It would have been very hard to predict the trajectory Total War has taken. It’s grown from feudal Japanese battles and a simple board game-style campaign to this, Warhammer III, where armies can hop between realities, where daemons and ogres clash, and where troops are led by flying monstrosities – including one that’s as customisable as an RPG protagonist.
Creative Assembly has crammed plenty of surprises and oddities into this final act, clearly saving up its strangest experiments for the cataclysmic confrontation between mortals and Chaos. It goes in some strange directions, but always goes big, fully committing to Warhammer’s wonderfully over the top brand of fantasy.
The impetus for the conflict is a bearnapping. Ursun, Kislev’s hairiest deity, has been imprisoned by the daemon Be’lakor. To make matters worse for the furball, he’s also been shot with a cursed bullet by a corrupted Kislev prince. His roars of anguish open up rifts between realities, letting armies cross over to the Realm of Chaos, where they can fight to reach Ursun – some to free him, some to request a boon, and others to steal his power.
It’s a setup that leads to a very different style of campaign, where conquering the map is still encouraged but isn’t quite as important as reaching Ursun’s prison. Every 30 or so turns, rifts open up all over the map, spewing out daemonic armies and inviting mortals to enter ’s weirdest locations, culminating in massive survival battles against a daemon prince.
