out of both necessity and a desire to watch their animations as they wreak havoc.

The temptation with Total War is always to zoom right in and watch fights up close, and that's even stronger when it's Dwarfs with mohawks taking axes to looming Trolls. But it's important to keep an eye on the overall battlefield to ensure reinforcements are being dealt with, flying units aren't hassling your artillery, and so on. Tabbing in and out of a tactical view that presents the battlefield from far above with units as neat rectangular banners helps, and when I zoom back in to see melee devolve into a mess, units overlapping and soldiers clipping through each other, I do feel a pang for the straight edges and ruler-perfect abstraction of turn-based tabletop Warhammer.

It's possible to pull off amazing things even in the morass, though it helps to abuse the slow-motion button and give orders while paused, as you can in single-player mode. You can overcome odds that the auto-resolve option for battles isn't able to: outnumbered 10 to 1 by two Greenskin stacks I still won a narrow victory as the Vampire Counts even though my Legendary Lord Mannfred Von Carstein fell. It's a great feeling to pull something like that off.

Lords and quests
At the start of a campaign you choose which of two Legendary Lords will lead your faction, iconic Warhammer characters like Emperor Karl Franz and High Wizard Balthasar Gelt, with the other character becoming available during the campaign. Each has their own questlines to pursue, storylines that unlock special battles to earn unique artifacts. These quest battles can also be played outside the campaign in a separate mode of their own. You might be facing an army with four Shamans, or reinforced by Dwarf Gyrocopters, and your Lord begins each battle with a rousing speech. (This is the only time you hear speeches–unlike Shogun 2 you won't have to skip them before every scrap.)

Because quests are bespoke little stories separate from the campaign—you use your regular army but opponents are conjured up on the spot rather than drawn from existing enemies—there's a risk of them seeming inconsequential. But their unique nature, and the few paragraphs of narrative that come with quests, are reward enough that I probably waste too much effort chasing them.

Though early quest destinations are near the starting positions, they quickly pop up much farther away. Sending your Lord off with an army strong enough to beat them is a bad idea, as even with another powerful stack of troops at home it leaves you open to a concentrated attack, like a sudden Waaagh! Unlocking quests often requires sending your Heroes off to perform specific actions, too.

Heroes are both tough individuals who can embed within your armies and agents who can deploy across the campaign map to perform specific actions. That map’s impressive in its detail, looking like cartography from the inside cover of a book made real. Heroes assassinate and corrupt, damage walls and buildings, reduce income and public order, or improve those things within your own borders. Sadly there are no videos for Hero actions, none of those clips of a ninja or geisha doing something cool that the Shogun games had.

Nameless Heroes can die, but named characters are only ever injured and keep coming back. Sometimes this seems apt, and having to kill the Necromancer Heinrich Kemmler twice only to see him resurrect again was perfect. It's odder when Joe Random Minor Hero keeps coming back to annoy the same city even after I pay money and risk the odds to have him assassinated over and over.

It's not all about death. There are unique tech trees to research, buildings to construct, public order to maintain, and diplomacy to tinker with. Even the Greenskin tribes engage in limited diplomacy–though they don't make trade agreements they do negotiate alliances with each other and sometimes the Dwarfs tempt them with gold to buy peace. A lot of money gets thrown around on the diplomatic screen. It's easy to profit by letting one side of a war buy you off then waiting for the other to tempt you away, flip-flopping repeatedly with no noticeable impact on your standing. After a few Total Wars I've forgiven the weaknesses of the AI, but the talking heads on the diplomacy menu still feel daft.

Tonal war
Sometimes the Total War game underneath pokes through, creating situations that don't feel right for Warhammer. When Dwarfs defeat Greenskins they have an option to ransom their captives for cash, a decision I can't see either side agreeing to in the fiction. But there are times when the tone is absolutely right, as when the Dwarfs are given a choice to forgive a grudge but both the replies available are different wordings of “hell no.”

One of the most Warhammer-ish things about it is Chaos. After 20 turns warnings appear: Chaos gathers in the north. It's another 50 turns before I notice their effects, a spreading corruption like the undead's. As the computer turns whiz past, the pause while the Chaos Warriors move grows longer and longer as their numbers grow. It's past turn 100 before I engage with them, but by thenthe northern Old World is ruins, and Archaon The Everchosen leads a doomstack right towards me.

The end times came and I ignored them, pretending it wasn't my problem until it was too late.

It feels strange to be worried about spoilers for a strategy game, but you should encounter Chaos for the first time for yourself. Games Workshop has told the story of this Chaos Incursion twice–the first time Chaos lost and fans hated it, the second time Chaos won and fans hated it. Now you can retell that story yourself. It's a story of nations squabbling when they should unite, but even as darkness draws closer the acrimony between me and my foes, combined with the desire to take their territory, stops me from committing to confederation. The end times came and I ignored them, pretending it wasn't my problem until it was too late.

The part of me that collected a High Elf army as a teenager wishes it was broader in scope (at least give us Skaven!) but there will be expansions to cover some of that and in previous games they’ve been handled well. Anyway, the best Total War games have been the most focused, whether on a single nation or a single general. Total War: Warhammer takes in a continent but tells one story, and it's potent because of that.

THE VERDICT
86

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER
If you find real history a bit bland compared to glorious nonsense made up by strange British people then Warhammer is the Total War for you.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamesn.com/total-war-warhammer/total-war-warhammer-review

Total War: Warhammer review

I’m watching a group of hungry, dragon-sized vampire bats tear chunks out of some Dwarfs with guns outside of an absurdly gothic castle filled with skeletons, zombies, and a couple of banshees. It’s a small part of a fantastical battle of gargantuan proportions. For a moment, I sit there and appreciate the fact that I’m witnessing and controlling this fight in a Total War game without the benefit of a single mod.

Unshackled from history and reality, Total War: Warhammer is as much a re-imagining of Creative Assembly’s 16-year-old series as it is a spin-off or a sequel. The epic big-picture campaign, the tactical real-time battles, the language, and the UI might all be fundamentally familiar, but none of them have escaped revision or augmentation. It’s refreshing, certainly, and often bold, but not everything that’s new is an unmitigated success.

A Total War campaign begins with an agonising decision: who the hell am I going to lead to victory and glory first? It normally takes an age for me to decide, as I pour over the multitude of faction summaries. In Warhammer, there are only four: the Empire, Vampire Counts, Dwarfs, and Greenskins. Five if you also get the Chaos Warriors DLC. It should be easier, then, to pick a faction, but it isn’t remotely.

See, the four main factions of Warhammer are more diverse than any that Creative Assembly have created before. Units, buildings, tech trees and a couple of unique systems ensure that no two feel alike, and this isn’t a case of reskinning things to suit a faction’s aesthetic; these are meaningful differences.

Take the burly Dwarfs, for example. They have no cavalry or magic, but have explosives, guns and deadly artillery, along with various gyrocopters. They’re also blessed with a huge tech tree and a strong economy. Their unique system is the Book of Grudges, which transforms every slight against the Dwarfs – attacks, raids, assassination attempts – into a quest for revenge, and the more grudges that accumulate, the less faith the Dwarven leadership has in its king, resulting in instability.

Starting positions – geographically speaking – make a big difference in terms of diversity, too. The Dwarfs start off in the mountains, and their territory is mostly narrow, winding valleys and paths through huge mountain ranges. It makes navigating Dwarfen kingdoms a nightmare, unless you’re playing as the Dwarfs or Orcs, who can travel through ancient underground paths.

This all leads to Warhammer offering up some of the most interesting, asymmetrical wars and battles in the Total War series. And the limitations, like the lack of Dwarfen cavalry or the admittedly inexplicable dearth of undead ranged units, merely add to the tactical conundrums that make a battle compelling. It’s worth noting, as well, that this asymmetry doesn’t necessarily lead to imbalance.

Warhammer’s undead aristocrats, the Vampire Counts, might not have ranged units, for instance, but they have several flying ones – they get their first straight away – which extend the range of their attacks. They don’t rout, either, which is simultaneously brilliant, because you’ll never lose control of them, and terrifying, because units are more likely to be wiped out.

Like the factions, the roster of recruitable units is quite small, but infinitely more memorable than the many different-but-not-really dudes with swords and spears from the previous games. Ghouls, giants, dragons, holy engines of war, knights flitting around on pegasi – these are troops you’re not going to forget. It’s not just a matter of cosmetics, either, or even stats. A giant isn’t simply bigger and stronger than an ordinary warrior, it can fling men around and stomp on them. Its size and strength have a tangible impact on the fight.

The cosmetic stuff is still important, though. It makes battles easier to read when units are this simple to identify – you’re not going to have a hard time spotting a building-sized spider. And, let’s not beat around the bush here, it looks incredible. Total War: Warhammer is a stunning game, from the campaign map full of fantasy flourishes like skull rocks and the growth of vampiric and chaos corruption, to the battles in great underground caverns or beneath the gaze of imposing mountain fortresses.

Warhammer’s real-time battles are still built on the easy-to-learn foundations of Total War combat. For all their special passive abilities, bonuses and stats, units still broadly follow the rock, paper, scissors model, while more nuance is added by elevation and forests, which affect the field of view and give units certain advantages. If you’ve played a Total War game before, you’ll know what you’re doing, but there are a few extra things now waiting to be learned.

How best to use magic is one of them. Lords and heroes (generals and agents) can cast spells during a fight that are unlocked when they level up. How many spells they can cast in a given battle depends on the Winds of Magic, which constantly shift. Most of them are, disappointingly, buffs and debuffs that use the same spell effects, and are perhaps not as flashy as one might hope. There are a lot more spells that heal and bolster units than giant vortexes of doom, and though they might be handy, they are a wee bit dull.

However! They do make lords and heroes substantially more important than their historical counterparts. Not only can they turn the tide of a battle with a well-timed spell, they’re handy in a brawl, too. And their power can be increased by loot rewarded after a fight or a quest, so they are always growing and always earning their keep. Eventually, they get access to flying mounts so they can tear across the skies, avoiding and getting into scraps at their leisure.

When Total War: Warhammer lives up to its name, and everyone is fighting, and borders and constantly fluctuating, and there’s no room to breathe for all the conflict, this is one of the high points of the entire series. Unfortunately, war more often comes in spurts, and with breathing room comes the realisation that the game continues to struggle with things that have plagued Total War for years, and that a lot of its new additions aren’t nearly as well realised as the faction diversity or thrilling, fantastical battles.

Campaign AI and diplomacy have become the twin banes of my existence. They’ve never been the series’ strongest feature, but in Warhammer it feels like another step back has been taken. In my first campaign, playing as the Dwarfs, I actually had to swear off diplomacy for a big chunk of the game because it was too easy to exploit. I found myself in a cycle where money and deals were being flung at me, neutering any challenge or need for empire management.

The Dwarfs begin, like all the other factions, as merely one group within a race. So the playable Dwarfs are not the only stumpy mountain-dwelling folk. My Dwarfen cousins really liked me and my faction of go-getting hirsute blokes, so they were constantly sending me trade deals and offers of friendship. That’s fine – I like making friends. It wasn’t an even friendship, though.

“Come join us in a war against these guys,” they’d ask, with great frequency. “We’ll give you lots of gold.” How could I refuse? So I’d take their cash and join their war, and then I do… absolutely nothing. I had my own wars and worries. And then I’d get the inevitable message from, let’s say the Vampire Counts, asking me to leave the war. And yes, they’d offer me money too. So I’d take it. A few turns later… “Come join us in the war against these guys. These same guys. Here’s some cash again, too.”

This went on and on, and nobody seemed to care that I was constantly leaving wars or that I wasn’t actually participating in them. I was rich, and I didn’t have to do anything.

It should be noted at this point that CA themselves advocate that experienced Total War players should jump in at one of the harder difficulty levels. On Very Hard, for instance, they say that “The game will be unforgiving and you’ll need to find ways to get the most out of all areas of the game, including battle, campaign economy, diplomacy and character skills. Nasty inescapable situations are likely to be encountered frequently by the ill-prepared and unwary, so you should exercise caution when planning your next expansion.”

However we have tested the game on a higher difficulty, and exploitable diplomacy and unsatisfying AI opponents aren’t just problems on Normal, which is where most players will end up. Cranking it up a tier does make the game more challenging, certainly, especially in the already engaging and reasonably tricky real-time battles, but these flaws in the campaign persist regardless of the challenge setting.

Along with the easily exploitable diplomacy, the campaign struggles due to its lack of tension. Most of the map is taken up by the aforementioned minor, unplayable factions, but they are often excessively timid, and serve mostly to be gobbled up by the main faction of their race. They can be allies or opponents, but they’re always just more fuel for the war machine.

There’s a narrative reason for this. Total War: Warhammer is all about uniting the diaspora to put up a stronger defence against the inevitable wave of Chaos that’s building in the north. So the point is to invite these minor factions into a confederation – they seem predisposed to this, even if you keep leaving their wars – or simply by conquering them, which isn’t much of a challenge thanks to their aforementioned timid natures.

One thing that’s missing – and their absence is really noticeable – are established empires. There are no Roman Empires or Sassanids, no lumbering behemoths that present a deadly and immediate threat but that can cautiously be taken apart. Every faction begins as small and meek, so the first order of business is always expansion. Despite the faction variety, they all start out in a similar situation, with a similar goal: become more powerful. And that’s actually pretty easy.

Through quests and easy pickings, Warhammer gives you everything you need to become a burgeoning superpower before you even have your first clash with one of the other main factions. By that point, things admittedly pick up considerably, as that promised Total War begins. And when the Chaos Warriors march south, that’s when the game really starts. It’s just a shame that you might not even spot a Chaos legion before you hit 100 turns.

The Chaos Warriors call to mind the Huns from Attila. They are the game’s major threat, and like the Huns they pour out of their lands, raiding and burning everything they see. And where they go, they spread chaotic corruption, destabilising regions and inciting revolt. They are a real menace. Unlike the Huns, however, they are a blunt instrument, and a fleeting threat.

In Attila, the rise of the Huns heralds a dramatic change in the campaign. Factions find themselves homeless, forced to move south and west into other lands, causing problems in the regions they move to. The whole world starts to shift. And the Huns, though their push west makes them seem like a force of nature, are still able to make deals and temporary alliances.

The Chaos Warriors, on the other hand, are just destroyers. They move south and raze every settlement to the ground. That’s it. They exist in a state of constant war with the other factions, so they never do more than fight. And their war against the world means that they lack focus, continually being pulled between different conflicts, whittled down by players and AI alike. So for a while, they might seem like this terrifying threat, and in every game I’ve played they’ve annihilated vast swathes of the world, but eventually they die from a thousand cuts. It’s a bit of an anti-climax.

Like quite a lot of Warhammer, the threat of Chaos is a great idea that stops shy of being great in practice. The role-playing elements are another. Warhammer has loot and quests and heroic abilities in spades, but lacks one key thing: actual characters, the one ingredient that keeps the others connected. Sure, your lords and heroes have names and a backstory, but they don’t have personalities, motivations or ambitions. The quests they go on are impersonal things, missions to go and fight in a battle half-way across the world for a new sword, that only serve to get them get bigger numbers in their character sheet.

Look, this is a strategy game, not an RPG, so I’m not expecting The Witcher 3’s character development, but I already know Creative Assembly can do more, because they’ve done it before.

Not for the first time in this review, I’m suggesting that Total War: Warhammer should be more like Attila, which I realise is strange given that one of the game’s strengths is that it is so different from its predecessors. But Attila’s court intrigue was a fantastic addition, breathing life into generals and leaders, giving them families, desires and influence, along with all the wrinkles they add to the running of an empire. Warhammer desperately needs that extra layer of dynamism.

This is not to say that Creative Assembly’s attempts to mix some RPG mainstays into the game isn’t welcome. Despite my complaints, quests encourage conflict and exploration, spicing up the sometimes dull early game, while gear offers up a second path to increasing the power of your all-important lords of heroes. That the objects are all drawn from the lore of the tabletop game is an added bonus.

Special, curated battles are the real quest rewards, anyway. Who cares about a sword with +3 melee damage when you’ve got a titanic clash waiting for you in an exotic location? These fights are the best of the bunch, tailored and sometimes containing a trick or two, perhaps a special objective. Conveniently you don’t need to actually get the quest to experience them, as they also take the place of historical battles, and thus can be played immediately by selecting them from a menu. That’s also where you’ll find custom battles and multiplayer brawls.

I’ve found myself drawn toward those one-off multiplayer and skirmish battles more than in any previous game. The new additions to the real-time scraps – the fancy units, special rules for each race, the occasional magical surprise – make me want to rush through the campaign faffing to get to them, so leaping into them straight away is a very attractive prospect.

Total War: Warhammer has made me re-evaluate what I really wanted from Creative Assembly’s foray into the fantastical. I thought I wanted a clean sheet, everything new and surprising, but now I find myself missing old features that didn’t make the cut. And out of all the things that stuck around, why oh why was that awful diplomacy system one of them? I wouldn’t want to sacrifice any of the new things to get them back, though.

The quests and loot, the magic, the giant and flying units, that one Chaos lord whose surname is “Deathmetal”; these are all things I wouldn’t want to lose. Even the parts that need time to mature or require a bit more follow through, I’m glad that they made it in. Many paragraphs ago, I said that not everything new is an unmitigated success, but the overall experiment, the transposition of Total War to an entirely new universe, is. It does feel like phase one, however, with its focused scenario of uniting your race against Chaos, leaving a lot of space to grow, and I find myself more intrigued with what it might become.

Total War games past have expanded, changed and morphed over time and this will doubtless be similar. As it stands, Warhammer is a worthy addition to the series, particularly as a melding of two universes we’ve long wanted to see collide. And before long, as the patches roll in, it could be even more than that.

7/10

 

[Makabb]

D1p

 

[Beowulf]

I'm tempted to get it. After first -75% discount.
Or, if the AI miraculously works not totally bad, and the "modding" is something more than ability to alter troop colours and starting positions, I might consider first -50% sale.

 

[Whiran]

Reviews are here.

Are there Let's Plays or Streams of it?

I guess I could look that up myself... but :effort:.

I'd be concerned if there were "reviews" of the game but no streams or raw videos. I don't tend to agree with reviewers and prefer to see a game in fully in action before deciding. "Professional" reviews are pretty much valueless to me making a purchasing decision.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/19/total-war-warhammer-review/

Wot I Think: Total War: Warhammer

Watching the Greenskins approach from a dusty brown hilltop with the remnants of the High King’s great Dwarven army, I knew I was probably going to lose this battle and, with it, the entire Blood River Valley that I’d spent most of my game trying to conquer. I’d already defeated three other Orc armies in the last two turns, but this made one unstoppable horde too many. Hours of effort and progress were about to be erased as my greatest army was swamped by the seemingly endless tide of Greenskins.

I was thrilled: this kind of heroic, doomed slaughter is what I signed up for with Total War: Warhammer.

The Warhammer license liberates Total War from the burden of plausibility that it has so uncomfortably shouldered throughout its history. It’s a game of titanic clashes at the gates of ancient capitals, and wars of pride between two enemies with nothing at stake but a moral point. Every other battle is a Battle of Dimrill Dale, The Fist of First Men, or any other legendary, improbable fantasy clash between heroes and their armies. Total War: Warhammer (Total Warhammer from this point forward, as it is both a better title and a more accurate one) always feels like its source material: turned-up to eleven, about to snap under the weight of its own absurdity, but carried along by sheer enthusiastic conviction.

Battles like this have sometimes been hard to find in previous Total War games, where I’d find myself auto-resolving all but the most closely-matched battles in order to focus on my strategic designs. But here, in my week or so with the game, I’ve fought at least a half-dozen of the most thematically satisfying battles I’ve ever played in Total War.

Total Warhammer encourages these battlefield heroics, battles that don’t follow the logic of a military tactics manual but instead satisfy the narrative of a fantasy game. Greenskin tides rolling across a battlefield, breaking against walls of armor-laden Dwarves bent on avenging past defeats. Heavily armored Imperial knights go tearing through dense thickets of undead infantry. Hero units plunge into the fray, sometimes wiping out entire regiments with a few swings of a magical axe.

Stuff like this is why I decided to fight this last, hopeless battle with my beleaguered Dwarven army. The outcome was practically written in stone, and in any other Total War I’d have cut my losses and moved on. But not only did I feel like I owed this army something for beating 3:1 and 4:1 odds in the last couple battles, but I was also starting to think that maybe they could pull this off. That the High King and his stubborn Longbeards could notch another win.

There were other factors tipping the scales in my favor. Total Warhammer is a game of exaggeration. Your generals and soldiers will level-up as they always have, but now each general and hero has distinct leadership tracks that have very different impacts on their role. They can be behind-the-lines inspirations, legends of hand-to-hand combat, or strategic-level administrators. Sometimes all three, if they last long enough. And those bonuses can stack in some wild ways: my Dwarven king gave his melee troops a 12% bonus to both attack and defense… as well as a massive bonus when fighting Greenskins. When all the bonuses were factored in, each Dwarven soldier was hitting those Orcs for almost double their normal striking power. In no time at all, with a little seasoning under each army’s belt, there is no such thing as a “normal” Total Warhammer battle. Every skirmish becomes a clash of the titans.

It was a fearsome thing to watch, the last stand of the High King’s army. Goblin units melted under Dwarven axes. Orc archers were cut down en masse by pinpoint-accurate Dwarven Quarrelers. The piles of corpses were stunning. The Greenskins started to hesitate and waver as my army of fanatical veterans hacked their way through their ranks, and their generals died at the hands of the High King.

Then the Giant Spider reached the battle. An Orc super-unit, the Giant Spider stood 4 times the height of any of my soldiers, and you could fit a regiment underneath its eight legs. Even as the Orcish regulars cut and run, the Spider was impervious to my heroes’ axes. It calmly, methodically started flinging Dwarves around the battlefield, stamping them with its legs, and chopping them with its jaws. It was horrifying, a little unfair, and entirely amazing. It single-handedly (eight-leggedly?) won the battle for the Greenskins and drove my forces out of the valley.

With the loss of the valley, my forces retreated into the mountains to lick their wounds and rebuild. It was a time to manage my diminished empire and brace it for another attempt to retake the lost ground once I’d gotten some breathing room.

Not that there’s a lot of empire management to do here. Total War: Warhammer keeps the focus squarely on the battlefield by reducing the complexity of the strategic layer. Tax rates? Nope, you tax or you don’t, those are your choices. Building chains have more to do with what kind of units you can build than what kind of economy you’re creating. While you do build up your forces and expand your holdings, ultimately you’re here to annihilate your enemies and resist the intermittent, horde-like invasions coming out of the Chaos Wastes.

What partially saves Total Warhammer from feeling like a shallower version of a Total War game is that the feature cuts are replaced by a series of faction-specific game mechanics that make each race feel wildly different from its rivals. You may not have to manage much of an economy anymore, but you do have to figure out how to keep the Dwarves feeling confident in your leadership by paying-off the grudges they bear other races. Every lost city must be regained. Every victorious enemy general must be humbled. If you don’t let revenge steer your strategy as the Dwarves, they’ll lose faith in your leadership and create a restive, rebellious atmosphere. Likewise, the Orcs can’t stop fighting. Ever. In fact, they’re best-served by leaving enemies weak but alive so that they can always have armies satisfying their “Fightiness” (there’s an actual meter next to each army’s information panel) somewhere rather than having unhappy Orcish armies fighting amongst themselves.

And because your options are more limited on the strategic layer, you really do have to win Total Warhammer on the battlefield. You don’t just want a victory, you need a decisive result or conquest becomes impossible. If you let the AI take over and eat 35% casualties, your armies will bleed-out. This is a game where tactics end up driving the strategy, not the other way around. For the most part, that drives a lot of exciting action.

But only up to a point. What keeps me from wholly falling in love with Total Warhammer is my growing sense that it works because Creative Assembly ripped-out most of the strategic guts out of the game and left a facade in their place. For instance, one reason that the stakes for each battle are so high is because it’s nearly impossible to field more than one or two good armies in a game. The economy won’t allow it. Even deep into my games, the majority of my income came from “background income”, which is what Total Warhammer calls your baseline “money from the ether” income. In other words, the actual economy of Total War: Warhammer can’t really sustain any of what you see on the campaign map… which also means that expansion simply adds to your vulnerabilities without contributing resources to your war-chest.

Every faction is afflicted by this, it seems. If you pay attention to the diplomacy screen, you’ll note HUGE swings in the power rankings of each faction on the map. I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that I would become one of the top 3 powers in the game as soon as I had a couple decent standing armies (that were almost crushing me underneath their upkeep costs) and I’d plummet down to 15th or 20th as soon as I suffered major casualties. Small wonder that nothing is ever gained or lost in the Old World: no territory can fund the forces needed to protect it, so each expansion is a brief boom before an inevitable collapse. Like an annoying racing game, Total Warhammer’s campaign is rubber-banded so that building a lead is nearly impossible.

And here we come to the limitations of this review: I have enjoyed my time with Total War: Warhammer immensely, but the more I play, the more I have a growing sense that it begins to crumble as its scope expands. The economy is out of whack so there’s magical income to compensate for it. The moment you make progress on the campaign map, you draw so much diplomatic aggression from other powers that you are quickly swarmed by enemies that you do not and (thanks to the economy) cannot field the forces to resist.

That does put extra pressure on you to deliver those decisive victories as a general, and it contributes to the intense “win or die” Warhammer flavor of the game… but it also means that those victories start to feel fleeting and illusory because they don’t add-up to anything strategically meaningful. What was exciting becomes a slog, and that’s especially, painfully true on higher difficulty levels.

None of this diminishes the fact that I’ve had a wonderful time playing Total War: Warhammer and am far from finished with it. But the more I play, the more convinced I become that this is a game that makes a devil’s bargain. It feels exactly the way a Warhammer-themed Total War game should feel, and creates tons of dramatic battles and storylines over the course of each campaign. But to reliably generate all that excitement and tension, it secretly disconnects many of the strategic systems that hold good Total War games together. So do you want a good Warhammer game, or a good Total War game? Because I’m less and less convinced that you’ll find both inside Total Warhammer.

 

[Makabb]

Reviews are here.

Are there Let's Plays or Streams of it?

I guess I could look that up myself... but :effort:.

I'd be concerned if there were "reviews" of the game but no streams or raw videos. I don't tend to agree with reviewers and prefer to see a game in fully in action before deciding. "Professional" reviews are pretty much valueless to me making a purchasing decision.

 

[Zewp]

Waiting for the crack. I'll give it 2 months tops. CoH2 showed SEGAs colours

Ain't happening, man. It's got Denuvo.

 

[Makabb]

Is it me or the AI seems competent? It attacks him and when he tries to flank it also goes to the flanking units.

 

[Blaine]

According to this guy (whose review is also fairly good), performance and stability are much better than in Rome 2 and Attila.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Not a review, but samples from the soundtrack:

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

According to this guy (whose review is also fairly good), performance and stability are much better than in Rome 2 and Attila.

I've heard this as well, but haven't seen any benchmarks yet. I'm curious whether my Oc'ed fx-6300 will run it reasonably, or if it's time to sacrifice my wallet on the hardware altar.

 

[Blaine]

I'm fairly sure my i7 5930k OC'd to 4 GHz will be up to the task.

Temptation to give in to the decline and D1P rising... must resist....

 

[Zewp]

I know my CPU is up to scratch. What worries me is my old HD7850. Thing is getting fucking old. I ran Rome 2 maxed out so hopefully this is not much higher.

 

[Makabb]

Temptation to give in to the decline and D1P rising... must resist....

I'm watching moar vids and I have to say i never seen such good AI in total war stock games,,, only in modded ones.

The AI is actualy fighting and not standing in one place waiting for you.

 

[Makabb]

I see it's not only me, the reviews also say 'massive AI improvements'.


First total war to be actualy playable?! can it be ?

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

It's warscape. All you niggas are dreaming, especially you, Makabb. It's a piece of shit.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Looking forward to erasing some grudges with extreme prejudice.

As I said previously, this entry in the TW line-up won't change the world; it will be entertaining for a while. And that's all I ask of $60AUD.

 

[Blaine]

entertaining

Whoa there, what kind of an asshole would think that games are supposed to be entertaining, let alone fun?

If it doesn't meet the arbitrary criteria which differ from person to person, it's literally unplayable.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Wasn't Rome 2 lesson enough for yous? This is some Stockholm syndrome shit.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I'll let one slide, considering I've spent good time (and been entertained) with every other title CA have released in the series.

 

[Blaine]

Yeah, TW is imperfect. Whatever. The AI's not smart enough, the campaign mechanics aren't good enough, Rome 2 hurt my potato's feelings, yadda yadda yadda.

The only "perfect" strategy game I have ever played, other than chess or go I suppose, is SMAC. Even SMAC has its imperfections, because holy cow, does it bog down in the late game (very common for games of its kind).

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

Not a review, but samples from the soundtrack:

Wow, that's about as generic as it gets. The fuckers ought to have dragged Mark Knight out from whichever opium den he now inhabits and force him to make a proper soundtrack but nooooooo... Sigh. Whatever. Guess I can always play the dark omen and shadow of the horned rat sound tracks in the background.

 

[Disgruntled]

Recently got myself hyped for this despite knowing better. Having watched a few videos and reviews, im now back on the downer knowing just how much they've cut down in campaign features. Looks like streamlining for the casuals and cost cutting. And there isnt really enough in faction flavor to make up for it from what ive seen.

Still, ill be playing cause I have to try TW in a fantasy setting. It would be nice if they put some strategy elements back in with patches, but im afraid it'll just be the usual dlc again.

 

[not an artichoke]

This will be the first TW I don't buy shortly after release. I've finally learned my lesson.

I don't expect TW games to be perfect, but I expect a strategy layer that is more than an afterthought with one or two gimmicks that serve only to set the scene for tactical battles. If the strategy layer is a hamster wheel, there's little reason to care about the results of tactical battles.