Total War: Warhammer 3 is the newest Total War game and the third entry in the acclaimed Total Warhammer series. The series takes a deep dive into the world of Warhammer Fantasy, bringing fan favorite characters to life with impressive 3d graphics. As someone who’s played over a thousand hours in each installment of the Total Warhammer series, I believe I can give a fair review of the latest entry in the series.
What Total Warhammer 3 Does for Warhammer Fantasy
The Total War: Warhammer (or, as it should have been called, Total Warhammer) series is Creative Assembly’s revival of the once long-forgotten Warhammer Fantasy setting. Warhammer Fantasy was Games Workshop’s wargaming line way back in 1983. The setting was probably more popular for its lore than it’s models, with a ton of books being written for the setting, my personal favorite of which being the Son of Aenarion trilogy. Warhammer Fantasy was eventually replaced by Age of Sigmar; While AoS has some great models, the canonical retcon or world-reset of the Warhammer Fantasy settings rich lore had some people peeved.
CA brought the setting back with Total War: Warhammer, one of a few games renewing interest in the setting after years of silence. The sudden resurgence of Warhammer Fantasy fans thanks games like Total Warhammer and Vermintide took a lot of people by surprise, but interest in the setting has since skyrocketed so much that Games Workshop has announced a return to the Warhammer Fantasy minis line.
Mixing the Total War series with Warhammer was a no-brainer. CA’s popular war and conquest game series encapsulates the massive scale of war better than any other, and the transition to a fantasy war setting was inevitable, and it’s safe to say there is no better one than Warhammer. CA easily could have chosen Age of Sigmar, which has a lot more art material available for their design team to reference, but instead they chose the classic Warhammer Fantasy, which came with a lack of reference material and thus a lot of freedom.
A consequence of this choice was that when it came time to make Total Warhammer III, CA was tasked with designing a brand new faction from the ground up. Even with two games of reimagining and expanding on existing factions in the Warhammer world under their belt, Creative Assembly had yet to face a task so gargantuan. To their credit, they knocked it out of the park.
CA worked closely with members of Games Workshop to design Cathay and all of the new units in Warhammer III. Their decision to work with GW and the freedom GW gave them with their source material created an absolutely fantastic expansion on a faction that desperately needed it; Cathay is amazingly cool, beautifully designed, and thematically interesting.
Every faction in Warhammer III is just as visually and thematically interesting. CA knocked the ball out of the park with design, making each faction stand out from each other and managing to be just as interesting to play. This can make choosing which faction to play on a new game a little hard, and for that I give the game a ton of praise.
Total Warhammer 3’s Campaign Mechanics and Gameplay
Warhammer III does a fantastic job of giving each faction it’s own unique campaign mechanics. Be it Kislev’s devotion or Chaos Undivided’s favor generation, each faction has something else to learn when you boot it up for the first time. Aside from some shared campaign objectives, no two games played with different factions should feel the same.
It’s in those shared campaign mechanics where Warhammer III begins to show some flaws. Winning a Warhammer 3 campaign requires gathering souls from the champions of all four chaos gods, which is done by traversing rifts in the materium that open up several times during a campaign. Between rift openings, your main focus is conquering the map and building up your forces.
Unfortunately, many aspects of Warhammer III’s campaign incentivize building tall, not wide. This means that expansion, the core gameplay element in any Total War game, becomes less lucrative and even sort of boring over time. Once you have your core recruitment buildings constructed, the only real purpose in expansion is to make more money or build recruitment price reduction buildings, and the game throws so much money at you by default that you shouldn’t really find yourself wanting for either.
This and the punishing attrition and fighting in the Chaos Realms can lead to games where the best thing to do is to sit around and wait for a rift to open. This isn’t exactly engaging gameplay, with rifts taking somewhere between 20 and 100 turns to spawn — I don’t know the exact math here, that’s just how it feels.
Warhammer III is a game that could really use the Mortal Empires map. All of the new factions are super interesting and really fun to play as, but the actual unique campaign kind of limits the enjoyment of each one. It’ll be interesting to see how factions like Chaos Undivided play on the world map, and I wonder what will become of our boy Archon when the superior Demon Prince shows up on his doorstep.
Total Warhammer 3’s New Gameplay Systems
Total Warhammer III added some new gameplay systems in addition to some much-needed quality of life improvements. Most notably, sieges have been completely revamped in a way that expands on the gameplay both on the campaign map and in the siege itself. While I greatly appreciate the new siege mechanics, they often don’t feel super impactful to the outcome of my sieges (be I attacking or defending), and I feel like even more expansions on this system would be great for the game.
The new wave defense game mode makes use of the same mechanics as the new sieges, and arguably does it much better. Barriers and towers still feel kind of lackluster in this game mode, but the ability to upgrade and reinforce your armies is a really cool feature that I enjoy making use of. However, it almost feels too easy to win one of these unique battles with the right upgrades and reinforcement — But I might have just been abusing Khorne infantry.
The outpost system greatly incentivizes making alliances, with the ability to recruit another faction’s troops to your army being a super interesting and much-appreciated addition to diplomacy. Access to powerful units is a great incentive for making friends, and the diplomacy-related currency makes helping your allies much more lucrative.
Conclusion
If you’re on the fence about Total Warhammer III, I recommend waiting for the full map to release. Many problems this game has can be solved by simply including the full game’s map and objectives. Future balance updates will no doubt solve some of the tall-building incentives and nerf certain factions snowballing too hard; I have a lot of confidence for this game’s future, and will continue playing it myself in the meantime.
The Final Word
It has some flaws in its core gameplay loop that can make long-drawn-out campaigns feel a little tedious, and I find myself starting more new games than I do finishing them. However, what this game does for the Total Warhammer series makes it undeniably the best of the three, and the factions available to play are by far my favorite in the franchise.
Our Total War: Warhammer III review was written based on the PC version of the game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website!
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