Story- story is pretty good actually 7/10

Lore- it's Warhammer, enough said 10/10

Gameplay- it actually does make you want to go turn after turn as you want to see how the world/your faction develop. 7/10

Art design- always loved Warhammers aesthetic and this game does pretty well, although some areas are a bit bright for my liking. 8/10

Colour use- like I said, generally pretty gritty although some areas are a bit too bright for me personally. 7/10

Immersivity- really easy to get sucked into advancing your civilisation and it's fun to get in the head of your lord and RP a bit 9/10

Ending- multiple endings are all pretty good despite being so many 8/10

Soundtrack- doesn't really do it for me, feels like I've heard all of it before and it's just a bit boring 4/10

Sound effects- the sound effects are better, sometimes lords repeat voice lines and such but overall the sound FX are pretty on point 7/10

Level design- the maps are mostly pretty good, although some are just flat 7/10

Environments- honestly all the environments fit the housed factions pretty well, and despite some being a bit bright I do see why 8/10

Characters- the lords are super over the top and I love it, really like getting into the heads of them to play how they would, only thing is that they're already characters so it doesn't have a bunch new and they're not really developed so 8/10

90/120

Warhammer 2 has a lot more going on than the historical Total War games. Untethered by the limits of realism, the door is blown wide open for a much more varied set of mechanics. Each faction’s units, goals, strengths, weaknesses, magic, and technology are incredibly different from each other, but this complexity actually makes this game easier for newcomers to play. With each faction being so specialized and distinct, it’s easier to understand how you should be strategizing. In a game like Shogun, your faction’s unique feature may be strong cavalry, but how much should you play into that? If you try to make a full cavalry army, you’ll either get destroyed by spearmen or run out of money, and finding the middle ground where you can take advantage of your bonuses without going overboard can take multiple campaigns. Compare that to an example from Warhammer, where the Skaven faction is geared towards swarming with cheap units and bombarding with powerful ranged gunners. The balance to strike is obvious, use the disposable units to tie up the enemy as you gun them down. If you have a magic user available, they can destroy anyone who flanks the gunners or turn the tables wherever the front line is breaking. Even if you’ve never played Total War before, this sort of strategizing will come naturally, and you can start having fun without the sort of Youtube tutorials strategy games often rely on. The accessibility combined with the abundance of content makes it easy for me to recommend, but the real question is if I can recommend buying it. There’s a ton of DLC, which is always a major turn-off, but you really don’t need to load up. Paradox games might lock entire game-changing mechanics behind DLC, but that’s not the case here. It’s just factions and faction leaders which you can pick depending on how interesting they seem to you. Personally, I would recommend buying Warhammer 1 and 2 to start, which will give you all the base factions from both games to use in 2’s combined campaign. The DLC factions are mostly based on gimmicks that shake up the standard gameplay, which isn’t a priority when you’re just starting out. Buying it this way also makes it fairly cheap to get into, especially when measured against the hundreds of hours you can get from it. If you’ve ever been interested in Total War, it’s easily worth your time and money.

no tengo idea de juegos de estrategia pero despues de tiltearme, quitear y hacer una review de mierda un amigo se ofrecio a explicarme un par de cosas y masomenos pude ganar unas batallas y avanzar un poco en la campaña. si bien veo lo que le gusta a la gente del juego simplemente no es para mi, la cantidad de tiempo que hay que ponerle a cada batalla es demasiada, pasados los 10 minutos estas persiguiendo unidades enemigas con 1 de vida que se rehusan a ceder la victoria cuando es obvio que no tienen chance alguna. la parte de desarrollar edificios y diplomacia esta bastante buena igual sigo pensando que la cantidad de pantallas de carga por las que tenes que pasar son muy molestas pero por suerte hay un boton que te simula las batallas automaticamente que podes usar para cuando es obvio que vas a ganar.

First things first: I haven't enjoyed a Total War game since medieval 2. So imagine my surprise when I picked up this game and found out that I am actually having tons of fun with it.

One part of it is the fun over the top magic system, allowing you to rain down terror on the enemy lines with everything from meteors and lighting storms to Zombie crab hoards and magical boats.
Another part is the amount of detail and care put into each faction, giving them all an unique play style and fun tiny details. Which just plays to my world builder's heart.

However when you buy this game, you should add the blood for the blood god DLC for the true guttural mayhem experience.

On the one hand most of its battles boil down to a big scrum where you win if your archers kill the enemy monsters and the enemy archers before your first line breaks. On the other, big dragon go whooooooosh.

Movement on the campaign map is janky, i don't think the rules are super clear on movement ranges and are sometimes infuriating.

The vortex campaign is a bit underwhelming, pushing you to a very defensive playstyle towards the second half of it, which is incredibly boring, with almost nothing going on. Mortal Empires is better, but good lord is it a lot to take in, especially for a beginner. Most of my campaigns I eventually get swarmed by enemies on all sides and it's just non-stop chaos (ahah, get it, 'cause it's warhammer and there's chaos ahahaha).

I appreciate all the free dlc (Paradox step your freaking game up) but I hope my lizard(man) brain won't have me buy all the paid ones so that I may one day never even touch it beacuse my backlog is too big and I need to cut it down already.

All in all, warpstone/10

Rating overall: 4,4/5
Hours of time played: 46h 3m
6/7 Fun: This game was a mixed bag in the beginning since it didnt really fully release because for me the immortal Empires campaign is the actual game. But having a crossover with two other games you spend money on and get rewarded. Tell me a game which does that? Imagine Sims 4 would be Sims 1+2+3 combined and then you get even more additional dlcs. Yes its a bit the same as the other two, but I have combined over 400h in all Warhammer Total Wars. And since every faction and often times even subfactions of factions feel so different and unique once a year you have to play a campaign.
5/6 Genre: There is no depth to diplomacy like in Three Kingdoms but I dont mind that. I dont want my neighbours to talk with, I want skulls for the skull throne! I want to anguish my enemies in my soulgrinders or liberate the world from the pestilence of the skaven or orcs. You can play this game with 7 other people and play simultaneuosly! Its just so much fun.
3/3 Graphics: Another remarkable feature is the zoom in. There are not many games where I press the cinematic button and just enjoy the view in awe how video games can look or what they can do today.
5/6 Atmosphere: Nice music and the warhammer universe is a perfect setting for a game about war. I am a sucker for fantasy anyway and I played the tabletop as a kid. I can imagine people who either dont like fantasy nor warhammer dont get the fullest out of this game.
3/3 Gameplay:

Is this the most in-depth, well-crafted, and consistently engaging strategy game ever made? No.

Is this an excellent strategy game with a lot of character and visually stunning battles alongside exceptional audio/visual design? You betcha.

Total War and Warhammer are like peanut butter and jelly. They come together in a nearly immaculate way. The immense world and races of Warhammer lend themselves beautifully to the giant-scale battles and 4X gameplay of the Total War series. Warhammer 2 offers so many different ways to play through its systems that you can easily get totally lost in any number of campaigns. Each race plays so distinctly differently from one another such that if you're ever bored of your current campaign there's two dozen entirely different experiences waiting for you around the corner.

The DLC system kind of sucks, but honestly, you get what you pay for. Each DLC commander (apart from the early ones) offers drastically different designs compared to the base game commanders. Think of each DLC as a sort of shakeup for whatever race they're released for. The base lords are the most basic experience you can get from each race whereas the DLC lords will often mix up the gameplay of their race in a way that sometimes feels like an entirely different game. (See: Oxyotl, Ikit Claw, Grom, Clan Eshin). Now, does it suck you have to pay for these? Yeah, totally, but these DLC packs are no slouch. I'll say this, I've bought every piece of DLC for both games and have never once questioned my decision to do so. It's your money, spend it how you like it

The actual title for this game is Total War: Warhammer II, however I think the folks at the Total War series had a slam dunk with the name I used so I'm gonna put that instead okay? So as part of the Total War series the gameplay loop is essentially Grand Strategy (campaign maps, resource management, population happiness, tech trees, etc) + RTS individual battles (you can see where each individual guy is and then you direct them around a separate battle map to fight) to form a cohesive whole of WAR! I was a huuuuuge fan of Medieval 2 many years ago and I've played a couple TW games since then but typically bounced off pretty fast - but I've put 40~ hours into this one, what's the difference? WARHAMMER IS FRICKIN AWESOME THAT'S WHAT!! Where every other TW is some humans with different colors fighting other humans in another color this game has an enormous variety of races and each of them plays pretty differently and watching all these crazy fantasy units go at it just looks and feels amazing + the campaign parts are no slouch as well.

As this is Warhammer II there is a Warhammer I, and I do own that as well - I played the "Mortal Empires" campaign that combines the maps from 1 + 2 plus all the factions as well from I to form a GIANT world map to fight over in a sandbox-style campaign and frankly it is awesome. In each game there are 4 base factions - 1 has Humans, Dwarves, Greenskins & Chaos while the second game has Lizardmen, Skaven, High Elves & Dark Elves. I did a quick mini campaign as humans and High Elves to get used to the mechanics then jumped into the game proper with Lizardmen and I have mostly completed (just a formality at this point to wrap up the last few victory conditions) one Mortal Empires campaign and DAMN did I love it to pieces. You start off with some relatively simple units (basically alligators with big sticks and thin lizards with javelins) and slowly progress your way to cooler and cooler units ending with some wild shit - I had one army that was almost entirely T-Rexes and Stegosauras - that sounds amazing right??? Well, yeah, it was. And that's really the magic of this game: building up YOUR armies and YOUR heroes then getting to watch them smash into other armies until one side gives up, followed by that ever-satisfying feeling of expanding your "color" across the world map and holding more territory. It just felt great.

The campaign layer feels juuuuust complicated enough for a game called "Total War", there's diplomacy involved between factions that can add some interesting complications and you have to keep track of a few different variables (depending on your faction anyway) so you're rarely JUST spoiling for the next fight, there's always some administrative or colonial task to keep in mind while you're moving your army pieces around. They could've very easily gone overboard with this and make it a slog (and I fear some of the other races might just be that) but for Lizardfolk at least it felt like a good balance, even giant slugfest battles can get boring if you do them too often. As you progress through the campaign you begin to fight more and more enemies of different races which keeps things feeling fresh long into your game with a world-shaking event occuring about 'halfway' through - Chaos Invasions. So there are a few Chaos-adjacent factions that are in the game that you go toe to toe with like regular enemies however at certain intervals armies of special chaos will show up and just wreck shit all over the map - and it provides an amazing and tense challenge when it does occur.

My game was played as the Lizardman Slaan Mazdamundi who I chose since he seems like the "default" Lizardman option. I tried my best to roleplay as an agent of Order - I was benevelent to humans, elves, dwarves (though I basically never encountered them) and my fellow Lizardfolk. In fact I spent HUGE chunks of the game just getting my fellow Lizardmen to ally with me rather than just have peace treaties and the other races treated me in a way that could be charitably described as "standoff-ish". The faction I picked started off in the "Central America" analog of this world with some Dark Elves to the North and much of "South America" being populated with Skaven and rogue human factions and then some vampire pirates further at the end, who I spent much of my time battling. After nearly 100 turns I was getting to be pretty unstoppable when suddenly... CHAOS ARRIVES!! Full stacks of chaos units who are tough as BALLS start showing up and absolutely annihilating the dark elves. I go in and start colonizing and wondering... what the fuck happened up here?! Then I get into some VERY tense battles with these guys and eventually form a shieldwall with my 4 armies fighting as one and I beat them!! It was amazing and then... chaos again?!?! I fought them basically to a standstill and then destroyed them, and order prevails!! I needed to do a bit more for the formal Victory conditions but... I won okay??

Total Warhammer 2 is an excellent strategy/RTS game with a compelling world and super awesome factions to control and I can't wait to drop into more areas and try to dominate the world. Slowly expanding your roster with weird and cool units and watching them RIP into the enemy is just... its beautfiful. Watching your T-rexes charge into hordes of chaos warriors and watching them get ripped to shreds is just what gaming is all about.