Recent reviews by sechallenger

This game delights in wasting your time at every opportunity. If you have a lot of free time and lots of patience, I can see you having a lot of enjoyment out of the sim elements. For me? Combat system is extremely bare bones, early game is incredibly grindy, and every facet of this game is repetitive and aggravating. Really wish it was better. I've tried to enjoy this game on three separate occasions, gave it 44 hours fair shake. Can't do it anymore. Done letting this game burn my precious hours on this earth.

This game, when it's fun, is really fun. The core gameplay is solid, the roster is decently diverse, and, despite what people say, it really isn't pay to win. Yes, the dlc (not really dlc but you know what I mean) characters are often really good, but it's like a high tier vs a mid tier where you can still win. You can't really turn your brain off and expect to do good.

But it blows my mind how a company can make such a fundamentally solid game with a marketable premise and just not give enough of a crap to give it ANY qol features or even basic upkeep.
The problems:
-This game has a paltry number of servers and regions, it doesn't even have European servers. Just NA and Japan.
-The matchmaking is garbage to the point my w/l ratio fell below 30% even though I was at averaging 18,000 damage and 12/6 each game. I am certain it doesn't have any skill-based matchmaking of any sort.
-The game itself doesn't have any sort of backfill feature so if a player leaves mid-game, that spot will never be filled and that team is now permanently fighting 5v6 (which doesn't make any sense, you can't search for another match until the one you left is over and you can't rejoin a game you leave, so why no backfill?)
-If someone leaves, then a minute or so after that members of the the team that is down one are allowed to leave without penalty (still can't join a match until that one is over, though...), so why not just have back-fill??
-If a game starts and a team has less than 6 players, it immediately cancels the match and forces all players back to menu, wasting everyone's time. Why not just let someone join mid-match???
-The backfill issue makes it to where you pretty much need to have a 6-person team of friends to even stand a chance against any remotely competent team.
-The amount of rewards you get (even with the battlepass) vs the amount of rewards needed to unlock characters is disgusting. I've been playing for 22 hours and I still haven't gotten enough to buy a single character. (Unless you wanna buy micro transactions, in which case characters cost roughly 20 USD EACH.)

I really like this game, I wish it was better, but this game messes up certain core design features (or just doesn't bother entirely) so bad that it makes finding an actually good and satisfying game near impossible. If you want to try it, it's FTP, so there's no real risk to it, but there's a reason it's already fallen below 1000 active players and is falling daily. Try and convince 5 friends to play with you, that will make the game a bit more fun.

This game ends up being more of a chore to play than anything else. The combat is REALLY jank and two dimensional. Parrying requires you to react to subtle movements and feints in order to block one attack but the times it's asking to react to are far too short and ends up being more of a coin flip than the quick mind games the developers probably imagined. The only people playing the game anymore are those that have hundreds or thousands of hours, so trying get better is very trying. If you really want to get good at this game, then you can put in the hours and of course you'll eventually started fighting on even terms with other players, but the amount of time you'll either get ganked, screwed over by jank hitboxes and inconsistent parry windows, or just killed by someone you never even saw will make the journey of getting there very long. frustrating, and tedious. At that point, why not just play something else?

To anyone who is a die-hard strategy gamer, I cannot recommend any game more than this one. For this review, I will first cover the negatives, and then the positives. In my view, if you can't get over the negatives, then there is no point in reviewing the positives.

-Negatives:
1. The game is expensive, and has a lot of dlc attached to it. I would recommend (like with all Steam items) to wait for a sale to get the game and it's dlc's. Doing so will end up saving you a LOT of money.
2. You will need a relatively high-performance computer. Total War games are notoriously heavy in terms of storage needed and performance. The game is loading in thousands of soldiers per battle, each with their own individual model.
3. The victory conditions on campaign are brutally large and hard to complete. This is a minor one, since most of the time the player will set goals for themselves to meet instead of the superficial one the game provides.
4. Vortex campaign (the vanilla campaign) is somewhat gimmicky compared to the Mortal Empires campaign, which I considered the definitive Warhammer 2 experience. The only way to play Mortal Empire is to buy Warhammer 1, which is another expense the consumer must put up with. That being said, buying Warhammer 1 also unlocks another 5 races to play as in ME, without any other dlc, so you could consider it a large dlc package.

Pros:
1. The games offers hundreds to thousands of hours of content. From dozens of unique campaigns, to custom battles that can test infinite possibilities, and multiplayer coop and vs modes, this game won't grow old anytime soon.
2. The dlc (for the most part) offer enough fun content for the price given. I would recommend every dlc available except Blood for the Blood God, Warriors of Chaos, Call of the Beastmen, Wood Elves, and the Grim and the Grave. (If you are having enough fun to warrant buying dlc, of course.)
3. Any problem you find with the gameplay itself (lore conflicts, small unit rosters, gameplay bugs or annoyances) can be fixed through the mods you can find in the Steam Workshop. I use several mods in my campaigns, and greatly appreciate the enhanced experience they offer.
4. I genuinely believe that this is one of the best strategy games on the market. From the empire management, to the battle tactics, to the sheer degree of content offered, you can't do much better than Total War, Warhammer 2.

In summary: If you can overlook the price tag of the game and dlc attached to it (or be smart and wait for a sale), you will love this game. Few grand strategy games have ever reached this level of excellence and fun. If you are a grand strategy fan, you simply cannot overlook Total War Warhammer 2.

Incredible game. Challenging but fair and incredibly satisfying in it's presentation. It manages to paint Samurai-era Japan in an extremely realistic light that laughs in the face of those people that dismisses everything from Japan as 'weeb.' I would point out the few nitpicks that most people (justifiably) dislike, like agent gameplay or Realm Divide, but if you know about them you can easily pay a quick visit onto the Steam Workshop and get any number of well-made mods that either fix these issues or add hundreds of hours worth of content.
My only recommendation would be to avoid the Rise of the Samurai DLC. It's not that its low-quality,it's just really boring.

A slower and even more difficult take on the Total War series. Very, very good if you can survive, and a very interesting take on how expansion works in this game.