Gaming's Thalia and Melpomene.
The gold, silver and bronze standard for sequels.
Schrodinger's flawed gem: Simultaneously without merit and without fault.
Trans girl boysmile and lecherious salaryman sneer rolled into one.
Russian roulette but rather than a bullet you randomly end up in cut content from a Bethesda game

All of these openers and more sit in the top of my "Total Warhammer 3 Review: Mk6 Ukulele Apology Edition [FINAL] [MAYBE]" google doc, scored out because I can't quite pick which one is the most apt.

Some games occupy a horseshoe curve of quality, and for others it's a sigmoid curve. Total Warhammer 3 occupies an ouroboros curve. Fantastically difficult to discuss because even innocent statements like "it's good" belie just how much of it is terrible and "it's bad" fail to convey just how much of it is fucking amazing.

If you don't know what Total War is: It's a grand strategy franchise where the campaign map is Civilization and the battle map is Age of Empires. This formula is so successful that nobody's ripped it off properly and Creative Assembly have such a monopoly that they avoided being dissolved by SEGA just because the promise of more Total War money was too alluring. In short, it is to Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms what Baldur's Gate 3 is to Hatoful Boyfriend.

Total Warhammer, then, is a 6 year long mutual masturbation vanity project between Games Workshop and Creative Assembly and for many fans of both franchises, also a dream come true. Seriously, a Warhammer Total War game was something people begged for, to the point where one of the most popular mods for TW Medieval 2 was exactly that.

To describe it in perhaps unflattering terms, Total Warhammer as a trilogy is the tabletop brought to life. It is what most Warhammer Fantasy players imagine during their games: Sweeping armies crashing against one another, insane spells and fanciful lords carving trenches in the living-or-unliving flesh before then.

I use the word "presentation" a lot in my reviews, it's one of my crutches, but unlike other crutch words I'm okay with allowing it to leave the first draft because it is phenomenally useful.

Especially for Total Warhammer, a trilogy so self-indulgent in its presentation that every Sony project for the last 15 years looks restrained.

I truly cannot convey just how gorgeous this game is to observe with just words. It is otherworldly on every level and no corners are cut.
Hordes of bulky armored Dwarves thunderously march into columns of hyena-wheezing, cackling Goblins and tear them apart with meteoric hammer blows, explosive runic magic, howling artillery and Dawi curses.
Conscripted Empire soldiers stand their ground, pathetic sword and shield in hand as they stare down skeletons that march in perfect unison, flanked by hordes of undead horrors. An endless cacophony of clanging and screaming erupts from the resulting clash, and by the time it ends the living have taken their leave of the land.
Ancient High Elven soldiers clash against the twirling, gesticulating, erotomanic horrors of Slaanesh, holding their line even as their enemy distorts their very body for the sake of indulging their agony, practically hissing out daemonic curses all the while.
Battles between truly matched armies become a unique soundscape onto their own; defiant cries, screaming, howling, the roar of gunfire and the clatter of crossbows, it's magnificent.

Even just on a visual level, the detail is stunning. When I say "it's the tabletop brought to life", I mean it. Everything, from the lowliest Bretonnian peasant to the most complex Chaos Dwarf hellmachine, is animated, voiced and modelled with the utmost love and care. Being able to hit Insert and see them lovingly up close only adds to it.
It's really the animations that sell it for me, though, because they help differentiate factions that'd otherwise be samey.
High Elves stand proud and resolute, Wood Elves are lurched over in a permanent state of defensive hyperawareness, and Dark Elves seem almost relaxed regardless of situation - so deep is their apathy towards the lives of others.
Warriors of Kislev are taciturn and unmoving from top to bottom, while only the higher tier Empire troops display anything resembling bravery. Bretonnian peasants are shit-scared at all times and their men at arms aren't much better, which makes their Grail Knights being Space Marine-esque stand out. Cathayans, meanwhile, are almost Elven in their resoluteness.
And the fucking SKAVEN, dude! They're rat-people, and the nutjobs at CA made them convincingly swarm like rats when they pour over enemy armies.

Everything, top to bottom, is draped in the level of insane maximalist design you expect from a GW property. Whether it's Fantasy, Sigmar or 40k, 'scale' is the keyword and it really shows here when even a humble Tier 1 Ogre unit towers over the mightiest elves.

This carries over to the options available, too. With everything unlocked, there's 24 unique races, most of which have various legendary lord (leader) options to augment the gameplay. Each race's roster is almost wholly unique to them, though some lords do get to crib units from others for thematic/loreful reasons. That all might sound unimpressive, but you should know that the Total War standard is... not this. The TW standard is 90% of factions sharing a roster with some faction-specific units, and the 10% being outliers added in via DLC.

In practical terms, all this variety and all these options mean that the gameplay becomes the textbook definition of "simple to learn, hard to master".
As far as realtime tactics games go Total War isn't particularly complex due to its slower pace, mostly boiing down to making tetris blocks as unit formations and right clicking a LOT, but where other TW games mostly have you fight the same units all campaign, Total Warhammer throws you into fights with so many factions that demands you learn the matchup.

In some abstract ways, it's a lot like a fighting game. Playing other races and factions to familiarize yourself with their playstyle also helps you fight them when they're enemies. You may see a 20-unit strong Skaven infantry line and panic, but a brief tour playing them will reveal to you that Skaven infantry is mostly terrible, so your return trip will involve a lot of dead rats.
In other TW games, battle tactics tend to be rigid: Send your swords against spears, your cavalry against everyone else, your spears against enemy cavalry, and general against general.
Here? There's monsters and flying cavalry and magic infantry and other factors to consider, so while good tactics help it's infinitely handier to know that Trolls/Giants melt when swarmed with cheap spear units, that undead units begin to dissolve when their lord dies, or that regenerating units are easily killed by fire attacks...

Okay, I lied about it being simple.
It looks simple, the skill floor is fairly low, but there's a ton at work under the hood and you're not told most of it. Elevation has a pronounced effect on the combat performance of all units, units with higher mass can ignore enemies surrounding them, the entire calculation behind the mythical 'charge' mechanic... You can get by without knowing all of this, but at some point your amazing Jade Warriors will get whomped by some Skaven clanrats on a hill and you'll think the game has bugged, but it's working as intended.

Oh? There's more under the hood? Let's take a look- Oh jeez, now I'm up to my knees in the different calculations used for chariots/how unit count affects stats/the entirely unspoken logic used to decide settlement trading value/the literally invisible attack speed stat and so much more- Fucking hell it keeps spilling out. Now I've got bugged Armor Piercing Damage calcs and healing cap on my belt- WHAT IS A TZAANGOR BEAK.

Total Warhammer 3 has a very fun gimmick: If you own anything from the first two games, it's available in the third for free. On a big combined map, too! If you've put down the cash (about £300~ for all the DLCs and each basegame off-sale), it's all yours. All 6 years of content.

Now, for most of you, that last five word sentence is enough to make it clear where I'm going, but since subtext doesn't exist in Warhammer I won't use it here either:

Total Warhammer 3 is a fucking mess. A trainwreck. A minefield. Gaming's first potluck. A digital equivalent to those "[fanbase] sings" videos where the quality spectrum present is "all of it".

It is a game attempting to jam 6 years of content into a continually updated and tweaked engine while also maintaining a degree of technical competency and balance, and it fails so miserably. If you know anything about software or game development, this should come as no surprise.

At first the disparities start small. You look up pictures of Total Warhammer 1, think "wow that looks great on a technical level!", and then you meet the Empire or any faction from 1. The materials on their armor are poorly applied, resulting in too much bloom. Their unit portraits have bugged lighting and give everypony deathly pale skin. Some of their mounts are using rigs from the 2nd or 3rd game, resulting in some stretching. This applies to basically all content imported from 1/2 into 3. Odd, but not too game changing.

Yet.

The worst part is that, whatever minor inconsistency you notice, it will eventually blossom into a daisy chain of you saying "hey, what the fuck?" at something that's just broken or bugged.

I had a whole spiel here listing various things that're broken, fucked, deeply unbalanced (and not by design), or have been left behind, and it's just... It's so long. It's the same length as some of my smaller reviews. There's just so much about this game that clings to the surface like rust, and a lot of it goes even deeper. Cavalry is still of debatable usefulness because the developers seem to have forked from a pre-rework version of Total Warhammer 2, and you need a mod to make the Total Warhammer 1/2 cast not look terrible on the UI.

But the real issue is that all of the bad is about a stone's throw away from the extremely good. You can experience a manic fight for survival as Karl Franz, one of the most fun campaigns ever committed to the franchise, and next door is Bretonnia.
Bretonnia is a faction that has been terrible ever since Total Warhammer 1 and while it's lore-friendly, they've been neglected continually and their 'reworks' often change very little. The end result is... Playing them feels like hacking a PS2 game to access an unplayable character/faction and finding out that they 'work' but are missing about 3/4ths of their kit.

Kislev have access to three shiny new magic lores (Ice, Tempest, Hag) that are really great and unique and fan to use, but they also have some lores from the first game that by and large haven't had much of an update, so besides picking them for flavour or as a really specific counterpick in case Archaon loses the Chaos Rumble, they're worthless.

On and on and on and on and on. Examples of beauty sitting two provinces away from legendary lords that have a 1% pick rate in multiplayer for various reasons. Campaign map bugs that've been around since the combined map came out. Units that are basically a meme due to having been eclipsed by a DLC unit from four years ago and never once getting a balance shift.

In many ways, Total Warhammer 3 is the closest I've come to experiencing actual real-life romantic love but with a videogame. It is impossible to take an atomistic stance on the game, to zero in on the thing you like, because even that will have holes. It simultaneously occupies the zenith and nadir of the genre. It is intoxicatingly beautiful and frustratingly inept. Everyone who thinks Bethesda games are 'notoriously buggy' should be forced to do a run as Malus Darkblade, restarting until they get the long victory.

And I guess, much like real love, the flaws don't bother me.

All those spiels up above about the bad bits and the dissonance? The especially low-lows? All the bugs?

I don't give a shit about them. No, really. I don't care.

We live in an era of the pragmatic adaptation. Your favourite story will get a film adaptation, but that story is 90% of LOTR's runtime and there's no plans for a sequel film, so they'll squeeze it into 1hr46m. Your favourite manga will get an animated adaptation, but they'll pad and squeeze and stretch things to make 23m episodes spread across cours. Your favourite tabletop game will get a videogame, but it will omit your favourite units and focus exclusively on the posterboys. So on, so forth.

More than any other IP, Warhammer gets it the worst. Warhammer games wear a veneer of excess, but it is merely a smokescreen. They will show you fanciful high-rises and space-gothic churches before shuffling you into plain steel combat arenas against standard enemies. In a way, most Warhammer games are like the intro to Fury Road: Here is your indulgence, o Warhammer fan, but only for a moment before it is the sands for another day.

Total Warhammer rejects that.
Total Warhammer is pure opulence.
It is not pragmatic.
It is not cautious.
It is not restrained.
It is balls to the wall indulgence.
It is a game where even filler units will get a developer blog explaining the design influences, which tabletop mini it was ripped from, and what they poured into it.
A game where they got Richard Armitage to voice the big bad because he's Belakor and he inherently deserves it because he's Belakor.
This is a title where every unit has a real life history, every Lord is a character from the grand Warhammer archives. It is in love with Warhammer and it spares not a penny in lavishing it with the attention it deserves.

This game knows it's history. It knows its audience. One of the first trailers simply flashed the words "GRAND CATHAY" on screen and we were so delirious with joy that I wager someone had an honest to god heart attack. It's Smash Ultimate for shunned transgirl Warhammer fans that have an autistic affinity for topdown camera games.

...Also to dispense with the flowery bits for a second: All the amazing bits are foundational and immutable, while the bad bits are very easily fixed with some low-level mods that're trivial to either find or make yourself. Shit dude, it took me about 20 minutes to make a mod that makes Allied Recruitment a bit less tedious.

To cap off, I'll just post the Immortal Empires launch trailer because I think it's a perfect encapsulation of what Total Warhammer actually is: Recklessly indulgent and impossibly sick Total War battles mixed with a very sincere love of the Warhammer IP. Sure, it's dolled up for the trailer, but nothing shown in this trailer is impossible in-game.

Except AI Karl Franz and Katarin surviving long enough to join fights together.

Blessed be the community patch.