Recent reviews by Xether

Disappointing. Ultimate map painting game, just save up your special mana points and instantly change provinces to your culture and religion. Will wait until 50% off and patched and balanced before giving it another chance as this game does show promise if they made it more difficult.

Very good classic

You get to smother a baby and your party really isn't that bothered.

A classic. 10/10. Beautiful artwork. Beautiful music. I enjoyed the lore and campaign storyline. Very high replayability with using skirmish and lots of races.

Very good value for what you get. Not only do you get a bunch of new units for orks and dwarves but you also unlock 3 new factions in grand campaign!

No idea of the mixed reviews i was really expecting atleast positive on average. This really is the best total war i ever played and this is from playing the original shogun when released and every other release since then. Honourable mention of playing Horned rat and Dark Omen religiously.

I have currently played 5 hours of empire campaign and obviously as i play i will change or add stuff to this review. I will make it short and sweet for the moment.

Firstly diplomacy i feel is alot more responsive then in other total war games. The AI when getting crushed will offer favourable peace terms. It will offer to help go to war with other nations your at war with for gold. It seems to offer trade deals much more frequent then in other games. I feel its at a good place because in previous total war games the AI will barely ever agree to trade unless it totally benefits them, never join your wars, only accept white peace even if totally crushed.

Secondly early unit variety is really good. In previous total war games the campaign was a utter bore where everyone started with milita units and you had spend retarded amount of gold to slowly get up from milita to basic swordsman and even more insane amount of gold to get to the next stage of unit progression. In Warhammer? Well for the Empire i already start with swordsmen, halberdiers, spearmen, gunners, crossbowmen, imperial knights. Then a few turns later i got pistolers, greatswordsman and mortars. If i was playing Rome i just bloody have peasent milita and auxillaries for the first 20 turns. The not to mention the biggest change in this game; heroes. They act like Kensai in shogun where they are a 1 man army. It so awesome with all the different spells, skills and item customization and mount customization this is a giant step in the right direction for total war series.

Thirdly the games economy seems to be alot better compared to other total wars. Before, a 20 unit stack would hurt your economy in the beginning quite badly but in my current game i have 2 20 unit stacks and 3 8 unit stacks and i still have 1000 gold a turn income. This game offers the ability to make more armies so the grand scale of things seem alot bigger. Also buildings are quite cheap allowing you to field armies alot easier rather then having to hoard so much money for a simple upgrade.

And to end with i have to say the graphics and the physics are brilliant. People fly around when getting hit by trolls. Cavalry charges totally mince enemies with bodies flying in the opposing direction. Magic looks beautiful and so do the maps. Siege maps look beautiful all the buildings and walls look great.

No crashes yet. No FPS drops.I have a average PC and been playing on high. This is probably the best vanilla release they ever done.

9.5/10

Just completed the Campaign and have spent 60 hours in the beta doing Skirmish and Muti so i thought it be a good time to give a review.

Firstly the graphics look fantastic and the game runs very well on my rather average PC. All the ships look just how they do in table top. The imperial ships look so beautiful with all the tall spires and cathedrals. The map designs look gorgeous with planets, suns, asteroid fields, ice crystals and my fav being the blackhole map that reminds me so much of the movie intersellar. I've experienced 2 crashes in my 85 hours of playthrough and both instances happened during the beta so im happy that they have dealt with the little problem.

Secondly the campaign is brilliant. I think the voice actors done a very good job and speak in the way you expect people in the 40k universe to speak. The campaign was long and took me just over 40 turns to do but every turn had some form of speech by someone of some incident happening or some big bad coming into the system. The cinematics are truely awesome and really keep close to the lore. i really love the art design and music with chapter 2 "entering the warp" scene where the crew are praying being a masterpiece.

I did the campaign on normal and i can say its just about the right difficulty (For someone like me that likes hard games) any higher and i could see myself throwing the mouse or keyboard at the wall mainly due to how random the campaign can be. The problem being is that every time you replay and load the same mission your enemy will have a completely different set up and be in completely different location on a completely different map (asteroids, mines and gas being in different locations). This can pretty much make you win or lose automaticly depending on the mission and it can be incredibly annoying when everything is stacked against you because of the RNG. All you can do is restart and load the mission up. This really is the only bad thing i can say about the game. Hell, i even lost the first mission because the first shot the defence platform did after the shields went down critical hitted me and took my generator offline and then took double the time to warp out as abaddons 100 ships slapped me down hard.

Thirdly the balance of skirmish and multi is completely fine. For those of you who were not in the beta you have no idea how bad it was back then. You had Eldar Holofields that worked even better then they do now. You had insanely OP Assault boats that at the time made Chaos the go to race. You had insanely OP Taunt that was auto win when playing Orks. You had Nova Cannon that didn't even show up on the map and fired alot faster. There was alot of things that have been sorted out and balanced and right now things are pretty much good. Some work probably has to be done on Eldar but for everyone else it is near enough perfect. Literally all it comes down to is "Git Gud" for the most part.

The Micro in the game is perfect balance of not requiring to be a korean SC2 God and good enough that the game isn't a "a" and left click game. You can choose all the options that you want the computer to do for you by right clicking on all the skills you don't want to personally control yourself. Boarding and lightning strikes is usually a good one to do for new players. Ships are very slow even as Eldar so i can say that game is rather slow paced and not that many ships you have plenty of time to do all your skills and planning. If the game is still to micro intense for you? Just press space bar and it slows the game right down for everyone. There is literally no way i can see people complain about micro in this game. The only theory i have is that they are LOL kiddies that are so use to playing just 1 character with 4 abilities that when they come to a game where you have control 3-4 "characters" they instantly get anal prolapse.

8.5/10 - Campaign battle balance rather off as its pure RNG. Alliance battles and data collecting are awful. If you get Both in the same battle.. Pray to the Emperor. Tiny bit of race balancing needs work. Other then that a brilliant game. A must buy if you love the 40k universe. You won't be dissapointed. Can't wait for the space marine DLC.