Total War: Warhammer II
Fantasy battles meet battle fantasy once more
GAMING’S GREATEST MERGER throws up another installment, but any worries about TotalWar moving to a CallofDuty- like release schedule are unfounded. As the second part of a trilogy that will eventually join up into one ubergame, WarhammerII takes everything about the first game, and subjects it to an upgrade and polish.
Selecting “Desynchronize animations” in Rome:TotalWar used to cause a graphics card to develop heatstroke, but these days the engine is well enough optimized that last-gen cards should handle the game without a problem. That’s not to suggest there’s a lack of incidental animations or effects, as your tiny magicians and mounted knights crackle with lightning and swish their tails in a constant flurry of movement.
On the surface, little has changed. Total War is still a mixture of a strategic map game—in which you capture settlements and resources, recruit heroes, build armies, and sally forth to find other armies to get in a scrap with—and a tactical one, in which you take direct control of these regiments and heroes. Winning gains you experience and sometimes equipment for your hero, especially if you manage to take out an enemy lord, while losing sees your army either destroyed or reduced to a shadow of its former self, and your ambitions thwarted.
Beneath the surface, though, something is scuttling. The big draw is the ability to play as the Skaven, hordes of ornery technorodents, who huff warpstone like it’s paint thinner, and eat their captives. They’re lots of fun. There’s nothing like smashing into massed elven archers with a bunch of thuggish Rat Ogres, while your plague catapults pepper them with glowing green shots from afar. Reinforcements literally pour out of holes wherever the Skaven general chooses, right next to the cannons slaughtering your infantry, for example. ON TO A GOOD THINGY? This fits in with the game’s structure, which is a race. There is a powerful thingy on the High Elves’ island, and it’s up to you to control that thingy before any other faction can. All this makes a mockery of the game’s diplomacy system, as no group is going to honor a non-aggression pact when you’re competing for the thingy, and makes the late game one of constant harrying from the remains of other races, as you complete rituals and defend settlements.
Ah yes, those other races. There’s a couple flavors of elf, including the dangerously wicked Dark Elves, whose slave-based economy seems like a great way to get rich, and break out the fancy war units, until you realize all those slaves might not be too happy about their situation. You can rise above it all as the haughty High Elves, or as the levitating Lizardmen. If you’ve got the first Total War: War hammer, you can use any of its races, too, and march across the Warhammer world’s equivalent of the Americas as Dwarfs or the Empire.
Everything looks sharp, even zoomed right in, and the backdrops—all waterfalls and jungles—have had a new coat of paint. Freed from the need to provide a history lesson with every installment, TotalWar has reached new heights. And all it took was some tabletop inspiration.
Total War: Warhammer II
COGENT Total War at its best; huge fantasy battles and sieges.
RODENT Complex interface; civil unrest and wandering armies can be annoying.
RECOMMENDED SPECS 3.2GHz Core i54570; 8GB RAM; GeForce GTX 770 4GB or AMD R9 290X 4GB.
£60, www.totalwar.com, ESRB: T