Total War: WarHammer...
You might think you know rock, paper, scissors, but Jody Macgregor says this is a game where paper can beat scissors, so long as there’s enough of it.
Total War comes to the WarHammer universe, well, it hadn’t really ever left but the ultra-realistic gaming strategy series takes a pop at the fantasy world of orcs and elves.
The Warhammer world is a fantasy setting, loosely based on Renaissance Europe, but with the fiction of JRR Tolkien funnelled into it, while copies of 2000AD covers are scattered on top. It’s a mish-mash of everything someone at Games Workshop ever thought was cool, and it’s both familiar and really weird.
This is a ground-up alteration of the TotalWar formula, to make it suit the fantasy setting of the Old World. That formula comes in two halves. The first is a turn-based grand campaign about marching armies across a map, and managing provinces through construction, research and taxation. The second happens when those armies meet and drop into a real-time – though pausable – battle.
In previous TotalWar games, the factions played in a relatively similar way, but not any more. For instance, the Greenskins have a meter measuring each army’s Fightiness. Win battles, and it rises. Lose or squat in your hovels like a coward, and it drops. Dwarfs, on the other hand, have to keep track of grudges. They never forget a slight, carefully noting each in a massive book of bitterness.
All these differences dramatically affect the way you play. As the Greenskins, you fight just to keep armies Fighty, and raid neighbours without regard. It’s not the kind of game where replaying as a different side means ‘focusing slightly more on missile weapons’. Each faction is almost a different game.
There’s variance between factions in both the turn-based campaign game and the real-time battles. Dwarfs don’t have wizards but are blessed with plenty of artillery. Vampire Counts don’t have missile units – for them, it’s all about lurching forward, targeting specific enemies with flying units and Black Knights, while the skeletons and zombies shamble up to fill the gaps. The Greenskins have a bit of everything, but can be hard to control.
It’s possible to pull off amazing things even in the morass, though it helps to abuse the slow-motion button and give orders while paused, as you can in single-player mode. You can overcome odds that the auto-resolve option for battles isn’t able to.
At the start of a campaign, you choose which of two Legendary Lords will lead your faction – iconic Warhammer characters like Emperor Karl Franz and High Wizard Balthasar Gelt – with the other becoming available during the campaign.
Because quests are bespoke little stories separate from the campaign – you use your regular army but opponents are conjured up on the spot, rather than drawn from existing enemies – there’s a risk of them seeming inconsequential. But their unique nature, and the few paragraphs of narrative that come with quests, are reward enough that you may waste too much effort chasing them.
There are unique tech trees to research, buildings to construct, public order to maintain, and diplomacy to tinker with. Even the Greenskin tribes engage in limited diplomacy – though they don’t make trade agreements, they do negotiate alliances with each other, and sometimes the Dwarfs tempt them with gold to buy peace.
One of the most Warhammer- ish things about it is Chaos. After 20 turns, warnings appear: Chaos gathers in The North. It’s another 50 turns before we notice their effects, a spreading corruption like the undead’s. It’s past turn 100 before we engage with them, but by then The Northern Old World is in ruins, and Archaon The Everchosen leads a doomstack right towards us.
The best TotalWar games are the most focused, whether on a single nation or a single general. Warhammer takes in a continent but tells one story, and it’s potent because of that.