Game: Total War: Warhammer

Total War: WarhammerFinished Total War: Warhammer. Played on Linux. Well, “finished” may not be the precise term. I’ve mastered the Grand Campaign with The Empire, The Dwarfs, Bretonnia, Greenskin, Wood Elves, and the Vampire Counts… and this game is awesome! It is the sort of game that gets you hooked on playing “just the next turn”.

The graphics and the sound is nice and captures the Warhammer look & feel known and expected from the tabletop game. Apart from some minor glitches (e.g. having some crashes) and some wired idiosyncrasies (e.g. navigating armies across the sea is not calculated by the pathfinding algorithm, need to “exchange” troops to be sure the same army is in the attack range of the other, …) the game plays very smoothly. Each faction has their unique playing style, and some are harder than others. However, each has its own pros and cons.

Ok: micro-management of cities and overall gameplay could be more complex in the campaign part. Yet it does not stand in your way. One will also find some optimization here in there in the player navigation on the menus when one really wants to find something, e.g. more than once I found myself typing escape to abort a hero’s action, only to be confronted with the “Exit Game” dialog, huh?

Ah, yes and the stupid implementation of probabilities! The game tells you that your hero has a success chance of X%. Well, the game did already role the dice on that one and only shows you this number it had before(!). It took me a while to figure that out. I read that this is to prevent Quick-Save – Quick-Load series until your hero succeeds. … which turned out in a Quick-Save – Quick-Load if the hero fails to save the money spent. Errm, this is not how math works, does it?

But still: a must-have for strategy fans, a feast on tactics.

9/10 9 out of 10 (for the glitches).