Before the qualities (or lack thereof) of this videogame can even be discussed, it is important to bring up the cost. I am writing this on the evening of the 25th of November, 2025; in a little over a week, on the 4th of December, the next DLC "Tides of Torment" will be released. To access everything in this game, you need to buy 3 STILL RETAIL PRICE games (that are 9, 7, and 3 years old respectively), for a total of $179.97. Once the base games are accounted for, if you scroll up the page a bit, you will see they have conveniently consolidated all 3 games DLC on this store page (minus Blood for the Blood God I and II which you don't need unless you want to go back and play the previous 2 games with blood effects), for a total of $319.22. This puts the total cost of Total War: Warhammer III at $499.19, before any online sales taxes, and not accounting for the previous two blood packs.

When Tides of Torment releases on the 4th of December, Warhammer III will breach the $500 threshold, coming in at $526.16. It should be common sense that NO videogame that has ever been released, or ever will be released, is worth $500. There may be other grand strategy game players, simulator game players, and gacha game players that would argue that this is okay because some of their games can end up more expensive than this one. To them I would say, it is wrong when developers/publishers do it to you and your communities, and it is wrong when they do it to Total War players as well. Additionally, actual tabletop wargamers that play these Games Workshop produced miniature games (Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Warhammer the Old World, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and Warhammer 40,000) will frequently claim that this game is a "value pack" considering the amount of factions contained within that $500, compared to the cost of a singular army of actual tabletop miniatures and materials to assemble/paint them. To them I would say, GW has led you around by the nose for 42 YEARS now, and your perspectives of both time and value are completely irreparably damaged.


It's bad.

More specifically, it might very well be the greatest Warhammer: Fantasy Battles videogame ever released (low bar). However as a Total War game, it is marinated in the bile of Total War: Rome II, and suffers many similar problems due to that. I will list off several things that come to mind, however there are more valid complaints than can be typed in a reasonable amount of time.

This is primarily a single player game (I will touch on multiplayer aspects later), most of your time will be spent engaging with AI opponents of two different flavors. The Battle AI is absolutely feckless. On offense it forms a long single line and runs straight at you with no regard to the terrain, nor their opponents or their own army composition. This results in it forming giant blobs of its own units which are easily blasted into paste with ranged fire and spells. On defense it forms a long single line and sits there doing nothing until the player either weighs a flank (which causes the AI to pivot its whole force), or it takes enough damage from projectiles of any variety to cause it to flip into its offense mode detailed above. The Campaign AI is absolutely craven. It spends its time sitting in walled settlements, sitting on units it recruited in the first 5 turns of the campaign because it can't disband them. It does this until it is in a state of war, where it decides to actively avoid enemy armies on the field, and go hit undefended, unwalled, minor settlements instead. It will only ever engage in a pitched battle if it perceives the autoresolve value to be in their favor before the armies actually make contact (the AI doesn't have fog of war and can see everything that isn't in ambush stance at all times, so it doesn't need any reconnaissance). The only time you will ever face it on the field is if you bait it with an ambush, or it has formed a big blob of armies and is moving them all together.

Despite being "the biggest Total War map ever", the Immortal Empires map (the only singleplayer mode anyone will play, I am not even going to discuss Realms of Chaos in this review) is so condensed that it doesn't feel very big at all. Unless you are in a Jungle biome (which lowers armies movement by default), most settlements in the game are only 1 turn of movement away from each other. If you combine the AI's craven, avoidant behavior with the density of settlements, it results in the problem that everyone complains about more than anything else.

The siege battle situation in this game is unacceptable. The frequency of these sieges are caused by the reasons I listed above. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if this battle type was actually fun; but the battle AI's passivity plus its terrible pathfinding, settlement layouts, stupid building and capture point mechanics, and bugs (primarily with the gatehouses and getting on and off wall segments) do everything in their power to make that not the case. The other problem is that the player is on offense 95% of these battles because the cowardly AI refuses to attack the player's hardpoints unless they have 4 stacks rolling together. I don't think that the solution to this problem is "remove sieges" as so many like to say, I think CA needs to take a hard look at Total War: Shogun II, and Total War: Medieval II, and use those two game's sieges as a baseline to build from.

Despite the singleplayer focus of the game, it has multiplayer. On paper, a game like this should be a wonderful multiplayer experience, but once again there is a factor in play to prevent this from being the case. The main issue is the complete lack of servers. All of the connections in this game are done peer to peer, and as a result whenever ping is involved, the game quickly turns into Warhammer III the interactive slideshow. The way the game handles latency hasn't changed since Total War: Rome from 2004, it sloooooows down, and depending on how bad the latency is, it will just stop.

You can do multiplayer campaigns, which could be fun if you aren't playing with somebody from another country, or somebody who has poor quality internet. The more players you add to one of these campaigns (it goes up to 8) the worse it gets, as everybody is directly connecting to each other, rather than a server to sync the gamestate. In the previous titles, the maximum was 2 players in a multiplayer campaign, so the additional players is cool in theory. They also made it to where you can do your turns simultaneously, which is awesome until two players go to war with each other, and then it becomes a frantic clicking match as a TURN BASED CAMPAIGN MAP goes realtime.

This community is split in 3 ways. The first split is between those who use the games built in matchmaking, and those who join insular Discord communities based around the tournament scene. The second split is between those Discord communities, between the newer Domination game mode, and the traditional land battle game mode (which is now doing Conquest mode instead). There is no siege battle focused community like there was in the heyday of Medieval II, this is because siege battles are terrible. The same latency problems are in play here, and on top of that now you're picking to play with either: automatch scumbags who spend their time abusing the lack of rules, or Discord eSports people who want to regulate you to death.

If you don't have ANY of this games content, don't buy in. If you disregard that advice, buy in on sale. I am stuck in the sunk cost fallacy, be warned.

This is one of those games where I wish steam reviews weren't just a simple Yes or No recommendation.

At its core, TW:Warhammer III is a good game that stands out from games in other Total War series due to its variety and uniqueness of factions, units, and playstyles. Even if you're not into the Warhammer franchise, you can enjoy this game if you're into strategy, big battles, and fantasy. The sound is good, the visuals are good, the voice acting is great. The battles can be very entertaining.

I like the game, I really do. However, I just can't RECOMMEND buying the game for people new to the series.

Let's get this out of the way first. The DLC situation with this game is particularly egregious. Even if you paid full price for this game, you only get a fraction of the factions unlocked. And even those unlocked factions in the base game aren't fully unlocked, portions of it, legendary lords (which determine your starting point and playstyle) and even some upper tier units, are locked behind DLC. The DLCs combined for Warhammer III can cost you way more than twice as much as the base game. But let's say you like the game, you decide to buy all the DLCs for the WH3... and yet, you still don't have everything unlocked. Why? Because not only do you need to buy all the DLCS for WH3, you need to buy Warhammer 1 AND Warhammer 2 AND all their respective DLCs in order unlock everything. In addition, they don't support cross platform, so if you have WH2 on epic and WH3 on steam, guess what? You gotta rebuy WH2 on steam just to unlock the stuff for WH3.

But let's say you're mister/missus money bags and you don't mind spending a couple hundred dollars to unlock things in the game. There are many minor (not game crashing) bugs and bad design choices that aren't terrible on their own but are horrible when they all come together. Not all factions are equal, and understandably so, as it's difficult to perfectly balance a game around all these factions and legendary lords that can completely change how you play a faction, but those are not the bad design choices I'm talking about. For example, in the previous games, minor settlements can gain walls if you built the correct building and upgraded it. Certain factions were unable to do this but gained other advantages to make up for their lack of walls. In WH3, they've completely done away with gaining walls in minor settlements for every faction without making up for it. As another design choice, they've nerfed the garrisons defending your settlements. By design, the AI, to compensate for not playing as smart as a human, gets more resources and have less upkeep, which allows them to field more armies than you (and the higher the difficulty, the more resources and less upkeep). This results in the AI generally being in more places and able to just steamroll your minor settlements, regardless of your defensive buildings, if you don't have an army babysitting it (and most factions can't support having an army babysitting every settlement). In the previous games, the walls forced them to siege your minor settlements buying you time to get an army over to save the settlement, but in WH3, it's like playing Whack a Mole with all their armies running around going for your undefended bits, which quickly gets very tedious. It wouldn't even be so bad if your major walled settlements were choke points or something, but no, the AI just waltzes on by. Just a bunch of bad design choices coming together to make a horrible (and very common) situation.

There's also all these weird (but not game crashing) bugs that just ruin things sometimes. The more commonly noticeable one is when the AI gathers several armies around a town and... just sits there doing nothing (for possibly the entire game). And this is a VERY common occurrence. The other more commonly noticeable (well, if you play with a faction with ranged units) is that sometimes your ranged units just stop firing at will. They'll shoot if you manually tell them to attack a target but that defeats the purpose of firing at will. They could have clear line of sight to the target, no obstacles, on a flat plain, with ammo, in range, and they just won't fire at will. This makes things particularly unpleasant if you're playing a range heavy faction and downright cost you some battles if you're in a big battle and you don't notice your ranged units doing absolutely nothing because you were busy micromanaging another part of the battle. Even melee units will have brain farts at times where you order them to engage/chase an enemy unit and they just walk in and stare while the enemy is busy whacking away at them or just follow (and not attack) the enemy that's running away even though your unit is faster and should be cutting them down while running.

I could go on but this review is long enough as it is. I like the game but I just can't quite recommend it buying it especially if you're new to the series. I understand companies need to make money, but it just doesn't feel like the value is worth how much they're charging. Some people can argue that just the base game alone is worth it but you definitely feel the difference when you play a base game faction and find out some of your unit roster is locked behind DLC. And if you're expecting people to spend hundreds of dollars, at least try to keep it as bug free as possible.

whole reason i got a gaming pc. such a great game and cant wait to see what comes next