Recent reviews by Midnight Piper

Amazing game - solid combat, better combat AI than I've seen in most games, good building with lots of shape selection (though some jankiness in snapping and annoying build restrictions), lots of NPC behavior customization and assignments, storage customization, and wide range of server settings. The UI/menu's feel a bit "spreadsheet-like", but work well once you get accustomed to them. Massive depth to almost all systems - can take some time to wrap your brain around and comprehend. Could wish for more than 1 NPC follower to join my raiding party. Great survival/village builder hybrid that's going to keep me busy for a long time.

Land on a planet, explore, discover POIs and quests, take off, land somewhere else on the same planet for a new environment and explore again, repeat a third time, finally think about jumping to a new planet. Find a cool biome, build a base for storage and material gathering. Finally get bored of doing my own thing, head to a population center and do a bunch of questing. Spend a bunch of time in space combat pirating or hunting pirates as I journey. Get irritated with my ships limitations, spend hours customizing and maximizing my ship. Chase quests, laugh at the clumsy quest execution, really enjoy the quantity of quests available. Burn out on questing, go explore a new world/pirate/hunt pirates/build/upgrade a ship again.

The Good:
Tons to do - huge amounts of content and types of activities; biome exploration, base building and resource exploitation, ship design can suck me in for hours, endless questing.

Lore/Setting - Nice background lore, supported in environmental design.

Main quest - Some real gems among the missions, fun progression. Also in the negatives.

Faction Quests - The one or two main quest chains for each faction are generally fun and engaging - with the reservation that much of the dialogue and many of the decisions involved are clumsy and ill-considered.

The bad:
Generally shallow (sometimes just really bad) writing - both dialogue and quest design. With the exception of a couple real gems, don't expect this game to tempt tears or joy from you. Romances and relationships are generally clumsy and forced, sometimes laughable.

Main quest - Integrated into the new game plus, pursuing it too far instead of backing off means starting over in a new game mode, losing everything you've done or built. Good NG+ implementation, disruptive integration into the main story making me feel like completing the main story requires me to start a new game and give up my current playthrough.

NPC behavior - talking over each other, acting in bizarre ways, sometimes freezing in combat, getting stuck in terrain. Companions behavior is worse - clumsily blocking the player, never following the players lead, no way to direct them or prioritize their behavior.

Small "cities"- No massive fun population centers. No Night City, San Andreas or Liberty city here. Small communities called cities, like morrowind or Skyrim. A dozen or less shops, a few points of interest.

Conclusion:

While it hasn't blown me away, and despite the general quality of the quests and dialogue, I'm enjoying the game, the range of activities available, and can see myself playing it for a few months at least, worth the buy in my book.

Reaction after 28 hours: Really want to like it, I keep going back and trying it again - the new sieges turn Warhammer 3 into Total War: Arcade, the campaign is horrible, and the silly color choices in the UI are ... distracting to say the least.

Reaction after more time: I can play it and generally enjoy it now, but I still can't recommend it. The biggest issues for me remain the constant crashing and the siege battles.

The new sieges break the longstanding rule that differentiates Total War games from the mob of rts games out there - you build/buy/train ahead of time, then battle on the field prepared. Warhammer 3 breaks that traditional contract with the player by adding generic rts "build-as-you-battle" mechanics that make it feel like they're trying to be Warcraft, not Total War.

The changes haven't actually changed the siege meta outside MP - if anything, they've made both minor settlement and city sieges quicker sprints. There's too much wall and too many access points for the AI to defend. Put a block of forces one one side of a settlement as close as possible, place other units hidden in trees OR as far back as possible OR use stealth/vanguard units. Battle begins, create a distracting mosh pit or even just visible threat on one side, run your capture units from the other sides into the town unopposed onto the capture points, ignore barricades and towers - quick sprint battle over, don't even have to fight my way through a gate or over a wall or through a line of defenders before the sprint anymore. Now I don't even have to defeat enemy forces in minor settlement battles, they have had the sprint-to-win meta dumped on them too.

I've come to accept the campaign as a limited "scenario" playthrough, with the real traditional sandbox campaign to be released later, though the pace and challenge of the thing can be frustratingly random - one playthrough is almost over by turn 90, the next rolls along to turn 200. In one playthrough by turn 50 you are being hit on two sides by demon armies shoving 3-6 armies across both east and west borders every 5 turns or so - in the next you get a nice comfortable expansion.

Loved the first game, having to force myself to get through this one. Points for attempting to examine social issues, but it delivers clumsy, ham-fisted storytelling featuring one-dimensional bad guys, social parodies, and often incomprehensible decision-making.