• Publisher: Sega
  • Release Date: Feb 17, 2022
User Score
5.1

Mixed or average reviews- based on 354 Ratings

User score distribution:

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  1. Feb 19, 2022
    4
    You have had 6 years to make the third game better then the second game. It isnt. All demon factions arent fleshed out enough and cathay and kislev are woke disney garbage. Total Woke Hammer should be the name of this game.
  2. May 19, 2022
    4
    TW: Warhammer II is one of my all time favorite computer games, so of course I bought this and, honestly, I don't get how this company could screw up so badly.

    This feels and plays like a middling mod for WH2. You get new map, units and factions, and that's pretty much where benefits end and problems begin. Performance is much worse than W:TW2 despite the map being smaller than ME.
    TW: Warhammer II is one of my all time favorite computer games, so of course I bought this and, honestly, I don't get how this company could screw up so badly.

    This feels and plays like a middling mod for WH2. You get new map, units and factions, and that's pretty much where benefits end and problems begin. Performance is much worse than W:TW2 despite the map being smaller than ME. Graphics were not improved in any way. Bugs galore. The "tweaks" or "features" added are mostly failures - UI changes for worse, realm of chaos is clunky, new setlement-type battles with building stuff on the map are annoying.

    I give it a 4 because it still has the W:TW2 engine at heart, but honestly if you are new to the series - buy W:TW2 and skip this.
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  3. Mar 12, 2022
    4
    A decent game under the massive flaws and bugs it has brought along. Battles feel bland without the dreaded Blood DLC and the factions seem a lot more sparse on release than Total War: Warhammer 2's. Many many users reporting game breaking crashes and bugs, with myself reporting awful optimisation.

    The game will be great, once the lacklustre campaign is replaced by Immortal Empires and
    A decent game under the massive flaws and bugs it has brought along. Battles feel bland without the dreaded Blood DLC and the factions seem a lot more sparse on release than Total War: Warhammer 2's. Many many users reporting game breaking crashes and bugs, with myself reporting awful optimisation.

    The game will be great, once the lacklustre campaign is replaced by Immortal Empires and the initial bugs quashed. Wait on this one.
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  4. Feb 18, 2022
    4
    The campaign is easily the worst out of the 3 in the series. CA seems too arrogant when it comes to listening to the community. Most of the problems in the first 2 games are still present and even made worse (gates, vassals, cowardly campaign map ai etc.)
  5. Feb 23, 2022
    4
    У игры есть потенциал, но этот потенциал просто загублен на корню в данный момент(6 дней после релиза)отвратной оптимизацией, кучей багов, недоделок типа выхода подкреплений врага прямо в городе со стенами во время осады, убитой в ноль экономикой, балансом, аморфным ИИ особенно за фракции порядка.
    Пока хотя бы часть этого не будет исправлено выше 4 баллов она увы не заслуживает
    Тем более
    У игры есть потенциал, но этот потенциал просто загублен на корню в данный момент(6 дней после релиза)отвратной оптимизацией, кучей багов, недоделок типа выхода подкреплений врага прямо в городе со стенами во время осады, убитой в ноль экономикой, балансом, аморфным ИИ особенно за фракции порядка.
    Пока хотя бы часть этого не будет исправлено выше 4 баллов она увы не заслуживает
    Тем более за такой довольно конский ценник в 3 с половиной штуки деревянных.
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  6. Aug 5, 2022
    4
    I wasn't the biggest fan of Warhammer 2, not because it was bad, but because I wasn't that interested in that category of game. Nonetheless, it was extremely well-made and made me appreciate that genre of game. This however, did not. The storyline is boring, the fact that you don't have to be the best kingdom to conquer and win, you just have to be the first to get 4 stones is beyondI wasn't the biggest fan of Warhammer 2, not because it was bad, but because I wasn't that interested in that category of game. Nonetheless, it was extremely well-made and made me appreciate that genre of game. This however, did not. The storyline is boring, the fact that you don't have to be the best kingdom to conquer and win, you just have to be the first to get 4 stones is beyond boring. It also takes forever to load anything in multiplayer, not sure if that's the same in singleplayer. Definitely not worth the price, just give Warhammer 2. Expand
  7. Jul 18, 2023
    4
    The Game offers epic battles with many races and a beautiful lore. I love how the Studio is trying to make the best out of this Game and continues to listen to the Community. As a Slaaneshi Player i am very pleased with Most of the Units. As a Suggestion it would be very nice if you could buff Chosen of Slaanesh because they feel very weak and disapointing. I know you are doing ur bestThe Game offers epic battles with many races and a beautiful lore. I love how the Studio is trying to make the best out of this Game and continues to listen to the Community. As a Slaaneshi Player i am very pleased with Most of the Units. As a Suggestion it would be very nice if you could buff Chosen of Slaanesh because they feel very weak and disapointing. I know you are doing ur best guys keep on the good work! Expand
  8. Feb 18, 2022
    3
    I have been a fan of Total War games since Shogun 1 and have particularly enjoyed Total Warhammer 1 & 2. Unfortunately, this is just really, really disappointing.

    I'm not quite sure what they were thinking with the changes they made because almost all the changes are for the worse compared to WH2. The new settlement towers and barricades? Pure cancer. The towers in particular are
    I have been a fan of Total War games since Shogun 1 and have particularly enjoyed Total Warhammer 1 & 2. Unfortunately, this is just really, really disappointing.

    I'm not quite sure what they were thinking with the changes they made because almost all the changes are for the worse compared to WH2.

    The new settlement towers and barricades? Pure cancer. The towers in particular are utterly unbalanced and make every battle a slog. I say every battle rather than just "siege battles" because the AI absolutely refuse to fight you on the open field unless they outnumber you hugely. I've had three open field battles in 6 hours of play. Big, fun set-piece battles are meant to be the centrepiece of this game and this one fails at it's most fundamental level.

    The new mechanic where rifts into chaos randomly appear in your territories every turn? One of the most annoying mechanics they could have devised. Not only is there no way to prevent this but they take your provinces from 0 to 100 corruption in three turns, discourge enemy agents into your lands and often enemy armies. This means that the only viable tactic is to turtle and spam end turn since, if you expand, you cannot protect your provinces properly.

    The game economy is broken. This makes having more than one army nearly impossible (especially due to the necessary turtling) and good luck saving enough money to get decent settlements unless you farm Slaanesh's rewards.

    Does it have good AI? LOLNO, all AI factions at war will make a beeline for the player no matter how stupid it is to do so. This has always been an issue but it's so much worse in WH3. The AI also outright and blatantly cheats in respect of the main quest (you can watch it do so in front of your eyes) but, even worse, if they collect all the souls before you that is an instant game over and there is no option to buy more time by defeating them in battle.

    The UI? Far inferior to the WH2 one.

    Optimisation? It runs like a legless paraplegic on a floor made of needles. Look forward to constant graphical glitches and stuttering.

    Bugs? Quite a few game breaking ones but you'll only find out after having wasted several hours on a campaign.

    I am going to have to ditch the game until the big combined map comes out or until there is mod support to get rid of the many, many issues because the gameplay is actively anti-fun at present and that is coming from someone who actually quite liked the Vortex campaign in WH2 (which a lot of people complained about).

    Very sadly, this is the first TW game that I simply cannot recommend. Hopefully they'll fix some of this in patches but I suspect that much of it is unfixable because it represents inexplicable design decisions which would need to be redesigned from the ground up. Regardless, I'll keep an open mind and I hope that I can change this review to a positive at a later date.
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  9. Aug 17, 2023
    3
    Awful experience compared to TTW2. After more than year it feels like a beta or the Early Access. The game developers are definitely not the same who designed the brilliant tomb kings and vampire coast. While playing the same faction in TWW3, you can get more broken mechanics and much more boring gameplay as it was.
  10. Mar 7, 2022
    3
    The game is not enjoyable and CA should me ashamed of releasing a game on this stage. Wasn't Rome 2 enough ? Stop messing around and do Medieval 3 , that's what we want ! But do it properly.
  11. Feb 22, 2022
    3
    Start this off by saying this is my first Warhammer game but have enjoyed other total war games, most recently Troy. There are some good qualities about the game but I have two major gripes that really need some work.

    1. The rifts opening up in your territory is infuriating and honestly pretty stupid. The “corruption” they cause is just as bad so I feel like I’m spending more time
    Start this off by saying this is my first Warhammer game but have enjoyed other total war games, most recently Troy. There are some good qualities about the game but I have two major gripes that really need some work.

    1. The rifts opening up in your territory is infuriating and honestly pretty stupid. The “corruption” they cause is just as bad so I feel like I’m spending more time babysitting the rift spawns than actually playing the game. I have to amass a bunch of tiny crap armies to ensure my land won’t get absolutely eaten by armies coming through the rift or corruption causing rebellion and I never want to play these fights because they do not pose a real threat and if you make any advancements in your territory you will be encountering a ton of these fights.

    2. This is honestly the worst one, I missed the first rift event on my play through not thinking it was that big of a deal, never missed one after, and this put me behind and I lost. I really have no idea how I could have came back, and I really didn’t think that just missing one event would be so catastrophic that it would ruin the entire run. I had no idea who had claimed the souls before me so it was impossible for me to attack that nation and to ensure they couldn’t win. It would have been great to know or have an option to prevent them from just outright winning but sadly that isn’t an option so I ended up wasting a good 12 hours worth of play time.

    Some other minor issues I had was the game crashes all the time. I also felt like my units were consisted of a bunch of morons that I had to constantly babysit so they didn’t just stand there and get murdered. It felt like the AI knew when my archers were in skirmish mode and would run at them until they turned around (they were behind a line of infantry mind you) and they would then stop and let their archers fire on me and I wouldn’t be firing back. Not the biggest issue most of the time but often I’d get stuck toying with my cavalry and had forgotten to take them off skirmish so my front line would get hit 2-3 times before I caught on. Also on some higher difficulties it feels as though, no matter the infantry, my units just lose in hand to hand combat. It felt undeserved in many cases as I’d have two superior units fighting one and they would just lose making it feel like an artificial challenge because the devs can’t create a smart enough AI to actually challenge the user!

    On the other hand the game is not all bad and I’m sure with a couple of balancing patches it will be better just kind of disappointing at release
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  12. Mar 31, 2022
    2
    Its so, so broken. There's so many issues in this game that existed in rome, like 15 years ago, the UI, battle engine, ai strategy engine is all the same. All the issues from the very first game is here, it unbelievable that they are allowed to get away with this,
  13. Mar 14, 2022
    2
    The Realms of Chaos campaign is tedious and unrewarding. The plot is very low-effort and uncompelling and its mechanics just aren't fun.

    The unit pathing has been re-worked and is more awful, yet more integral than ever. If one member of a unit gets caught on something/someone the rest of the unit can't advance or take orders and continually goes back for the lost unit. I was stoked
    The Realms of Chaos campaign is tedious and unrewarding. The plot is very low-effort and uncompelling and its mechanics just aren't fun.

    The unit pathing has been re-worked and is more awful, yet more integral than ever. If one member of a unit gets caught on something/someone the rest of the unit can't advance or take orders and continually goes back for the lost unit.

    I was stoked when I found out that multiplayer can have up to 8 people and the turns are simultaneous, but every multiplayer game I've played has inevitably crashed right after large battles. Now add the fact that the RoC campaign is generally not very fun and contains a lot of unrewarding busywork and even the 8-player multi-campaign isn't that appealing.

    Sieges are now worse than ever. All they had to do was add Three Kingdoms style sieges, instead WH3 has an RTS tower defence game on top of labyrinthian settlement maps- did I mention that the pathing is now horrible? Yeah, the end result of the changes to WH sieges is that now they take longer, are more tedious and more clumpy. You're expected to keep an eye on resources that you (as the defender) generate and also building towers and barricades *in real time,* which apparently only takes about 60 seconds per construction. Where are we getting these resources from? We're *under siege*. Why wait until the enemy is attacking to put up your defenses? Everything about it makes it the least TW thing Ca has ever done, more micromanagement with significantly less immersion. It's a shameful display.

    There's plenty of improvements, too: Quality of life stuff like being able to save hero builds, use quickdeal diplomacy and set a budget for your towns to automanage themselves. (Although the RoC campaign has so many BS hoops to jump through my budget has generally been strained in every game, so haven't had a chance to use this budget feature.) Also just the factions themselves; lots of cool models, aesthetics, voice acting, all good stuff. It's just completely outweighed by all the bad stuff.

    Been playing TW for 20 years and this is the first one to bore me out of playing it within the first couple days. Also it's filled to the brim with bugs. And Immortal Empires will likely be fun, even though it's been a month and that's still not out yet. Just been a few patches that fixed stuff and tweaked/balanced *nothing.*

    TLDR: Bad campaign, bad sieges and bad story. Cool content though?
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  14. Feb 22, 2022
    2
    5700xt + 2k+ middle preset=5-30fps. Game doesn't look better than TWW2-even worse. Without TAA and ssao game looks awful. 2022 and still no fsr or dlss.
    The UI is the most awful bland red color and hard to read.
    Overall TWW2 is the better and richer game. Too much wasted potential. Doesn't worth money now-wait for sale.
  15. Mar 28, 2022
    2
    Looks great, sounds good, but is still boring and broken. The way the CA treats their fan base and promoters is absolutely wrong and **** I feel bad for all the hard on fan boys sucking their lies out of their **** and still not getting a good game.
  16. Apr 8, 2022
    2
    Worst of the three parts. Totally unbalance piece of **** Not even acceptable as a dlc
  17. Aug 22, 2023
    2
    Plus d'an an d'existence et pourtant encore pas mal de bugs et d'équilibrages aux fraises et CA se permet malgré ça de proposer une augmentation de 150% du tarif DLC. À croire qu'ils veulent que les joueurs se contentent des mods, parfois plus généreux en contenu.
  18. Feb 20, 2022
    1
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. What a huge letdown, I waited four years for this game and it's the worst one in the series. The units are good but the campaign sucks. Which is the only game mode I play. You can't play any of the armies from the previous games. The campaigns themselves are boring its hard to get more than a couple armies going, the whole time your playing chaos whack a moll. Chaos just spawns over and over in the same spots. Who thought this would be fun it's just really annoying and makes every playthrough feel the same.each chaos faction has very few units.this game kinda sucks Expand
  19. Aug 9, 2023
    1
    The worst of all Total War games... looks like devs are more interested in playing politics than in making good game...
  20. Mar 30, 2022
    1
    Edit: After careful consideration (3 campaigns on vHard in, ~50 hours), I can no longer recommend the game.

    It's buggy. Performance is a joke (looks like WH II, tanks FPS in half), Engine is still old, design choices (rifts) are bad, give no sense of accomplishment when finishing a campaign and actively punish the player for expanding. The AI is still cheating like crazy. Total
    Edit: After careful consideration (3 campaigns on vHard in, ~50 hours), I can no longer recommend the game.

    It's buggy. Performance is a joke (looks like WH II, tanks FPS in half), Engine is still old, design choices (rifts) are bad, give no sense of accomplishment when finishing a campaign and actively punish the player for expanding.

    The AI is still cheating like crazy.

    Total War AI has always been cheating. I had hopes that Creative Assembly would stop being lazy and

    a) modernize the Engine (10 Bit, HDR, proper multi core optimization, DX12 features, proper Surround Sound etc)
    b) give us naval battles
    c) properly code the AI
    d) especially fix pathfinding, since that has always been a major problem

    but in the end all we got is a TW WH II reskin with a new map and a couple minor mechanics (some are just reskins from WH II DLC variants) that tanked the FPS in half. It's a bit of a shame that CA wasn't able to deliver anything of meaning after 5 years of working on this game. The groundwork is old, the AI is still programmed bad, we have no naval battles and the pathfinding and collision system is still broken, also the armor system.

    Warhammer III deserves better. CA has the money to deliver better. So the question is: Why didn't they?

    Rift mechanic was fun when I first played a campaign, instantly when I started the second, it bothered me. It's no fun for replay. There should be a button to disable to campaign/rift mechanic, so we can just enjoy some campaign gameplay.

    And the performance... Warhammer III runs like crap. My 3090 can barely achieve 30-35 FPS, where WH II gave me 55-65 FPS. It's probably the old engine. It's still 8bit, no proper multicore optimization, no DX12 features that could give the GPU some headroom. That happens when you try and cramp in features into an old engine that wasn't made for it. CA went lazy and didn't want to properly update their engine, and here you have the result.

    Why don't we have a timeline for bug fixes and new features (IE)?

    This game has issues. Not only performance and in-game bugs, but also design choices (after max 2 campaigns, Rifts are just no fun anymore). The game actively punishes you if you dare expand, not to mention that Daemon of Chaos and Kislev are officially labelled as "newbie friendly", even though they are everything butt (getting swarmed by full stacks after a couple rounds from all directions is not newbie friendly). These are serious problems. The game has been released more than two weeks ago, "influencers" were able to play the game weeks before that. Meaning Creative Assembly had more than a month now to realize the issues at hand and make a timeline.

    Where is that timeline?

    Where is the list of issues that CA has managed to assemble? Share it with us, so we can complete that list.

    When can we expect to play the Immortals Empire campaign? There's no problem in saying: "We are focusing on addressing bugs and performance, IE is still two months out, maybe more", what is a problem is NOT talking about it.

    Warhammer III could be so much more.
    ---------------------------------------
    Original review when the game launched:
    ---------------------------------------
    TO ME, SONS OF SIGMAR! FOR THE EMPIRE!

    I can recommend this game.

    BUT it's unacceptable that Total War still has no native HDR support in 2022.

    Auto HDR is also currently not supported. That's a shame for an AAA title.

    It is also barely acceptable that we still have no Naval battles. Creative Assembly needs to up its game.
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  21. Feb 22, 2022
    1
    Soulless cash grab peddling the Warhammer name while still offering minimal features, truckloads of bugs, predatory cut content for DLCs/Preorder "bonuses" and a straight up abusive dose of Denuvo copy protection to boot.

    Ignore the usual gaming media shills and poorly disguised review bots. Never settle for such mediocre offerings and anti-consumer practices.
  22. Mar 24, 2022
    1
    am I the only one who is really bothered by the units designs for example tzeenth flamers or horrors erc, this kind of units kinda shows me that the designers didnt even try to make anything new, but relied on player fanbase who will buy this game because of previous succeses. Each W2 DLC with new untis design had more serious and honest work into it then the whole W3 game, most allam I the only one who is really bothered by the units designs for example tzeenth flamers or horrors erc, this kind of units kinda shows me that the designers didnt even try to make anything new, but relied on player fanbase who will buy this game because of previous succeses. Each W2 DLC with new untis design had more serious and honest work into it then the whole W3 game, most all untis are just reskined, recouloured and reused, or are absolut effortless horrible new design without even trying to make a good design unit, I loved warhammer 2 but W3 really destroyed my will to play the game, sometimes I still play W2 mortal empires but the experience about the epic unit designs is absolutly destroyed and so my motivation to play warhammer at all.
    I kinda feel like the developers treat me as a player like an idiot, who you can sell every garbage.
    I mean come on .... look up the units ... !
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  23. Feb 22, 2022
    1
    Unbalanced and buggy. The economy is not existing. You can barely keep one full army unless you are the Scrooge McDuck imperium with caravan that gives you so much money that you can build 2 money storage. The Auto Resolve for fights prefer the human nations because they have more range units as Demons. This means you must play all fights yourself as a Demon Nation. In a Multiplayer lobbyUnbalanced and buggy. The economy is not existing. You can barely keep one full army unless you are the Scrooge McDuck imperium with caravan that gives you so much money that you can build 2 money storage. The Auto Resolve for fights prefer the human nations because they have more range units as Demons. This means you must play all fights yourself as a Demon Nation. In a Multiplayer lobby with more than 4 player its unplayable unless you like to wait. Because of the bad economy the demons never reaches endgame units and because you only have one full army you must decide to enter a portal or defend your citys. I hope the immortal empire campaign will be better.... ah i forget you need all 3 games in order to play this campaign. Ty CA Expand
  24. Mar 7, 2022
    1
    This game is not justified if you are a casual fan. Why would anyone want to play sieges 100%.What happened to land battles? As a campaign main CA really left us in the dirt. The Ai was bad in TWW1, TWW2, but its even worse in TWW3.
    If you are a tabletop player you probably think its the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I am not a tabletop player. This game was made for multiplayer
    This game is not justified if you are a casual fan. Why would anyone want to play sieges 100%.What happened to land battles? As a campaign main CA really left us in the dirt. The Ai was bad in TWW1, TWW2, but its even worse in TWW3.
    If you are a tabletop player you probably think its the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I am not a tabletop player. This game was made for multiplayer only it seems.
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  25. Mar 22, 2022
    1
    The laziness and lack of testing this game has is obvious and egregious. The fact that the supply line bug was in the game at launch at all and that it isn't getting a hotfix alone is just awful. CA as a company being behind on hotfixes and even coldfixes historically when compared to other companies doesn't really have an excuse. This game was in development for 6 years, they didn't touchThe laziness and lack of testing this game has is obvious and egregious. The fact that the supply line bug was in the game at launch at all and that it isn't getting a hotfix alone is just awful. CA as a company being behind on hotfixes and even coldfixes historically when compared to other companies doesn't really have an excuse. This game was in development for 6 years, they didn't touch WH2 bugs and problems for a majority of this time and this buggy mess is what we get? I would bet money that CA's management is who's to blame here and it was a miracle it had a delayed release, because I don't want to think about what it would've looked like if it was released earlier.

    CA needs to listen to the playerbases' feedback and change the game accordingly or else this will just devolve into definitely the bottom of the barrel amongst their other releases alone, and there's Atilla and Rome 2 to compete with. And what's with their focus on multiplayer gameplay and feedback? Why aren't changes to units separate between multiplayer and and campaign?

    Wouldn't reccomend this game to people who like the streategy genre. If they make massive changes to the game then it could be salvaged.
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  26. Aug 21, 2023
    1
    only fix bug every half year also each DLC now are extreme overprice 25€ is almost half of one full game for less than 20% content this is definitely an anti-consumer practice,
  27. Jul 14, 2022
    1
    Very unfriendly consumer wise business practice. The game is just dlc-expansion marketed as full price game.The day one DLC ofcourse is here and who knows how many more will come... Decent game killed by greed and they wonder why the player count is lower than the older games... People arent stupid and wont pay again for the same thing over and over again.. Greed, Greed never changes!
  28. Sep 2, 2023
    1
    I fan of total war games, but that its that the worsts game on my experience from total war. You shout to spent too much money for open all race DLC in this game. Worst camping what I ever play. The worst game for what I ever pay in my life.
  29. Apr 6, 2023
    1
    They stopped supporting the Russian language. Harassment of Russian-speaking players.
  30. Apr 8, 2023
    1
    No politics in games! Stop denigrating the Russian people and their language!
Metascore
86

Generally favorable reviews - based on 65 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 61 out of 65
  2. Negative: 0 out of 65
  1. LEVEL (Czech Republic)
    Jan 30, 2024
    100
    Although the Immortal Empires format, which will combine all three games into one large map, was not yet available at the time of review, the world itself is large even in the individual parts. Its treatment and variety of climatic zones and chaotic crevasses deserve high praise, and the freedom of creative license has been used to the fullest by the authors at Creative Assembly in this regard as well. [Issue#318]
  2. Game World Navigator Magazine
    Oct 19, 2022
    84
    Selling Ogres as a separate Day-1 DLC is definitely an anti-consumer practice, AI would be best described as “braindead", and some mechanics only work because of duct-tape solutions like “background income”. Yet, CA has managed to capture that certain “je ne sais quoi” of Warhammer: every faction plays differently, but they all feel awesome. [Issue#259, p.42]
  3. Oct 6, 2022
    60
    If the "Total War" series had been a cow, PETA would have been at the door a long time ago. That's how milked she is. When you're not fighting, you're trying to build your empire. This part of the game combines both the best and worst of Total War: on the one hand, the factions you can play differ substantially and all offer a different experience; on the other, after a strong start, the campaign collapses like a pudding. You focus mainly on one powerful army, so the overall overview disappears somewhat from view. Too bad.