#Total war three kingdoms review series

Total War is a game about war, and the diplomacy and management aspects are skeletal, largely serving the primary goal of the game: smushing units of ancient Chinese soldiers together to murder each other. Suddenly, every fight is huge, and because you’re bringing all of your forces to bear in each fight, it starts to feel repetitive.Īway from the battles, the simulation is imprecise. This is tough, because as you go around the map hoovering up the smaller factions, you grow in power and resources and establish bigger and bigger armies. The tactical depth is decent but once you’ve pasted a few different factions, the battles all tend to blend into one. However, here everyone is basically the same when you take the field against them. No matter who you played as, you were also fighting against several other species, meaning you got varied and different combat in each fight. While I’m loathe to come back to Total War: Warhammer again and again, every faction in that game played completely differently, whether they were Lizardmen, several species of elves, Dwarfs or even Undead. However, when Creative Assembly moved into fantasy, they opened Pandora’s Box. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the mode that brings mythical elements to the fore, and it’s clearly the way the game was designed to be played, while Records of the Three Kingdom strips the myth away for something that will feel more familiar to players who want the game to feel strictly historical. You’ve got a couple of different modes to play in. The factions also have some unique units and buildings. Every faction in the game has its own unique elements: Cao Cao can manipulate those around him into getting involved in proxy wars, while warlord Gongsun Zan has a military government with lots of military positions you can appoint characters into to keep them happy. The setting is a rich place to explore some new ideas and Total War: Three Kingdoms proudly wears the marks of this experimentation. Watching these fights is tense, as the victor of the duel can often decide the outcome of a closely fought battle. Hero characters in Three Kingdoms can instigate duels, which will often see two generals facing off against each other, as combat swirls around them. How do you stop an unstoppable force? By pitching him against an immovable object. They can be killed, or disabled, but it often requires serious firepower. These heroes roam the field getting into scraps, decimating anyone they run into and keeping your attack held together with powerful morale boosts and passive abilities. Total War veterans used to squishy commanders, flanked by elite guards, will quickly find themselves taken apart on the field. Take these characters into battles and you’ll quickly see that despite these tweaks, in combat the characters still feel nearly superhuman. However, the heroes here are toned down, armed with brutal combat attacks rather than magic, and near superhuman endurance, rather than immortality.

#Total war three kingdoms review series

Players that jumped into the Total War series with the fantasy editions will find these heroes familiar to the faction heroes from Total War: Warhammer, who possessed devastating abilities. Back to those titans, towering over the campaign map ready to do your bidding.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is a weird breed, a mix of the historical realism the series is known for, and the superhuman combat and abilities of Warhammer. But, developers Creative Assembly recently mixed things up with a licensed crossover with Games Workshop’s Warhammer franchise, switching out the samurai and knights with trolls, vampires and… honestly whatever a Terrorgheist is. In Total War: Medieval you’re charging forwards with knights and catapults, while Total War: Shogun 2 brings samurai to the fray. Players take the role of a character, letting you run an empire while also dipping in to control its battles, using cavalry, archers and other units to flank, demoralise and even just stab your enemies.įor many of the games in the series, battle has been strictly historical. The Total War series, for the uninitiated, is a strategy game that plays out at a tactical and campaign level. If you’re playing the game on Romance mode - and you really should be - each of these titans is given prenatural combat abilities, able to single handedly cleave up an infantry without breaking a sweat. This is what I think of, again and again, when I think about Total War: Three Kingdoms. In Total War: Three Kingdoms, the generals commanding your armies stand towering over the trees, titans of war slowly circling each other ready to batter anyone that stands in their way.