BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

Battle in TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III isn’t just about winning or losing—it’s a fight for survival

- Fraser Brown

After five years, we’re nearing the end of our journey through the battlefields of Total War: Warhammer. With the third and final game, we can at last play as and against the daemonic hordes of the Chaos gods, and for this conclusion Creative Assembly still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. In my first foray into the latest game, I found myself facing an endless horde of these monstrosities, slicing my way through them in a completely new kind of Total War brawl.

Survival battles are an evolution of the quest battles introduced in the previous Warhammer games, where you face a bespoke challenge on an extra fancy map. As the name suggests, you’ll need to deal with relentless waves of enemies as you try to reach your goal—a beefy boss encounter—but thankfully you’ll have a lot of help. Fortifications, reinforcements and buffs can all be summoned by spending supplies, earned through slaughter, giving you more things to manage, yes, but also more ways out of a scrape.

“These are very seminal moments in the narrative arc from the campaign game,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “They’re all effectively boss battles, where you’ve gone through a chunk of gameplay and this is the final part towards completing that area in the campaign narrative. So they really fit that bill and give it that climactic moment, as well as just providing an awesome opportunity to look at the Chaos Realms in more detail.”

DEVILISH