Daemons are invading your lands, capturing settlements, outposts and forts. They plan on pushing your people back and killing your god to please their masters. Do you turn tail and run or stand your ground, build your armies and meet them head-on in the battlefields? Total War: Warhammer 3 is the epic conclusion to the massive Total War: Warhammer trilogy. Developed by Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive, and published by Sega and Feral Interactive, this turn-based strategy, and real-time tactical video game is set to release on the 17th of February and is available on PC.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is set in Game Workshop’s fictional Warhammer Universe. Warhammer 3 provides 7 playable factions including 2 mortal realms factions, the Grand Cathay and Kislev, 4 factions based on the Chaos Gods, being Nurgle, Khorne, Slaanesh, and Tzeentch, and the Daemons of Chaos themselves. People who pre-order the game will be gifted a 7th faction the Ogre Kingdom. Each faction has its own campaign and each campaign offers a totally different way to play the game.

With the Daemons of Chaos faction, you can fully customize the look of your own Lord. While proceeding through the campaign, you will devote your success’ and offer sacrifices to the Chaos Gods. Doing this will grant your Daemonic Prince gifts from the Gods themselves, ie. body parts, and weapons sent up from Hell itself. Each body part and weapon has buffs and is also modeled after the God of Chaos that gifted them. With the game having 8 different campaigns, they all basically had the same objective, and that was to acquire the Bear God Ursun, who has been imprisoned in the Chaos Realm, although each faction’s end goal was different. Some factions wanted to save the God, others wanted to offer Ursun as a sacrifice to restore their glory, whereas one faction in particular just wanted to eat the Bear God.

Being brand new to the game and the series, I decided to play the Kislev campaign, a campaign designed for new players to the genre and for returning veterans who wouldn’t mind a refresher. Although this campaign was designed for new players, I found the tutorial didn’t explain enough. I found myself attempting to move my lord on the campaign map although my movement had been used up for that turn. If the game had explained that there was limited movement per unit per turn, it would have saved a lot of frustration and confusion.

The battle tutorials, however, were very explanatory with the game running you through a scripted mock battle and explaining the troops’ strengths and weaknesses. Although the campaign map tutorial was extremely vague, I worked the controls and mechanics out rather quickly.

As mentioned earlier the game has two main game styles; turn-based strategy, and real-time tactics. The campaign map features the turn-based strategy where you ‘in-turn’ move your armies, conquer, or lay siege to forts and settlements, train troops, and upgrade buildings in said settlements. The battles, if you choose to fight them yourself and not use the auto-resolve, feature the real-time tactics, where pre-fight you can strategically prepare and layout your army formations, and even hide troops in thick forests, however, the AI you are facing has no care for hidden troops and will send there own troops straight towards your ‘hidden’ units, making this mechanic only really feasible in online battles.

Players can play either campaign, LAN Multiplayer, Online Multiplayer, Online Co-op, LAN Co-op, and vs AI. These multiplayer battles feature a metric f**k-tonne of maps, including land, subterranean, siege, settlement, survival, ambush, and chokepoint types. Each category features at least 15 maps where some feature more than 50!

Warhammer 3 ran flawlessly and I encountered no game-breaking or annoying bugs. Running a 3070TI, 5900X, and 32GB RAM, I was able to run the game on ultra 1440P with 4 full armies going head to head and holding a solid FPS. With so much that was going on during the battles, I was surprised, with the amount of destruction and devastation that was happening with Daemonic Lords fighting Ogre Kings, while all the additional troops were engaged in their own little melees and receiving missile bombardment from afar.

I was expecting it to run like a hot mess. Having two maxed-out armies on ultra at 1440p averaged 50FPS. Dropping down to 1080P for both maxed-out armies saw a solid 60FPS with no drops, and pitting 4 maxed armies against each other at 1080P made no difference either. The game was locked at 60FPS and switching V-SYNC on or off made no difference.

With so much happening in the battles, trying to achieve more frames would probably be more of a hindrance, and being an RTS, more than 60 isn’t really needed. The visuals were stunning, whether it be watching a Daemonic Prince going head to head against a Terracotta Sentinal, watching Skullcannons proceed to do drifties into a collection of melee troops, or watching a Lord proceed to wipe out and knock back a group of ground units singlehandedly, each animation was smooth and focused the raw power of each unit without making them look overpowered or underpowered. As Thanos states “Perfectly balanced, as all things should be”.

The battle map designs and campaign maps were stunning, although the open land battle maps were extremely open and empty, I soon filled them with slain corpses and when the battles started I was too focused on smiting the Chaos Armies to really care what the open maps featured, as long as I was victorious, that was all that mattered. The siege and settlement battles offered more possibilities, with multiple varying paths and chokepoints featuring elevation advantages and flanking routes fully bought out the War strategist in me. I found the Siege and Settlement battles to be the most intense and invigorating.

When the battles start, the sounding of the war trumpets made the adrenaline flow, coupled with the Lords and troops screaming and making their battle cries. The voice acting was unflawed and held a lot of emotion during the crucial moments, unless it was the Daemons or Ogres, they were just angry all the time, which is normal. The human civilizations, however, had the most diverse voice acting, which added to the mood and immersion of their campaigns.

All in all, I quickly became hooked and enveloped while playing the campaigns. Before I knew it, I had easily spent 3-5 hours per session. The game flowed extremely well and my thirst for domination overtook my lust for campaign fulfillment. As a new player to these titles and with a vague tutorial, I still picked up the mechanics very quickly and before the first keep, I knew what to do. To anyone looking into Warhammer 3, whether you be new to the franchise or a returning veteran, this game is a must! Throughout my time playing, I would easily say it is high on the list of games I’ve played within 2021-2022.

Written by: Bigfoot