Successful Total War Name Change: Total War: Warhammer

The great and terrible Total War series of strategies has never allowed any foolishness. If you’re going to have epic large-scale battles between mighty armies, then let those armies be about the great history of human meat grinders, not about random elves and orcs of the thirtieth kingdom. They will make a mess without any TW projects.

The problem is that the same old cabbage soup will eventually get boring, and the bright historical episodes will come to an end. How many fragmented Europes and samurai Japans are there in the world? Besides, the boy has grown up enough to be given something to play with.

But, once again, if we’re going to play, let it be something tough. Like the classic old-school setting of Warhammer.

Total War: Warhammer suddenly does not allow the conquering soul to unfold. Humans want to rule only humans, orcs – orcs, and so on. Even the local vampires somehow repaint all the blood banks they have appropriated into necropolises. It is not possible to be a full-fledged Sauron, subjugating everyone and everything, in TWW; in the case of very border cases, your troops will either simply plunder the settlement of another race, leveling a virgin construction site and a crowd of disgruntled victims for the enemy lord, or they will also mow down the local inhabitants. Well, so that it is fun and costly to rebuild the town.

With such an unusual arrangement for fantasy strategies, you quickly get used to it, you just need to realize that the game will not give you enough resources to build an empire over which the sun never sets. At least not in the first few hundred turns. Therefore, the mountainous goods with a serious dwarven pedigree will mainly clash with the green-skinned mountain evil, and the valley human imperial goods will accordingly clash with the valley vampire evil (well, and, as is customary for us humans, among themselves). And plus, at a certain turn, the whole honest brotherhood will greet the forces of Chaos.

You can rule each of the five aforementioned factions. It is in the differences between the factions that the iconic “Warhammer” is most vividly manifested in the new Total War. Everyone likes to fight, but, for example, orcs will perish without constant brawls, they will decline and most likely disappear, while the Empire can maneuver between warring lords for a long time, accumulating strength. And so on.

My personal favorites are gnomes. Firstly, they hardly fight among themselves, which greatly shortens the overall front line, and secondly, the local clans each keep a cheerful notebook and collect all their grievances there. Did Lord Vasya beat your reconnaissance squad? Wonderful, now Vasya is declared a vendetta, and nothing can cancel it. A decisive victory over Vasya fits into the strategic tasks, the fulfillment of which the clan will approach a bright future and reward themselves with additional perks. No burned mine and no slain hero will go unavenged!

Thematic Warhammer scenarios are perhaps the main attraction of the game. The main and only one. It’s even surprising how little the heart of the strategy about endless feudal fragmentation was touched by orcs with demons. I confess honestly – I, out of cowardice, expected that neutral caves with gargoyles and bays with mermaids would appear on the map from time to time. In armor with giant shoulder pads. But no, such is our long-divided world. The vampire rot with the madness of chaos will appear (in percentages, of course), but wandering giants with artifacts under their arms – no.

But now glorious epic real-time battles can be sweetened with a fireball or two. Isn’t that what we always dreamed of? Didn’t dream? Well, again, go play as gnomes, they are down-to-earth comrades, they don’t allow nonsense.

And yes, beautiful pompous screenshots of battles, taken from unplayable angles with the arrival of animated figures from Warhammer, bloom with a new vibrant color. Here you have giants attacking, and riders on griffins, and everything.

However, every first Total War veteran knows that the main thing is maneuvers, and maneuvers on the strategic map. To great happiness, TW:W not only offers seriously different paths to success, but these paths also have a habit of changing from game to game. Of course, the global goals will always be the same; all the happiness will be in the details. Despite the concrete map and victory conditions, two starting moves pass identically, and then all sorts of unexpected details begin. Sometimes loyal allies in the previous glorious defeat will reconsider their diplomatic priorities after the next start, and suddenly random orcs will appear near the capital.

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Total War has finally allowed itself to add maneuvers in the name of Assassins Creed to the permanence of FIFA, and that’s great. We have enough intricate maps of fantasy kingdoms and other alternative history worlds in our cultural reserves. The main thing is that the formula doesn’t get stale.

It would be great if the developers overcame their commercial ambitions and stopped selling essentially serial, episodic updates at the price of full-fledged sequels. But: firstly, there are practically no complaints about the quality of the product itself (except that the engine could have been slightly optimized), and secondly, TW is currently almost the only strategic giant that comes out more often than once every five years. Caesar can do it. The screenshots were taken from the Steamcommunity.com gallery.