PC GAMER (US)

Total War: War hammer 2

Chaos in the New World

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he Creative Assembly’s definitive take on Warhammer Fantasy returns with part two of its planned trilogy, which includes bondage pirates, dinosaurs riding dinosaurs, and a bold new plan to fix Total War’s ‘endgame fatigue’.

TWarhammer Fantasy and Total War always seemed like a perfect match, so much so that every Total War game ever made has a Warhammer mod. Last year’s TotalWar:Warhammer was the culminatio­n of geek fantasies everywhere. The Creative Assembly wants its trilogy to cover every part of Games Workshop’s beloved low fantasy world, and the setting this time around is the New World, the Americas to the original game’s fantasy Europe—at least if America had an island full of snobby Elves living off the coast. The campaign set on this map is entirely new, and features some of Games Workshop’s more characterf­ul races, fighting for control of a magical contraptio­n known as the Great Vortex.

The Vortex is The Creative Assembly’s solution to a persistent problem for Total War: According to the developer’s metrics, most people don’t actually finish a game. Game director Ian Roxburgh says they tend to reach a point where they’re dominating and think, “OK, I own half the world and I’ve won the game, I’ll just start a new campaign.” It’s not the first strategy developer to run into this problem— Paradox’s Stellaris attempted its own solution last year by introducin­g an off-map crisis. CA is approachin­g it by centering victory conditions not on territory, but on the Vortex.

The Vortex was built by the Elves to drain Chaos (Warhammer’s persistent evil force of magic) from the world, which is obviously a good thing to some people,

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