Related: Everything we know about Total War: Warhammer 3 I can build fortifications, heal or buff my units, or summon new ones through a handy portal. Here comes the tower defence stuff: killing enemies and holding capture points generates ‘supplies’, which can be spent in three ways. I take the first capture point – it’s called the Icon of Ruin and I can’t stop thinking of Doom for the rest of the battle – and there’s a brief respite while I prepare for the counterattack. This is one of very few things that bugs me, but it’s necessary to give this battle the scale it needs. Enemy forces are deliberately tuned down at the start of these battles, which creates the odd spectacle of Khornate Chaos Warriors being capably dispatched by my Tzar Guard, who appear to be mid-tier infantry. I need to take and hold three capture points to progress through the map to a final showdown, where an Exalted Bloodthirster (the biggest, angriest of Khorne's daemons) awaits. Specifically, she's crashing Khorne's balmy summer retreat, the Brass Citadel. I play as Tzarina Katarin of Kislev as she leads an expedition into the Realm of Chaos.
Pitched by CA as the game's 'boss fights', survival battles crib from tower defence games to create 40-minute spectacles that, on this evidence at least, fully deliver on what the devs intend. Playing one of Total War: Warhammer III's new survival battles has made this clear to me. 20 units with fixed health and vigour have a natural lifespan, and while the healing superpowers you often get to wield go some way to extending it, they're an inelegant, partial solution. If a line of rotten shipwreck-automata blasting arm-cannons at spiky Dark Elves while a giant fish swims around your underwater battlefield doesn't make you smile, then you're as heartless as they are.īut these battles are also a mechanical fudge. It's hard to be too cynical about the climactic battles that conclude many of Total War: Warhammer II's campaigns.