Total War: WARHAMMER III

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. [Eurogamer Recommended]

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.

It’s the equivalent of walking into a Games Workshop for the first time as a child and having your eyes roll back into your head from the sheer awe of the place. A thousand boxes, a hundred armies, dozens and dozens of different little bits and bobs. A whole wall of rulebooks! It’s not the most understated of hobbies; and there’s never been anything subtle about a 12-inch figurine that’ll set you back 80 quid. It’s rampant maximalism, is what it is, but it’s also bloody good fun. And it’s hard to imagine a better video game translation of Warhammer Fantasy and all of its large-scale mayhem than this weird, sprawling, endlessly fascinating thing they’ve dubbed Total War: Warhammer 3. And to think, at some point, Creative Assembly will release a brand new “Immortal Empires” campaign, which will feature all three maps and every faction from all three games, all twisting and turning in on themselves and curling at the corners of the world. Now that sounds like Chaos.