Game Review #2
When people think of strategy games, their minds usually go to two types: Real Time Strategy (RTS) or Turn Based Strategy (TBS). Examples of popular games which fall into these categories are Starcraft or Age of Empires for Real Time Strategy, and Civilization or Risk for Turn Based Strategy. Each type of strategy game has its own strengths and weaknesses, but these weaknesses have historically been a massive handicap for the strategy genre. Real Time Strategy can be fun, but it generally requires you to memorize so many things and have ridiculously high APM; this can be extremely alienating for the average player. As for turn based strategy, it can be enjoyable to set up a very long and complex gameplan, but generally these games force you to play for a really long time before you could possibly see the fruits of your efforts. The modern gaming landscape prioritizes games which can be enjoyed in shorter sessions, and mainstream turn based strategy games are severely handicapped by this. Fortunately for any strategy fans, the Total War Warhammer 2 is a fantastic game which blends the best elements of both real time and turn based strategy.
Total War as a franchise has been operating with this unique approach to strategy for quite a while. For years they have been making games based on various conflicts throughout history, and they approached it in the most realistic way possible. In Total War, your empire management is done via turn based systems. Each player has a turn during which they have more than enough time to think and plan out what buildings they want to construct, which troops they plan on training, or what they want to begin researching. This means that for any complicated decisions you’ll always be given more than enough time to plan out a carefully calculated strategy.
However, when you enter into a battle, the game shifts into a real time strategy game; you control your troops in real time and you need to coordinate them in order to defeat the enemy’s army. During the battle, there is nothing for you to focus on outside of your army. Is your economy on the verge of collapse, or your colonies about to erupt into a full scale revolution? You can worry about that later, because while you’re in a battle the only thing that matters is how well you’re able to command your army. The battles are also fantastic when it comes to realism and creative strategy, even in a fantastic setting like Warhammer Fantasy. Instead of commanding a small number of units, you’re ordering around regiments that contain hundreds of troops each, so it’s not uncommon to have battles in which thousands of individual units are on the field.
This makes it incredibly easy to immerse yourself into the battle, and it opens up tons of possibilities. Maybe your army is a bit smaller, and you have a focus on heavy artillery, but your enemy has a colossal army with a lot of melee units. In this case, your best chance of victory might come from using your units as human shields in order to slow down the enemy and give your artillery a chance to inflict hundreds or thousands of kills. When it comes to battles in Total War Warhammer 2, the possibilities are endless, and this is without even factoring in the immense unit diversity and magic systems present within the game. The game contains all of the long term calculated planning on turn based games, while also sporting the fast-paced adrenaline pumping action of real time games, which combines to form an absolute masterpiece that you can get lost in for days on end. If you have even a slight interest in strategy games at all, I could not recommend this game enough.
