Total War: Warhammer is not a strange marriage, if you stop to think about it. On the one hand is the saga of Creative Assembly, who has spent years digging a niche for players very PC. It is a kind of slow and constrained Civilization to a very specific period, a thing of shifts and manage empires and alliances in which novelty was always the management of armies when it comes to tanning back to rivals: battles in real time, driving thousands of troops, and very interested in systems such as morale in combat the control of the land and everything that you can find in the pages of The art of war.
On the other hand is Warhammer, possibly the best-known war in real-life game of the planet. One in which do not manage a stack of cardboard, where Grand Strategy (think of Paradox) is left aside in favour of the tactic (think of Starcraft or… Looks better: everything that is called RTS is not strategy: is tactical) and reference many things video game in real time. The DLC? Warhammer. The transition from pixels to polygons? Warhammer, more interested in the dioramas that on the boards. Warhammer, for the unfamiliar absolute matter, is equivalent to assemble a Christmas Nativity scene with Orcs, undead, Dwarves and all the fauna Tolkien where the rest put tinsel.
And the amazing thing is that Warhammer has managed the unthinkable with Total War: Remove self-absorption to a saga of Grand Strategy (and tactics) and bring it to the land of the accessible. Of the Creative Assembly had been a season spitting games of the main franchise as products of crazed churrero, a race toward realism faced with several obstacles. The lack of appealing historical scenarios – the fall of the Western Roman Empire Total War: Attila is not mainstream or for devotees of history-; the obsession to not let down to the jarcoreta of the strategy, a type spoiled by Paradox; and the feeling that each delivery is the refinement of a formula that begins to fall behind and touched roof with Shogun II.
The Codices for Warhammer, those billets of breeds and standards as an excuse to sell lead and paint it – two things that, go ahead, I’ve never done-, have returned them the illusion. They have remembered it that Total War, at the time, was born as a classical aspirations war game, up to the point that the strategic map of the Shogun and Medieval was as a Board in which physically moving virtual lead figurines. Total War: Warhammer is the reminder that this is a game, not the obsessive a couple of hundred recreation. A world of magical battles, of 18,000 men very frightened because before them the dead rise from their graves, dwarfs in helicopter and mutants Vikings invading your yard to help an insane God add skulls to the throne of skulls.
It is the repera. What Heroes of Might & Magic would have been if it had been able to. It is a world that bridges the rolazo and fabulous heroes capable of confronting their own a lot of units you poses («Emperor Kal Franz is said that he is the man of largest State seen», Yes.) And it is also said that with a hammer in his hand can turn 600 orcs in tapioca), with its own missions and storylines. An excellent idea, because there were already campaign missions in Total War, but far from the epic: kill such, such conquest, but the rookie player remained lost. How faced a major campaign, the main mode of Total War game? How you get to a world where you have three or four provinces and don’t know to do nothing? How do you play Civilization without 200 turns you just discovering fire?
Thus: turning the conquest of a strange Europe – yes, leaves the Warhammer equivalent to Spain. No, you can not play with them – in an adventure role-playing, in which your first steps are guided. And it is so natural that you have to look less stats than ever. Total War ago years that allows, at a glance, to understand concepts that previously depended on the rules. Load with the cavalry against a wall of Spears? You will take three seconds to learn that it is a bad idea. Add giants. Monsters. Perretes of chaos. Each unit has a function, and Warhammer is given well make evident in the way its capabilities.
No, do not invent anything for the Total War fan because it is not the objective (and because we were going to buy equal). There are air units, that something so difficult to represent in an RTS, and here is solved in a masterly way because watching them. The camera at ground level allows us to contemplate a murcielagos-vampiro horizon while you realize that your Arquebusiers have to move forward to shoot down them. A hero a faucet-mounted load is like throwing a stone into a pond made of people. Everything is natural, intuitive, and more epic than all the covers of Manowar together.
Because in TW: Warhammer there is no realism that respect. There are rules, rules, but you have so many people with armor of skulls (the last have skulls! cities! skeletons! everything is metal!), that Creative Assembly has been mullet Bolzano is and make a game-very-serious that doesn’t look like it. A world so attractive as a conventional rather than to recreate the architecture of the fifth century in morbid detail. This is a spoof of Tolkien, is mandanga derivative, it is a game where there are tanks firing in the face Lords vampires named Rammstein * and the orcs speak as stevedores canis.
But apparent is that there are very few factions. The player of Warhammer who comes here looking for Skaven (ninos-rata) or elves (armies of cosplayers) is going to feel disappointed. The Total War is going to feel ninguneado to not have that faction which is exactly equal to the former except in a unit and so cool. But if you look a little more closely, each faction has a completely different game style, each one inherited from a main Total War. Each one with their tricks and their potential to squeeze, instead of many textures to cover up the same.
Total War: Warhammer is, already, from the gateway to the “serious” strategy. A game in which each battle allows the player to build its own history and, from there, an epic discussion that freedom of action will depend completely on player. It is more or less what got Firaxis to resurrect XCOM. What Warcraft could never understand by stealing everything he could of Warhammer. That Total War was lost. Turn the war into a narrative engine. [8]
* Von Marstein, actually. But they could have been named Rammstein.
