Total War: Warhammer - Gameplay, walkthrough and impressions

The highly anticipated PC game Total War: Warhammer has been live on steam since the 24th of May, and I must say, it has been doing quite well so far. The first day of the release hadn't worked out so well as a large number of displeased gamers complained about server lags and crashes that occurred on opening the game. The developers quickly addressed the issue stating the root cause of the problem was the high number of players attempting to access the game.

They also provided remedial advice to solve the issue- such as restarting the game with Steam set to Offline mode, or updating graphics driver and verifying your steam cache. This seems to have worked for most of the gamers and the feedback now is mostly positive.

Total war: Warhammer is the 10th title in the Total war series and Mike Simpson, the Creative Assembly director, had stated that this was their greatest in the series. What makes it stand out from other Total War games is its fusion with Games Workshops Warhammer.

Total War has always featured a historical setting and was always focused on replicating history and making the game as realistic as possible. Integrating with Warhammer now introduces a fantasy setting along with characters from the Warhammer universe such as monsters and magic.

The game features four different races you can pick from, namely the Empire, the Greenskins, the Dwarfs and the Vampire counts. There is also a Chaos race that is available to those who preordered the game, or bought it within a week of its release. Each faction is unique and has the abilities and units unique to each race.

The Green skins, for example, has units like trolls, giants and Arachnarok spiders while the Empire - which is a human race, has units like steam engines. The abilities of the races are unequally divided, for example, races such as the Empire and the Vampire Counts have a large volume of magic at their disposal while races like the Dwarfs have very little or none.

The campaign map is quite similar to the previous releases in the total war series with the exception of diversity in physical terrain and climate as one moves from one place to another. Agents will be featured in battles as well as campaign maps. Named Agents get injured while the unnamed ones could get killed and you would not be able to get them back.

There is also a new mode in the game called the Quest Mode that consists of various missions and battles that players can complete to earn unlockable items and abilities.

Warhammer also brings a narrative to the Total War world. The story is larger in the campaign. The bottom line of which is that there are hordes of Chaos invading the world from the North, razing city after city, unless their faction leader is defeated in battle.

The necessity to defeat this common enemy all the more creates need for different factions to work together. Each faction also has a pair of unkillable Legendary Lords, who each have their own set of quests to acquire their core magical items.

Below is the video of an official empire campaign walkthrough. Have a look.

All in all, if you are a fan of strategy games or even just epic fantasy settings, Total War: Warhammer is definitely going to be well worth your time. It is definitely the best amongst the previous total war series, and Sega has also just announced that Total War: Warhammer has broken franchise records during its first week.

According to IGN, since its release on Tuesday, the game has sold over half a million copies and has regularly been topping 100,000 concurrent players.

The game is PC-exclusive, and pre-ordering or buying the game within the first week of its release will also get you access to the Chaos faction as a playable race. The PC version is priced at Rs 1,999 on Steam (Rs 2,499 at retail).