➤ Dinosaurs and rats in Total War: Warhammer II review 🎮

For years, the Warhammer license has been mistreated, offering gamers mediocre and easily forgotten titles, with rare exceptions. Lately, however, there has been a reversal of trend, with some productions capable of elevating themselves to real pearls of the genre they belong to with Total War: Warhammer to certainly be the standard bearer. The first chapter of the trilogy, released last year, marked an important step for Creative Assembly which, for the first time ever, found itself having to manage not only entire humanoid armies but also monsters with the strangest features, spells and pure a fantasy game world that fans are very attached to. It is therefore incredible how, despite all these difficulties, the experience gained with the various historical Total War was still sufficient to package a complete and particularly satisfying product, the first of a series of packages that will accompany us at least until 2019. Today is the time to go into more detail of Total War: Warhammer II, a direct follow-up to the chapter seen last year that expands the old world bringing four new races and new continents as a dowry, as well as renewed mechanics and some small tweaks to the gameplay .

Let's shine our shoes

The new setting takes us directly to the lands of Ulthuan and Lustria where lush forests await and valiant armies prepare for an impending global battle. The whirlwind of winds of magic has been unleashed and Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves and Lizardmen, each with different intentions and purposes, intend to take control. It goes without saying that in this circumstance the old pacts will fail and the war will come to a head. It is an incipit without particular air to tell the truth but it is the perfect basis to immediately introduce the most important mechanics of this Total War: Warhammer 2. Unlike the first chapter, or perhaps it would be better to say in addition, now the victory conditions of the campaign will not only focus on total control of the territory but also on the management of the vortex precisely, an element that alters the rhythms of the game by forcing the player with continuous sorties, preventing him from entrenching himself in a specific area waiting to recover enough forces and troops to launch a decisive assault. The attack and the disturbing actions therefore become very important since to get to control the vortex it will be necessary to go through five specific rituals, in a race towards the goal where all the opponents compete at the same time. In the upper part of the interface a progression bar appears that grows and fills up by accumulating the resources of the rituals, obtainable in different ways. There are specific buildings to be built that give you a fixed entrance but there are areas and camps that can provide you with a large quantity in a short time, objectives of primary importance to achieve final victory. It will therefore be very important to plan with due care which regions to conquer first, in an attempt to grab the precious rewards of the rituals. Artificial intelligence has evolved properly and new routines have been inserted precisely to put a spoke in the wheel of the player. At the beginning of each ritual the forces of Chaos will awaken trying to interrupt it, forcing you, once again, to an equal defense of your territories. It is a further level of depth compared to what we tasted in the first chapter that satisfies us and that, even if it channels the player towards a less free way to play, it also traces a campaign that is easier to follow and even more suitable for novices. Starting to follow the series from this second chapter is in fact absolutely possible given that the plot is independently supported and the new races, with all their pros and cons, are a novelty both for those who arrive on the servers for the first time and for the veterans.

Eight new faces

We were particularly pleased with the difficulty curve of Total War: Warhammer II as it is malleable and adaptable to every need. You can start with any race and hero by choosing from the canonical levels of difficulty, then deciding to rely on the tutorial or let experience guide you, with eight initial heroes able to further vary the pitfalls according to the different areas of start on the game map. The title deftly guides you through all the news and the campaign is studded with side missions to complete, objectives to pursue and requirements to be met. You feel transported throughout the expansion journey and never find yourself lost or left to your own decisions, which is an incredibly good thing for a game like this. Finally we can also say we are happy with the amount of content added by Creative Assembly that fully justify the full price at which this second chapter is sold. The races are completely different from anything you've played in Total War: Warhammer to date, and the map is truly immense, even wider than that of the Old World. The models of every single soldier were then built from scratch and the amount of work hidden behind the Lizardmen is enormous if we think of the effort required to model and animate Stegadonti, Bastiladonti and all the other huge beasts of the menagerie. All armies have then been diversified properly with their own mechanics and unique special abilities, as we had already described in our previous preview. There is not much to say instead about the actual gameplay during the battles, which has remained substantially unchanged, refined with slight modifications and balances to the behavioral routines of artificial intelligence but very little else.

Jurassic Park

One thing we particularly liked about this new chapter is the variety of races positioned close to your starting point. In the first Total War: Warhammer, whole shifts were spent fighting the neighboring rival faction, thus obtaining very similar clashes. This time, perhaps going against logic but improving the final result, there are many more races that control the various territories, offering a greater variety both in terms of visuals and of alliances to be made. Unfortunately, on diplomacy the title still shows its side, with rather insistent requests for senseless peace treaties and sudden acts of war, a marginal problem but inherited from the first chapter and here not yet resolved. Another sore point, unfortunately, is the absence of naval combat except with the automatic resolution, a feature loudly requested by fans but which unfortunately did not manage to arrive in time for this chapter. Small tweaks have been added to the map, with ruins to explore in pure RPG style with lots of decisions to make and rewards based on our choices and there is also a more accurate management of the end of the round with suggestions on all the things that are possible to still complete before giving the green light to our opponents led by artificial intelligence. It is now possible to colonize any camp without having to limit yourself to the perfect ones for your faction, obviously suffering malus in case of inhospitable territories, and there are really many other small changes and tweaks in this second chapter, too many to tell you about each of them individually. Let's just say that you will be satisfied with it and the feeling of being in front of an inflated price DLC is very, very far away.

Great!

There is also good news for what concerns the general optimization of the game. The graphics have remained almost unchanged, with the exception of the forests made more luxuriant, but the loads, now faster, and the general stability have been optimized. On a mid-range PC equipped with SLI 780 you play without any slowdowns keeping all settings high with 60 fps and a resolution of 1080p. From here you can easily go up to have a better quality with superior components, working on the multiple advanced settings: from volumetric fog to the quality of the textures, obviously passing through the anti-aliasing and reflections filters.

The only regret is that we have not worked better on spells and special effects in general that still have that fake flavor that was already felt in the first chapter. From fireballs to lightning storms, everything is not very credible on the battlefield, including the clouds of arrows that rain on the units, which have always been very unattractive to see when instead they could be that small tax useful for production to achieve excellence even from a visual point of view. Last note, finally, for the support, which will be as always mammoth and continuous in the months to come, with a huge campaign coming in the near future that will unite the worlds of the two chapters, all the races and the different mechanics, for one unique and truly complete experience for a game based on the Warhammer universe. In the meantime, you can decide to throw yourself into online multiplayer games, or to face a cooperative campaign between the owners of this second chapter: a division of servers that we did not fully appreciate.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Operating system: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K
Memory: 16 GB of RAM
Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780 - SLI

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Windows 7 64Bit
Processor: Intel® Core ™ 2 Duo 3.0Ghz
Memory: 5 GB of RAM
Scheda video: NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB | AMD Radeon HD 5770 1GB | Intel HD4000 @720p
Memory: 60 GB of available space

Recommended Requirements

Operating system: Windows 7/8 (8.1) / 10 64Bit
Processor: Intel® Core ™ i5-4570 3.20GHz
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 4GB | AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB @ 1080p
Memory: 60 GB of available space

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 59,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

8.8

Readers (45)

8.6

Your vote

Fortunately, Total War: Warhammer II is a solid chapter, capable of standing on its own feet and wiping out any doubts about its legitimacy of being a stand alone chapter rather than a major expansion. A great job has been done on the four races and all the mechanics added for the occasion are also interesting. The only sore points to date are represented by the net division of servers with the owners of the first chapter, and by a graphics sector that could be further improved, especially in terms of effects. The expense, however, is more than justified since you will find an immense campaign and hundreds of hours of full game play waiting for you. Future support is a guarantee, as has already been amply demonstrated.