Feature: The Runs Down
QUICKLY! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, QUICKLY! I've written the charts and there are some jokes and you have to read it! One of the jokes is quite good!
Total War: Warhammer
2 months ago
7 months ago
Feature: Hit Parade
An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC strategy games ever made, now freshened up to include our favourites from 2017 and 2018. From intricate, global-scale wargames to the tight thrills of guerrilla squads, the broad expanse of the genre contains something for everyone, and we've gathered the best of the best. The vast majority are available to buy digitally, a few are free…
12 months ago
Feature: Danelaw and order
Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is a smaller game with some very big ideas
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. That's a useful motto, a pick-me-up for the smaller among us, but the truth is right now, I am a very small dog with very little fight left in it. I'm the boss of Mide, a province in the middle of Ireland. The 9th century is…
1 year ago
Feature: Tomb it may convern
If you've ever come back from holiday to find that your flatmates/children/parents have flooded the kitchen/dyed the cat blue/thrown out all your original Jethro Tull LPs, then spare a thought for the Tomb Kings, Total War: Warhammer II's first all-new DLC faction. Once upon a time, they ruled a pseudo-Ancient Egyptian empire in which scholars quested for the secret to eternal youth and tyrants went…
Feature: The biggest hits of the past 12 months
Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months. Below is the full, hundred-strong…
Feature: How to build an empire
How Total War: Warhammer’s Mortal Empires engineers a world of unending war
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Total War: Warhammer’s Mortal Empires campaign [official site]. Mortal Empires is the logical conclusion of Total War: Warhammer. It asks this: what happens if all the races, factions, legendary lords and terrain of both Total War: Warhammer and its…
Feature: You'll need to be immortal to finish it
Mortal Empires is Total War’s grandest of grand campaigns: a stunningly huge global war with over 100 factions and 35 leaders duking it out over multiple continents. In terms of scale, it’s the series at its most ambitious, and its most daunting. It took me an hour of second-guessing and two false starts before I finally settled on a faction and leader. It’s excessive, really.…
Feature: We chat to the devs
Total War’s free Mortal Empires DLC merges Warhammer 1 and 2
Total War: Warhammer is a big game, and the recently released Total War: Warhammer II [official site] is even bigger. But in the eyes of the Creative Assembly, that still isn't big enough. To remedy this, they've come up with the Mortal Empires DLC, a free download that will essentially merge the two games' campaigns together in one huge map, letting players assume command of…
Feature: War of the DLC
When Total War: Warhammer launched last year, it was a marked departure for the series - though not, perhaps, quite as dramatic as 2005’s Spartan: Total Warrior - and contained no dearth of experiments and new ideas. It was exciting to see all of those changes to the formula, but it wasn’t until the addition of key pieces of DLC, introducing new campaigns and mechanics,…
2 years ago
Feature: Beasts,, blood and Bretonnians
Since launching last year, Total War: Warhammer’s [official site] digital facsimile of Games Workshop’s weird fantasy universe has grown considerably. The Old World’s become nice and fat with new factions, campaigns, units and mechanics, and now it’s finished. So this is a pretty good time to jump in, especially if you’ve been holding out for every piece of DLC. But oh no! There’s so much…
Feature: The big cheese
Alec is away this week. I fear that if he can't find a wifi signal on his travels he might resort to haruspicy to try and find the truths contained within the weekly Steam charts. These round-ups of the ten games with the most cumulative sales over the past week are his obsession and his curse. This week: while the cat's away...
Feature: It fails in fundamental ways
Total War: Warhammer is good at presenting complex information in battles. Your unit of spearmen will tell you when they’re attacked from behind and their banner will flash when they’re about to retreat. Your general glows, and he or she is often comically large compared to regular soldiers. Arrows, cannonballs and spells have brightly coloured trails so you can tell what’s about to hit you.…
Feature: Hail the underdogs
From the forum threads full of arguments to the constant tweaking and occasional overhauls via patches – balance has long been one of the pillars of strategy games. It means fairness, a level playing field, and in competition it means that victory comes purely from player skill. But balance, and the quest to reach it, can easily become the enemy of surprise and of the…
Time Commanders, the BBC game show where contestants order around someone playing Total War, returns to British screens tonight. Imagine a blind Let's Play of Rome: Total War directed by teams who didn't know what Total War was but did between them share a Desmond in classics, a Duke of Edinburgh's Award, experience leading their university rugger society, and four awful haircuts. After eleven years…
Feature: Hands on with the weird glass cannons
Let me summarise my highs and lows as a Wood Elf general in one phrase: I'm very much a Dwarf guy. You know where you are with Dwarves. Or rather, you know where they are - all the way over there on that ridge, Ironbreakers in front, Quarrellers behind, Hammerers poised to waddle down the flank like a glacier performing a legal U-turn. Dwarves don't…
Feature: From Sonic to Strategy
Even though Sega have been publishing PC strategy and simulation games for years now, I still can't see the company logo or hear the word without thinking back to hours spent at schoolfriends' houses, trying to work out if Sonic was too fast or I was too slow. The acquisition of Amplitude was the point that I decided that I needed to ask Sega a…
3 years ago
Feature: From tabletop reskins to giant-er giants
With its deep and engaging turn-based strategy, sprawling armies and epic battles, The Creative Assembly’s Total War series is known for stealing days, weeks and months at a time from its players - such is the breadth and depth offered by these types of games. Add user-made mods to this hearty post-release mix and that stretch can easily extend to years. The latest entry, Total…
Feature: A bonus bestest best!
We usually do our enormous GAMES OF THE YEAR posting fest at the end of the year (as would seem logical) but because it seems silly to reserve praise for special occasions we're doing a Games Of The Half Year collection to tell you about everything we've loved playing so far. It can double as a summer holiday recommendations list too! We've listed ours in…
Feature:
Alice is still on holiday, not back till Monday, which means it falls to me to do the terrible duty this week of asking and telling: what are we all playing this weekend? Read on for the optimistic lies we tell ourselves.
Feature: Grind for the grind god
There Is Only War: Playing Total Warhammer As The Chaos Warriors
Raze, sack, slaughter, burn, maraud. The life of a Total War: Warhammer [official site] Chaos Warrior is simple, with few diplomatic interruptions and little in the way of urban planning. There are buildings to construct, but they're part of the caravan of carnage that makes up your nomadic horde, and when you lay waste to a settlement, occupation isn't on the cards. The Old World…
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