Recent reviews by Snowskeeper

It's a worthy successor to the first game, in the sense that if you've got $80 CAD burning a hole in your pocket and nothing better to play you could make worse choices. The people acting like it's a messiah or something are insane, though. And I would strongly recommend having at least one other person to play it with, because a lot of the campaign missions are very clearly designed around co-op and the AI companions are dumb as hell.

The game crashed my computer for a month straight due either to the DRM or the anticheat. It still crashes it occasionally. I'm 90% sure it's the anticheat because it happens instantly when I try it normally, but when I reinstalled it or verified it only crashed when the anticheat finished loading.

Also, while people are celebrating the fact that it no longer requires a PSN account (which, yes, that's good), the game is apparently still restricted in areas where PSN accounts are not available. The game is still playable in those regions, but cannot be purchased. It is possible that this restriction will be lifted in the days ahead, and that Steam is just lagging behind to ensure that Sony isn't going to backtrack again; I will try to pay attention and update this if that is true.

I do think it's important to note, for what it's worth, that Sony is continuing to push mandatory PSN account-linking for multiplayer in other games--most notably Ghost of Tsushima. I would also note that as of now, Arrowhead's communication with the fanbase has been less than ideal. This would be frustrating at the best of times, but given this is a live service game where the developer is expected to routinely engage with fans (in this game moreso than most, given the way campaigns develop; they are controlled directly by a 'game master' on the team), bad communication is a serious problem. The development team knew that mandatory PSN linking would eventually be necessary at launch, and chose to sell the game in areas where PSN accounts were not available anyway. It's good that Sony backed down, but they could have chosen not to, and in that case people who had paid money for this game would no longer have access to it. I am not convinced that this is the last time a problem like this will occur.

So for these reasons I cannot recommend this game at this time.

Pros:
-Vocations are well-rounded and fun.
-Combat is solid, meaty, and satisfying. Lots of variety, even before you unlock the three special vocations. Of those, I've only unlocked Mystic Spearhand so far, and while I don't like it as much as I like Thief, it's miles better than any of the hybrids in the first game ever was imo.
-Game is very pretty, even on the lowest settings (which I am on).
-The quests are great.
-The game's central feature is exploration; it feels like it's been a long time since we've had one like that at this scale. I know people will point at Elden Ring, but I don't think that's accurate; while ER is an open-world game with a lot of exploration inherent to it, like. Souls games are always about the boss fights. This game is not; neither was game one. I think that at their heart they're dungeon delvers, and this game has that.
-Exploration loop is mostly good.

Cons:
-Performance. You've already seen all the other reviews, probably. It's not great. I'm also not sure it's going to get better, since as they've said it's primarily connected to how much ♥♥♥♥ is going on in the game. I don't know how they fix that without culling some of that ♥♥♥♥, which I'm pretty sure they don't want to do.
-Outfits are kind of ugly. This is especially a problem with the leggings; if you're only looking for optimal stats you're probably going to spend multiple hours in a thong. It's nice that this is at least true whether you're running a male character or not, but obviously it also affects what's in the Rift. Having to summon some obnoxiously horny freak's pawn because she was the only one around who spoke Elvish or whatever kind of sucks.
-The NPCs are kind of, like... I don't know. I'm not going to act like the NPCs in the first game were its heart and soul, but there were definitely stand-outs in the cast. Major quest NPCs were generally their own people. And a lot of the NPCs in town at least had something unique to say. That's not really the case here. I've gone up to a few sidequest NPCs after the quest and found that they were now barking generic dialogue for an NPC class that didn't even really make sense for them, among other things. There are certainly a lot of them, but I'm not convinced that's an entirely good thing, if I'm honest.
-The fact that you lose max health upon reloading a save, without regaining any of your max health loss gauge, kinda sucks. If you're not feeling that pressured, it doesn't matter, and if you are feeling pressured it can get miserable. The only way out of that loop is if you either find a campsite (unless the pawn you gave your camping set dies) or reload to the last time you rested at the inn (potentially hours of lost progress). Not super fun. Can you tell that this happened to me?

Pros:
-Excellent story.
-Great continuation of the previous game; follows up on basically everything I could have wanted it to.
-Unlike a lot of the other hosted Choice of Games games, choosing not to pursue any romances doesn't feel like it locks you out of any major content.
-Very strong character dynamics and relationships (again, even if you choose not to make any of them romantic).
-Doesn't have the problem that a lot of other CYOA games do, where it's not always clear what options require what abilities or will increase what stats; it's pretty clear from context what everything does.
-Failing at a check still generally leads to interesting outcomes; the game also often presents you with the option to panic, freak out, or faint, depending on the situation. Might not seem like much, but there were many situations where it felt like losing control like that was more appropriate to the character I was playing as, and I appreciated the option being there.
-Very effective (IMO, YMMV, etc.) portrayals of guilt, grief, mental illness, alienation, and despair. Also, just, to take the edge off that a little, there are a lot of genuinely delightful scenes in here. There's a dog park. The dog park is one of my favourite parts. If you have the chance, go to the dog park.

Cons:
-If you haven't read Fallen Hero: Rebirth, you really, really should go do that before you read through this one.
-Retribution took 5 years to come out after Rebirth, so it might take a while before entry 3 in the series arrives--and Retribution ends on a big cliffhanger. I've read off of Steam that Rydén decided halfway through Retribution that they needed to split the story into two parts, and I think that's pretty evident from the way this one ends. It's still a satisfying ending, IMO, but if you hate having to deal with cliffhangers when there's no ETA on them being resolved, this might be frustrating for you.
-There's one very major character from Rebirth who I almost never get a chance to hang out with, which is a little disappointing given how important they potentially are to your character's arc. I'm hesitant to include this, because I get the feeling that I might have been limited in that based on choices I made in the previous game, but it's a little frustrating because the game implies you're hanging out with them off-screen, and because one of the few opportunities I did have was in a situation where I would have had to actively ditch someone else to do it.

$15.49 CAD is very slightly pricier than Choice of Games games usually go for, but it's also longer than most of them are, and Malin Rydén is a fantastic writer. If you've played through Fallen Hero: Rebirth already--which, again, I am strongly encouraging you to do--you probably already know whether you agree with that or not; if you absolutely refuse to do that, then you also have the option of playing through the demo.

Night City is a fairly large area, filled with crowds of people and hundreds of quests. However, the majority of these quests (gigs and police scanner missions) involve going to a location signalled by a marker on your map, killing or knocking out a few people, picking up a text log, and then leaving. They are there to disguise the fact that there is nothing going on in Night City. It's just a pretty mask on an empty shell.

The basic gameplay is decent, but the progression systems slapped on top of that gameplay are almost all poorly-thought-out garbage. There are a bunch of interesting-sounding abilities in the stealth tree, but all of them are worthless because you can instant-kill anyone from behind by pressing a button. You could theoretically invest in a bunch of perks that boost your shooting, your survivability, your speed, or your damage, but why bother when quickhacking lets you knock anyone unconscious instantly, in slow motion, while in plain sight, without setting off any alarms, with an ability designed to be used on robots and drones? It feels cool the first few times you do it, but you can and will hit that point by the middle of the game if you invest in hacking just by doing the sidequests the game throws at you, and by the time you hit the end credits you'll have played through hours upon hours of combat where the only way to achieve even a bit of tension is to impose rules upon yourself as to what you are and aren't allowed to do.

There's also the gear system, which feels forced at the best of times and at worst feels like a ball and chain dragging the pace of the game down; the game feels at its best and most satisfying in the missions where you're controlling someone other than V, where, surprise surprise, the game is limited to a specific set of equipment and abilities that it can work around. Also it took them two years to add a transmog system, meaning that if you were trying to stay up to date on gear your V probably looked like they grabbed their outfit at random out of a bin behind some rich tacky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥'s mansion.

Also, people have been saying that the game is mostly fixed now. From what I saw and heard about the game at launch, I can believe that. After all, I only ran into several soft-locking bugs and at least two hard-locking design flaws (there are buildings with marked collectibles in them that have one-way entrances and no exits, among other things) over the course of my play through, not to mention god knows how many bugs ranging from the amusing to the irritating. CDPR has managed to successfully bring this game up to about the level of launch-day Skyrim, is the most charitable way I can think to put it. With no offence intended to the actual human beings who worked on this game, I don't think the game or the company behind it deserve an award for managing to make their $80 CAD product barely playable two years after release.

On that subject--on whether this game deserves to be called a labour of love--I'd like to remind everyone that CDPR treated its employees like absolute ♥♥♥♥ during the lead-up to its release. They proved to everyone, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the company's head office does not care about the wellbeing of the people who work for them, or about the quality of the product they're putting out. And now this game, which is supposedly meant to be critical of faceless corporations and consumerism ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over the planet and the people who live on it, has a big "LABOUR OF LOVE" sticker plastered on its store page. Because they commissioned a decent cartoon. We should be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ humiliated.

Buy it on sale, or hope it ends up in a bundle again (that's how I got my copy).

Pros:
-Gorgeous, intricate environments and characters, which change over the course of the day (in part due to your own actions, though don't expect to be making any major changes most of the time).
-Good banter between Colt and Juliana, the two main characters.
-Decent assassination puzzles, around the level of Dishonored 1's special eliminations but unravelled over a longer period of time.
-Competent gameplay (there are some interesting guns and they all feel more or less okay to fire, but gunplay can be floaty sometimes and range in particular can be very difficult to judge).
-Good story, most of the time, with a lot of little details and mysteries to pick apart. The way the story is layered over the entire island, rather than pursued linearly, helps expand the sense that this island is a more or less living place.

Cons:
-To start with the question you probably asked yourself the moment you heard this was a time loop game: yeah, some of the stuff they want you to do does get repetitive after a while, especially if you're not succeeding at every task on your first try. This is especially a problem with things that take more than one part of the day to set up, since you'll have to redo every part before it in order to get it right.
-Powers are mostly recycled from the Dishonored games. They were good there and they're still good here, but they're not particularly novel.
-Assassination targets are a little flat, personality-wise. This isn't the biggest problem in the world, but given how long you spend learning about them and how many times you're going to end up killing them (often in the exact same way), it's a little disappointing.
-The multiplayer is probably great if all you're here for is the PVP, but if you're actually trying to get anything done as Colt, it ranges from "frustrating but potentially rewarding" to "day-ruiningly bad." It's very clearly modelled on Dark Souls' PVP invasion system, but Dark Souls gives the host a significant advantage over invaders, and death in Dark Souls is not particularly punishing. In Deathloop, Colt has some of his advantages taken away when an invader shows up (crouching and leaning are significantly less effective against humans, and the invader can tag you for NPCs), and dying three times ends the current loop. Getting invaded at the wrong time by someone who knows their ♥♥♥♥ better than you do can mean losing over an hour of work in some cases--not just setting up assassinations, but also collecting loot, which you need to expend a currency on to preserve beyond the end of the current loop. While you can only be invaded once per loop, there's no cooldown period between invasions, so if an invader wipes you out at the beginning of one loop and you try to start another, it's entirely possible you'll immediately be invaded and killed again. The one saving grace of this system, IMO, is that if/when you decide it's too frustrating to live with for normal play, you can disable it very easily from the between-zones loadout screen.

Overall I'd say it's, like... Solidly fine. It's a very experimental game, and I think most of the experiments worked out okay. The big one that didn't IMO is the invasion mechanic, and you can at least disable that. I would personally not pay $80 CAD for it, though.

Alright, let's get this over with.

PROS:
-One of the best worlds in any MMO. The world-building is top-notch, the lore is very fun to theorise about and experiment with, and there's plenty of stuff to explore and think about.
-Decent combat system. You may see other players complaining that it was lobotomised from the original or that the new game is too easy. It is very easy, but the combat system was never the main appeal of this game, and IMO the combat system in TSW was overly complicated and obtuse. In this game it's fairly easy to create a build that feels satisfying to play, although there's not a huge amount of mechanical depth in contrast to something like Final Fantasy XIV, unfortunately.
-Lots of story content, freely available. You can complete this game very comfortably without paying a cent, and there's plenty of stuff to experience.
-Extremely flavour-rich. This is an extremely unusual setting for an MMO, and they do a lot with it; you'll run into communist gnomes and Lovecraftian zombie Vikings. The game also does a very good job of maintaining a strong atmosphere throughout; this is especially true in the first zone, Solomon Island, and in the second-to-last zone, Kaidan.
-The people who still play this game are very friendly and dedicated, and will absolutely help you get situated if you decide to try it out despite its current state.

CONS:
-Middling story. This is going to be controversial, because the story is often what people talk about when they recommend this game, and, like. By MMO standards, it really is really good! But I think a lot of what people are thinking of when they talk about its story is the setting and the lore. There are some fun characters, but very few of them are actually relevant for longer than (their) three missions. There are some fun plot threads in the story, but these are often dropped, or carried through for hours without being resolved. Who cares how much fun lore there is about the vampires if at the end of the day the only function they really serve in the story is to get beat up by the player for a few hours and then to never appear again? Add onto this the fact that the current conclusion to the story in South Africa is one of the most frustrating and least satisfying experiences I've had with a story I otherwise like, and like. I just can't really recommend this game based on its story anymore? Especially not in a world that also has Star Wars: The Old Republic's main campaign, and the entirety of Final Fantasy XIV, which you could be spending your time with instead.
-Also, like... The majority of the missions look like this:
--Short cutscene where characters say things that are often completely unrelated to what you're going to end up doing.
--Kill thing; pick up drop; bring drop to place.
--Get exp and money
--Get short funny/lore-y message from handler (although these are often copy-pastes). I really like these messages (at one point I was trying to transcribe them in a Google doc so I could reference them more easily for lore theorising), but they're not substantial, and given how many times you're going to see the copy-paste, like. I dunno man.
--There are exceptions to this; the Investigation missions in particular are great. But they're a third of the game. And on the complete other side you have the Sabotage missions, which utilize, y'know, very standard MMO stealth mechanics. There are missions that stand out here, but there are also severe, soft-locking bugs in many of them that have been here since the launch of the original game, and which still haven't been fixed.
-Also, the main source of replayable content for gearing in this MMO is redoing the above-mentioned missions. Those missions are also on a cooldown which lasts for over a day. For endgame content you can also do elite dungeons and the (one, singular) raid in the game, if you like, but you'd need to find a group for that, and the game is dying hard.
-Just to reiterate that more formally: the game is, for all intents and purposes, dead. People still play it--it'd be a shock if they didn't, given this is a rerelease of one of the most popular MMOs out there; there are still people playing the original version, even--but there hasn't been a major update since a balance patch a couple years ago, and, like. Honestly, knowing how excited I was for this re-release and how much I loved both versions of this game, it kind of hurts my heart reading some of the recent event newsposts.
-This wasn't a very good rerelease. It was a lot more accessible, and the changes to the combat system are more of a sidegrade than anything, but it was also a lot more heavily monetized, and while some of those problems have been fixed (you used to not be able to get more than one drop from a dungeon a day, unless you had a subscription, in which case if I'm remembering properly you could get two), others have not. There's also just. Still content missing that was in the original game. Which is especially weird because the only original story content in this game explicitly references that missing content.

You can probably see that I waited a long time to write this. I was holding out hope for a very long time that they'd manage to somehow pull back from the brink, and even after it became clear that they weren't going to be able to I just really did not want to kick a dead horse, I guess. But, y'know, Funcom is talking about releasing a new licensed survival game now, and they've been nickle-and-diming the people who play Conan Exiles for god knows how much at this point, so I figured it was time. I do feel like there was genuine passion for this story even during the re-release; I watched a lot of the streams surrounding it and it felt like the community managers and developers were still genuinely in love with the setting. They talked a lot about how a free-to-play re-release was the only way they were going to be allowed to keep writing it, because the original game was seriously underperforming by Funcom's investors' standards, and I believe them. This thing had developers and writers who were actively part of the Twitter roleplay scene at one point. If any of the people who worked on this game are reading this, thanks, and I'm sorry it ended this way.

Pros:
-Story is well-told. I'm going to list the story itself as a negative later, but it's integrated with gameplay fairly well. I was invested in learning more about the world and its characters, at least for a while, and what broke me out of that was the individual elements of the story, not the way it was being presented.
-English voice acting ranges from good to competent. The lip-syncing and body movements are frequently off, but, like, given how detailed the animations are I can't really fault that.
-The game is absolutely gorgeous, and the designs are fantastic.
-The puzzles aren't terrible. Occasionally they're very obtuse, but often that's just a consequence of the solution being a lot more obvious than the game presents it as being.

Cons:
-The story, despite being well-told, is pretty bad. Some elements only get frustrating if you spend too long thinking about them; others, especially the ending, are very obviously poorly-thought-out from the moment you experience them. This game leans very heavily on its story, so that is a major problem. And don't expect anything to be resolved; the game ends on a sequel hook.
-It's not very well-optimized. I also ran into a number of glitches, including one that resulted in my save file becoming unplayable. Fortunately the game keeps backup saves of each checkpoint which are accessible from the pause menu, so I didn't have to completely start over (this review would probably be a lot harsher if it had).
-Doesn't do much with its mechanics. I mean, it's an 11-hour game, and half that is spent playing as somebody who doesn't even have most of your main character's playset, so obviously, right?

Summary:

Overall there are some elements to this game that make the rest of it very difficult to enjoy. The ending in particular feels like they ran out of room in the plot, or like they suddenly realized they hadn't wrapped back to the intro yet. It really is a gorgeous game, and I don't want to diminish the work the developers must have put into making it, but given how focused on its story the game is (the majority of your time playing it will be spent listening to dialogue), I can't recommend this game at $60 CAD.

For what it's worth re: scares, this is an adventure game first and a horror game second. There are some disturbing themes, and like in a lot of horror they're mishandled, but for the most part the emphasis is on exploring and solving puzzles. On jump-scares specifically, I think there was a grand total of like one in the entire thing. It was pretty egregious, but again, it was the only one.

Pros:
-Interesting moral dilemmas.
-Good characters.
-Decent world.
-Gorgeous sets.
-Excellent sound design.
-Competent gameplay.
-Jokes mostly land well.

Cons:
-Story is bland, and for the most part the only thing that will affect the ending is whether you have certain skills raised above a certain level. Despite the moral nuance present in most other parts of the game, the story's core moral decision effectively comes down to "choose between being an evil bastard and not being that," and, y'know, that kinda sucks. I also didn't feel particularly invested in the overall objective, but I'm not sure if that was the game's fault.
-Very few environments feel "lived in." They mostly feel like sets for the player to wander around in.
-Game's conclusion is unsatisfying.
-Return of the "oh, random stranger said two things, I'm going to change my entire life philosophy" school of dialogue check.
-If you've had problems with Obsidian's mode of presenting choices in the past, you probably still will here. For the most part it's not as obnoxious as, for instance, Tyranny was (there aren't any situations where you can learn something, go to an NPC and try to tell them about it, discover that there are no dialogue options to talk to them about it, continue with what you were doing, and then get yelled at for not telling them about it later in the story, for instance), but there are some pretty major instances.

Overall, definitely worth playing, but I wouldn't pay full price ($80 CAD) for it, and frankly some of the game's best content is in Peril on Gorgon.

tl;dr: It's a really, really good RTS, with great visual design, fun combat, good unit variety, a ridiculous price-tag, and a somewhat frustrating (for a variety of reasons) overworld. Wait for a sale, but do grab it if it sounds at all interesting to you.

Actual review:
So I think at this point in Total Warhammer II's development cycle, it's fair to assume that many of the people coming here have not already purchased game 1. Which is good, because this game is the superior version in every way that matters. I do think it's genuinely good, and I think that while it does have some problems, overall they aren't nearly enough to justify a "no" recommendation.

That said, I'm going to start with the cons first, because if you're looking at a review made this late in the cycle rather than one of the top-rated ones, you're probably more interested in them.

CONS:
-The DLC. Oh man, the DLC. You've probably already seen it. You've probably already gone, "oh ♥♥♥♥, the game's already $70 CAD, and now they're asking me to pay how much to get the complete version? Is that a blood and gore pack?!"
It's actually worse than it looks at first glance, because if you want the real complete game, you also need to buy game 1 to unlock the Mortal Empires campaign. The Mortal Empires campaign smushes together game 1 and game 2's maps, to create one really big super-map with all factions from both games. Of course, if you want to play all of game 1's factions, you'll also need to buy all of game 1's DLC.
I honestly don't mind this as much as I probably should. I think a large part of that is the fact that when 2 came out, I already had game 1 and all of its DLC, so to me it was basically like 2 was being released as this massive expansion pack for 1, with updated graphics and mechanics. I still sort of think of it that way, in the sense that if you accept that $20 for a new faction is reasonable, then $70 for four factions and a massive addition to the map is also probably reasonable. I do think that's overpriced, but I've put hundreds of hours into this game, and it's the one I constantly return to time and time again when I can't decide what to play.
For what it's worth, a fairly large free patch featuring faction reworks and large-scale mechanical changes, along with a free lord, has been added alongside every DLC pack so far. If you decide all you want is the base game, and nothing else, you're not going to be trapped in limbo or anything. But you're going to be missing a lot of stuff, and the game is going to make sure you know.
-There are fairly severe optimization problems.
-The overworld's gameplay is... Fairly simple? Diplomacy is basically limited to a sliding scale of alliances, and while there is trade, it's basically just an alternative source of income. And once you've got a fairly sizeble empire, a lot of the time the overworld strategy feels like running around putting out fires on the campaign map as enemies just sort of jump on you from every angle. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you enjoy that kind of gameplay, and you can still usually steamroll through most other factions by the time you get to that point (although there is an acknowledged problem with Order factions aligning with each other to the point where they curbstomp everybody else, and with the Orc factions gathering so much momentum early on that it becomes basically impossible to stop them), but especially if you're still learning it can be frustrating.
The lack of complexity, for the record, is not something that defines the game as a whole; the overworld is just very much designed as a vessel to contain and enable the battles.

That's pretty much it for cons.

Pros:
-A strong RTS, with a wide variety of viable army builds. Mechanics focus around large units of soldiers, usually somewhere between 80 and 120 troops at max unit size. Rather than directing the actions of individual soldiers (which would be ridiculous, since battles usually feature between 1000-2000 bodies per army involved), you direct the actions of individual units. If you've ever played a Total War game (or any other kind of 'medieval' RTS), you're probably expecting cavalry, archers and infantry, and those are here, but there are also various kinds of fantasy units, such as dragons, giant bats, massive mutated vampires, and whatever you want to call the Hellpit Abomination. Armies are led by 'lords.' Unlike other Total War games, lords do not have bodyguard units; they're basically on their own. Also unlike other Total War games, lords do not need bodyguards. Any lord who isn't a wizard (I'll get to magic later) is probably able to take on entire units by themself in melee combat, because this is an epic fantasy, and defeating hundreds of people (or zombie pirates or ancient Egyptian skeletons or whatever) by yourself in one battle is par for the course.
-Fantastic visual design (and excellent music); I'm still noticing little design elements on characters and cities 500 hours in.
-Wide variety of factions and consistent support (which, I mean, given it's still running $80 CAD this far into its development cycle it better still be getting supported). My two favourite factions, and the ones I'd recommend otherwise, are unfortunately locked behind DLC. We've talked about that. But even in the base game, you'll find a lot of interesting characters with diverse playstyles and mechanics (and also the Lizardmen). Skaven can build settlements underneath the settlements of other factions. Dark Elves are encouraged to go raiding in order to, erm, recruit involuntary labourers, which can then be used to boost your economy (and cause revolts, which you can then use to acquire even more involuntary labourers). High Elves have a resource that allows them to manipulate diplomatic relationships with other factions. Lizardmen have a mechanic that as far as I can tell nobody pays attention to (to the point that one of their major post-release factions just straight-up doesn't even have it), and desperately needs a rework, but they do have giant dinosaurs, so that pretty much makes up for it on its own.
-Alongside its fairly regular DLC launches, there are always major faction/mechanical reworks and at least one free "legendary lord" (faction leader characters with unique mechanics and buffs).
-Fairly interesting magic system? Like alongside the 'normal' combat lords, you also have wizard lords, and you can also recruit wizard 'heroes' into your armies. Everybody but the dwarves has access to magic in some form. Spells are a mix of buffs, debuffs, and straight damage. If you see a formation of massed heavy infantry, send a spell over it and you'll turn large portions of it to chunky salsa. If one of your units is struggling, cast a spell, and give them a better chance of holding out. Facing a superior force with poor morale? Focus hard on their leader with single-target spells, and you might be able to force them to route. Magic adds a lot of tactical options, at the cost of having a relatively bad fighter taking up a unit or lord slot.
-I know I've already talked about visual design, but man, it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joy to watch in motion. I've long since come to terms with the fact that the 'real' reason I enjoy strategy games has nothing to do with strategy; I love them for the spectacle. I like watching armies clash up against each other, I like watching explosions go off in their midst, and I love watching giant monsters crashing into lines of swordsmen and sending them flying every-which-way. It's horrible, but it's also why every fantasy movie has been trying to be LotR for years now. I don't think any game series manages to capture that feeling the way Total War does, and aside from Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai, I don't think any Total War game manages it quite like Warhammer 2.

I enjoy it; I recommend it; it's good. Grab it if it's on sale.