Tutorials! I am a fan. Good tutorials are rare and actually enjoyable ones rarer still, and Total War: Warhammer 3’s is a treat. This is helpful, because there is a lot of Total War out in the world now – this is the third game in its little high-fantasy sub-series and something like the fifteenth full-sized Total War overall – and that means it might be just a tad intimidating for new players.
It’s intimidating for me, at least, and I’ve been bumbling around these turn-based overworlds since the Medieval era. Warhammer 3, as a likely result of those decades of iteration, has an extraordinary amount of systems to it. It’s overloaded at times, caught up in the fun of all that Daemonic excess.
Total War: Warhammer 3 reviewPublisher: SegaDeveloper: Creative Assembly, Feral InteractivePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 17th February on PC, Linux, Mac.
But that’s also the joy of it. This is the silliest, most convoluted, most chaotically maximalist Total War game I’ve played. Showing it to someone who’d only played Rome or Shogun would be like picking up a giant amp and travelling 700 years back through time to blast Slayer’s Reign in Blood at a Catholic peasant. It’s fireballs and flailing tongues and weird spikes. Cannibals, horrible gaping orifices, frog-legged bird wizards, and basic, bottom-tier units that somehow utilise ranged attacks and melee attacks and regenerating shields and magic damage, all at once (I hate them!). And just walls and walls and of tech trees, tooltips, and multipliers on top. Streuth!
Anyway, the point is thank the frog-legged bird gods for Warhammer 3’s tutorial. It’s a marked step-up in onboarding for this series, which has always been at least okay at it, and I’m emphasising its importance in Warhammer 3 not just because the game is absolute carnage but because it’s also a lovely prologue for the wider story – if we can call it that – of the main sandbox campaign. In it you play as an honourable Kislev lord who marches north into Chaosville in search of his missing bear-god, Ursun. Can you spoil a prologue? Someone probably thinks so, so just take the time to play it for a bit of delightful, trademark Games Workshop grimdark fantasy lore before you jump into the sandbox.
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I can pick at it. In fact I can pick at a lot of Warhammer 3. The prologue does well to re-familiarise you with the absolute basics of Total War but it does invest a little too much time into the old “left-click an army to select it” side of things, when what would truly be welcome is a gradual introduction to Warhammer 3’s reams of mini-mechanics, say, or the lesser-known intricacies of manoeuvring armies around the world map, or the specifics of each of the eight playable race’s several unique elements. Still, it’s an on-ramp, and there’s a new, lesser-trumpeted system of “tours” that you can take around certain elements once you kick things off for real too that arguably explain the smaller things better. And again, once you do kick things off for real, what a trip.