TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III

Making the Old World feel young again.

- By Matt Elliott

Around a year ago, Creative Assembly released a grand cinematic trailer to commemorate the full release of Immortal Empires: a game mode that fuses together every campaign map from the Total War: Warhammer franchise. The trailer serves almost no functional purpose: instead, it's crammed with the sort of narrative moments that make Warhammer obsessives go glassy eyed, the significance of which would likely take me another article to explain: there's Grombrindal and Tyrion fighting back to back; Gotrek and Felix standing off against Skarbrand; and haughty elf lord Teclis accidentally dropping a racial slur in front of the Dwarf High King. Marvel fans have Captain America brandishing Thor's hammer in Avengers:

Endgame; we have Richard Ridings, voice of Daddy Pig and Thorgrim Grudgebearer, losing his shit because an elf accidentally said 'short'. It's a tragedy that we'll never have a YouTube reaction video it deserves.

It's a huge, flashy, cinematic moment, but it's not just bombast. Immortal Empires is the largest Total War campaign ever, both in terms of physical map size and number of factions. When you fire up a new campaign for the first time, there are over 272 factions, the weakest of which, admittedly, will be eradicated by turn ten, devoured by more powerful armies like shrimp dip at an ogre wedding. If you have the DLC and previous iterations, an excessive 96 of these factions are playable at the start; a number I refuse to check because I don't want it not to be true.

Whatever you think about Creative Assembly's DLC pricing model, let's recognise this for what it is: the most absurdly detailed representation of Warhammer's Old World in any media, epic in sweep, dizzying in scope, and a method of play that didn't exist when the game was first released in 2022.