Total War: Three Kingdoms

Contains very little actual romance

- Ian Evenden

AFTER THE STRIPPED-BACK nature of Thrones of Britannia comes the full-fat, heavyweight, no-holds-barred game. Three Kingdoms is as expansive as the name suggests, taking inspiration from a 14th-century historical novel chronicling the events at the end of the Han dynasty and the steps toward Chinese unification.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel contains nearly 1,000 characters and 800,000 words, and it feels like the game does, too. On the surface is the classic Total War structure: a turn-based strategy game in which armies and generals prowl the map, capturing cities and building them up, before rooting out enemies and rebellions, and a real-time tactical battle game when armies clash.