Total War: Warhammer Review

Total War: Warhammer is a turn-based strategy game with real-time tactical battles set in the Warhammer Fantasy Battles universe.

What is Great about this game:

- The real-time tactical battles are beautiful and terribly satisfying to play while the "one-more-turn" compulsion of the turn-based strategic game is as strong as in any Total War game in recent memory
- Giving the units more active abilities (while slightly micro-heavy) makes the tactical battles much more engrossing and compelling.  There is more a sense of you needing to be there to act rather than just watching the armies fight each other
- The new customization and upgrade options for your lords and heroes add an almost RPG-like element to the game that is fantastic
- Heroes (Agents from previous Total War games) can now integrate into your army and fight as a unit alongside your regular army
- The fantasy Warhammer setting allows for the developers to free themselves somewhat from the binds of historical fact
- The Steam workshop modding support provides key customization options to make the game play as you want it to without issue
- The Warhammer universe is an excellent backdrop for a Total War game, and they come together brilliantly
- The game was so impactful on me that I went out and bought my first GW miniature (Mannfred Von Carstein)

What is Good about this game:

- There is a game that the developers could make derived from this game where you build up a party of only (a few) heroes and go through the country-side taking on and defeating standard Total War (20+ unit) armies.  I would buy that game and play a lot of that game.  That isn't really important to the review of this game except to say that that is how good the new lord and hero RPG elements are
- Good use of Steam features including cloud saves, trading cards, etc

What could be improved in this game:

- The new hero and lord abilities - while great - can be a little micro-management heavy as you will spend a significant time in the battles - especially in large battles - just searching for the next hero/lord ability to pop.  If a few more of them had been passive abilities - especially for heavy magic users - that probably wouldn't have been a terrible thing
- The city management options are quite sparse and relatively uninteresting.  Other than a main couple of core provinces that produce units, most of your additional cities will upgrade almost identically
- I don't like the mixture of fantasy units and gunpowder units

Conclusion:

At this point, I think that Steam workshop support for Total War games is almost a requirement - not because the games are bad by themselves, but because such effortless modding gives these games entirely new life and the freedom to play them as you wish, so this review takes that reality into account.

I am honestly shocked by so many bad reviews for this game.  This is one of the exceedingly rare times when I think the professional reviewers were more accurate than the gaming public.  The game isn't perfect by itself, but any modest tweaks to the game can be made via the copious mods available in the workshop, so unless you just can't stand a fantasy setting for a Total War game, this is clearly one of the best playing Total War games in years.  Moreover, its innovation in the RPG-like lord and hero skill upgrade paths to me feels like an essential innovation for all future Total War games.

10.0 / 10.0