As I unleashed a slavering horde of savage orcs on a hapless, dwarfen artillery crew or watched my brave Empire pikemen swarmed by killer bats and legions of the dead in Total War: Warhammer

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“ Humans get some of the best, heavy-hitting wizards in the Old World.

Every IGN Total War Review Ever 20 IMAGES

“ My faction embodied the creeping, oncoming dread waiting at the end of a horror movie.

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“ Heroes will almost always end up front and center, where the fighting is thickest.

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“ The arrival of the hordes of Chaos on the scene is a major turning point that transforms the scenario.

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By casting off the shackles of history, Total War: Warhammer eliminates a problem that has existed in the last couple iterations of the series: overly similar factions. During the eras of Rome II and Attila, you could assume that almost every unit was going to fall into a few categories: guy with a sharp object, guy with a longer sharp object, guy with some kind of missile weapon, and guy with a sharp object on a horse. The moment you introduce fantastical characters like lumbering giants, soaring pegasus knights, fireball-flinging wizards, and ancient vampires who can take on entire formations of infantry single-handed, it unleashes a bloodsoaked bounty in terms of army differentiation, unit diversity, and new tactics that makes Warhammer’s dark fantasy feel like a more natural fit for the Total War series than the real-world past ever was.These fantasy units and the factions they are bound to are the stars of the show. Lumbering “monstrous infantry” like trolls and crypt horrors add a new tier of melee fighters to the battlefield and break up the bow/spear/sword triangle. Sorcerers and melee heroes allow you to pour offensive resources to trouble spots in a scrum precisely and decisively. The true big bads like giants and vampiric vargheists can be the spearhead on or the exclamation point at the end of a successful charge, and the havoc they cause via over-the-top, almost superheroic attack animations demands gleeful close-ups. That’s something that was too often missing from Rome 2 and Attila, in which I usually felt obligated to play zoomed out for better tactical control. All the while, flyers soar into the equation and force you to question the concept of a “safe” front line, a welcome new dimension to the struggle for map control.Greenskins, my personal favorite, are simply a blast to command on the strategic map. Each army having a “fightiness” value based on how much havoc they’ve caused recently; low fightiness leads to attrition and infighting, but max it out and you’ll spawn a second, AI-controlled follower army called a WAAAGH! which will join in your battles and allow you to stomp across the map, overwhelming defenders with superior numbers. It’s nirvana on those days when I didn’t feel like worrying about settlements, unrest, or unit composition - I just wanted to run over some dumb humies in a one-sided slaughter, making latrines of their pretentious civilizations. This destructive power is appropriately balanced out by the total inability of the Greenskins to maintain defensive armies. Any stack that stops fighting (and winning) for more than a handful of turns is bound to collapse in on itself.While each of these factions are quite entertaining and different, they are few in number and their starting positions are fixed. By the time I’d played about 100 turns of each, I was struck by the feeling that I’d seen most of what the campaign had to offer in a relatively short time for a Total War game. I’m used to having a good dozen or so starting scenarios and minor spins on a few common themes to play with. In Warhammer, though, the only option is to start the campaign as a different Legendary Lord – your faction’s uber leader, of which each has a choice of two – which does not feel like a substantially different experience. For example, the Empire’s political figurehead, Karl Franz, grants an extra five percent campaign movement range and lowers upkeep costs for heavy infantry and cavalry by 10 percent. His counterpart, the sorcerous Balthasar Gelt, allows you to recruit one additional wizard and reduces the upkeep cost of wizard heroes. The bonuses aren’t negligible, but they didn’t really change how I played the faction or how the flow of the campaign felt.The hero formula wavers when it comes to the quest system. The scripted battles that I did get to see were fun and well-produced, with multiple phases of enemy spawns, story twists, and great voice acting. An early Empire quest tasked me with ambushing a group of rebels who were meeting up to plot my downfall at a clearing. My units were hidden in the forest nearby, and I was given the option of ambushing the smaller delegation right away before engaging the rest of the conclave in a pitched battle, or waiting for the entire rebel host to assemble before springing the trap. The in-battle storytelling really brought the characters to life and gave them a sense of place, which I found myself craving more of later on.The hitch is that I didn’t get to see many of these quests. Most of the later ones expect you to march your best general and his entire army to some far-flung corner of the map, possibly a dozen turns round-trip, which I really couldn’t afford to do unless my borders were completely unthreatened. That didn’t happen often, and I felt like I was missing out on a major feature as a result.But the arrival of Chaos always seems to come a bit too quickly, when poor ol’ Karl Franz is still trying to bring wayward elector counts in line and tech up to his best units. It felt like the factions forced to take the brunt of the Chaos invasion didn’t really have time to prepare a spirited defense, whereas the more secluded Dwarfs in their mountain holds and the Greenskins rampaging across the far South had plenty of extra turns to unify their people, fortify their frontiers, and get their unit compositions just right. The fact that I was so quickly overrun in my Empire campaign isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I enjoyed the challenge, and a force like Chaos shouldn’t be trivialized to make the campaign more winnable. But I would have at least liked to have had time to bring humanity together, and be waiting for our doom to come on the battlements instead of watching a fractured realm get taken apart piece by piece while I was still trying to build the quality armies I actually wanted to go to war with. In general, the initial phase of exploring and interacting with the world, completing quests, and consolidating your power over the minor factions of your own race could definitely use an extra 20 turns or so of breathing room.The few multiplayer matches I participated in were a lot of fun, and unlock a fifth playable faction, the Arthurian knights of Bretonnia - albeit with a limited roster. As a long-time Total War multiplayer combatant, I found that the new unit types really invalidated a lot of the go-to tactics that have become the metagame in competitive Shogun 2, Rome 2, and Attila. It’s a wild frontier out there, filled with goblins and steam tanks and undead witches, and it’s really refreshing to see the kinds of creative, asymmetrical army compositions that come from exploring the possibilities head-to-head. In one match, I made use of almost exclusively flying units to win a city assault with no artillery or siege towers whatsoever. In another, what I thought was an impenetrable line of dwarfen heavy infantry was outdone by a swarm of bats and some kind of blood vortex thing cast by my vampire opponent. Due to the diversity of the army lists and available battlefield spells, it’s a much more difficult ecosystem to fully get your head around and develop clearly optimal strategies for.