Total War: WARHAMMER II Review – Deep, brutal, strategic

Total War and Warhammer is a match made in heaven.  I’ve always been a fan of Warhammer from the sidelines – I could never afford the figurines but the lore is so in-depth that it’s hard not to get excited when a new Warhammer game comes along.  Add Total War into that mix and, to me, I think you’ve get a perfect strategic blend. Total War: WARHAMMER II is what I imagine thousands of dollars of figurines would look like on a battleground.

WARHAMMER II functions similarly to the first game. It is a deep strategy game in a large over-world map featuring city management, diplomacy, economy, exploration, army building and army movement.

During battles it becomes a real-time strategy game as you command your armies against opposing forces. These battles take place on varying maps and environments, either out in the open or in a castle siege. Before a battle you are able to place your units in whatever formations you want, and create control groups to better command your units on the battlefield. You can create any type of army and strategy you want thanks to varied unit types: ranged, melee, shielded, siege weaponry, monsters and mounted units; as well as different attributes: flying, stealth or vanguard deployment. You then combine these with geographical advantages such as hiding in trees and elevation. It’s quite a deep and rewarding system.

WARHAMMER II features a new map and 4 playable races – High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, and Skaven.  These 4 races unfortunately pale in comparison to the numerous races on offer from the first game. Admittedly, some of the original game’s races were added in post-launch content, but it still feels like a small step backwards from what WARHAMMER I eventually offered.  Each of the 4 races has two playable leaders which start on different areas of the map.  1 leader from each race has a starting tutorial phase, and 1 leader doesn’t.

As per usual, every race has its own unique mechanics and quirks to make them special. For example, the Skaven have a lord loyalty system. Since the Skaven are known to be treacherous little backstabbers, your Lords have what is essentially a loyalty metre. If you don’t keep your Lords happy through victories in combat, giving them a nice big army or some shiny items, they can defect and take with them their whole army that you spent your gold on.

Though the win conditions for each race are different, they are essentially all vying for the same thing – influence over The Great Vortex. This is achieved in the new main gameplay mechanic known as Rituals, which every race has to perform to further their goal. Each race has their own special currency that is required for Rituals. This currency is acquired through many different ways: treasure hunting, completing missions, or good settlement management with your main goal being to get as much as possible as fast as possible. It basically becomes a race against time to see who can complete their rituals the fastest, while also disrupting others rituals through use of your own armies or intervention armies that are essentially mercenaries for hire. Each Ritual unlocks a little cut-scene when it is finished, that gives you a little bit of insight on the story, and I found myself wanting to do the Rituals as soon as possible just to see these.

The new Ritual system makes the game – despite its natural, slow, turn-based movement – feel fun and fast and breathes some new life into how you will play this game.

A sage old man acts as your adviser to guide you through the very basics of the game.  I personally found that I still had a lot of unanswered questions and turned to online videos to help me understand.  I found this a little off-putting, having to watch a couple of hours of tutorial videos means that there is a clear lack of help for players new to the Total War games.  I would have liked to have seen a specific tutorial campaign that was small-scale but went through each of the steps and explained the systems a little better.  There is an in-game “wiki” of sorts, but it didn’t really help me.

Despite my PC far exceeding the recommended specs (for those that are curious, I’m running 32GB of RAM, a mid-range i5 CPU, and a 970GTX GPU), for Total War: WARHAMMER II, it still chugged on the main map and I had to drop the resolution down from 4K to 1080p to get something hardly above 30 FPS.  Trying the game on my partner’s laptop (boasting a decent i7 CPU and 960M video card) proved an even sadder affair – it was running at about 20 FPS on low graphics without anti-aliasing. This makes the game look, frankly, quite ugly.  I’m not too much of a graphics snob, but I have a decent enough computer to expect things to run quite well at ‘high’ settings.

Part of the loading screen problem is due to how much the game has to load at once.  The map is huge and there’s quite a number of AI players going about their business too.  This results in a lot of processing power dedicated to just making the game happen, let alone making it fast or pretty.

One of the struggles with reviewing a game of this size is the amount of time needed for just a single campaign.  My partner has 82 hours played in the first game and that amounted to two and a half co-op campaigns.  Finding time to explore each race with campaigns that can go for 10 – 20 hours each is a massive feat. Most of my time was spent with the Skaven, though I did spend an hour or two on each of the other races.