They’ve had three years and one additional game ( Attila) to work on the engine, but that work has paid off: it almost never got in the way of my enjoying the game, and for a Total War game that’s high praise indeed.
I haven’t had a single crash, framerates are smooth even with thousands of men on the screen at once, both the strategic and battle map AI works like a charm and is actually threatening (to be fair the strategic map AI gets a lot of help, but I’ll talk about that later), and they’ve even managed to cage the eternal bugbear that’s plagued every Total War since the original Rome: no longer do you have to have a book handy for when you hit the “End Turn” button, as the AI factions whip through their turns in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of minutes. Given that, I was somewhat astounded to discover that Total Warhammer is probably the most stable Total War game I have played. It was a technical and mechanical mess from start to finish and for the most part didn’t even qualify as a fully functioning game on launch. Mostly, anyway.įirst let’s dispense with the elephant in the room that tends to start trumpeting mournfully when it comes to modern Total War games: Rome 2 was an absolute disaster and fully deserved the kicking it got three years ago. It is possible to do Warhammer with Total War-esque mechanics and fail, so the Creative Assembly’s job is doubly difficult: not only do they have to get the gameplay right, but they also have to redeem themselves after the fuckup of Rome 2 by releasing it in a state that’s playable at launch.Īfter 25 hours with Total War: Warhammer, I am pleased to report they’ve succeeded on both counts. What a lot of people forget, though, is that it’s been tried before, and the main reason nobody really remembers Mark of Chaos (apart from the perfect intro) is because it wasn’t very good. And for good reason since the tabletop version of Warhammer involves models grouped into units precisely as Total War’s are, and also has most of the same core mechanics like unit type counters, flank attacks and morale it seems like it’s practically a 1:1 fit that would be very hard to screw up. I think the idea of transplanting the Total War mechanics into Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy universe has been around almost exactly as long as Total War itself has.