Recent reviews by Darkk

Total War: WARHAMMER III is a good game but i cannot recommend it in good consciousness.

This is an issue of price, after buying the game for 60e you get 2 normal fractions (Kislev and Grand Cathay) and 6 demonic ones (4 Demon gods and 2 fractions that are combination of the great 4). To play most of the fractions you need to own 2 previous games (both of which cost 60e) and there still remain multiple fractions which are not playable unless you buy their specific DLC which costs +-20e. Even after buying ""just"" the 3 games and having access to most of the fractions, you can only start as about a 1/3 of the subfractions led by their specific heroes and you WILL be missing a good portion of units because they come in a separate dlc. Without all or at least most of these products, this game feels quite barren and you notice the AI of the same fractions have a lot of units , lord types etc. that you simply do not have. To have this game feature complete you will spend 180e for the base games and 290,27e for dlcs ===> 470e in total. That is a ridiculous amount for any game with a development cycle below 47 years and appropriate level of scale, complexity and polish.

+ Pluses

+The diversity of the game world, units and multiple playstyles is to be praised- there is an enourmous ammount of unit models and a large ammount of maps that differ from eachother with their assets depending on where you are on the game world.

+The World map size is Huge

+The amount of specific animations and general eye-candy is small, but when present is good looking

+Magic is very limited and is only reduced to stat- buffs and debuffs , about 4 kinds of damage spells and creating temporary units which last a few seconds on the battlefield, but it is tastefully implemented and fits into both the game world and gameplay

+Specific fractions have their own quirks and mechanics, but they are mostly shallow in most cases


-The Minuses

-This game is technically speaking below the level of arguably the peak of this series (In My Humble Opinion- Total war - Shogun 2). The visuals are about the same as 2010 games with some improvements. (It uses the same engine (with tweaks) as total war Empire... which RELEASED in 2009)

-No naval combat

-Melee combat of units looks laughable upon inspection most of the time (to be fair the only game that solved this issue was Total war - Shogun 2 to some extent)

-The scale of battles has not improved since Medieval 2 with the biggest armies having 20 (19 without leader) companies having 200 soldiers or less per company. With reinforcement the biggest battle possible is 3*20 vs 3*20 which is VERY rare because game economy is not focused this way (it is possible to force this with playstyle, but you will be limited to the cheapest 5 types of units in most fractions most of the time). This game makes it feel even worse, since a lot of focus is on bigger units and heroes which are powerful so they ocupy 1 company on their own, making some armies as small as 20 soldiers when composed only of those units.

-Modding has been HEAVILY restricted on every game on this engine including this one.

-Warhammer Fantasy map is not completed (despite its huge size) parts are still missing



In Summary:
Despite huge scale of the game world and high diversity of units and maps, i do not recommend this game to potential new players. I will continue buying parts of this game but it has broken all of my good will towards Creative Assembly and i will never buy another Total War game, unless major changes in all of the listed aspects and more innovation occurs.

I REALLY want to recommend this, but it wouldn't be honest, base game for 50e is basically just the barren engine of the game and this game is definitely not worth 163 euros with the actual content (dont worry, they will add on 300e more in dlcs).

Allright, you WIN, i dont want Generals and 1/4 of my unit roster to be locked for Grand Cathay, you have succesfully extorted me for another 20e (i dont want to wait another 3 years for it to fall to 10e) in total about 200e for this game and i am still missing a lot of content... You will also propably get even more from me so that i can have this game feature complete, but i am NOT going to buy anything new you release ever again. I have been playing TWs since Rome 1 but this "Paradox" pricing model has broken my will to support you. Congratulations...

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