Total War: Warhammer III

Total War: Warhammer 3 has the most diverse and most fun ways to play with friends the series has ever seen, even if network issues can still be a bit troublesome.

Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer 3 is a spectacular fantasy battle simulator with a flawed campaign.

Warhammer 3 is Creative Assembly's most maximalist, chaotic, and arguably best game to date. But it'll ask a lot of you in return.

A brilliant final act with the series' most inventive and unusual factions yet.

Even so: I can’t help but marvel at the scope and imagination with which Creative Assembly has brought Warhammer’s fantasy world to life. And maybe I can forgive Immortal Empires for occasionally not working properly because it’s so packed with factions that already bend the rules by design. There are leaders whose army buffs I haven’t even touched, and parts of the world I haven’t yet set foot in. But if my past few campaigns have taught me anything, it’s that there are trees falling everywhere, and they’re making quite a lot of noise.

Creative Assembly/SegaThis sprawling medieval fantasy brings together romantic and classical strategy game design with spectacular results

Though best considered as the final part of an excessive strategy megagame, Total War: Warhammer 3 is a heavyweight in its own right. A little too much RTS grind in the midgame is easily outweighed by transformative changes to multiplayer, sieges, diplomacy and more.

Warhammer 3 is, frankly, an incredible package. It somehow manages to deliver multiple unique and satisfying campaigns, mostly without sacrificing their quality and depth in the process.

This is an enormous bummer, because everything else about this game is so good! In so many ways this is the best Total War game ever made, the latest example of a series that has spent the last 3-4 big releases (we don’t talk about the Saga games here) successfully refining a decades-old formula to keep it fresh and interesting. It’s a shame, then, that having come so far in so many respects this time around, Warhammer III stumbles right where it matters most: at the end.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is a big game by nearly every measure. It hosts big battles across enormous campaign maps, contains multiple armies with unique units, and effortlessly shifts between the Old World and Chaos Realms. It will get even bigger post-launch. It features absolutely gorgeous art in its many cutscenes that marry lush animation with the classic fantasy oil painting style and often hilarious voiceovers. It represents a giant bow on a gift Creative Assembly has been working on for years and is sure to be a can’t miss for Total War and Warhammer buffs alike. Will it change minds for those who bounced off the series in the past? Not really, but this one is for the fans, and I’d wager most folks would be delighted to receive this kind of attention for their favorite IP.