Barely an hour into a good six-hour preview of Total War: Warhammer 3’s campaign, and I have been royally gazumped. I’m playing as Grand Cathay, one of the eight new factions playable in the game – and yes, there are eight; Creative Assembly announced a final surprise faction, Chaos Daemons, during our previous session, which look like frightfully silly fun themselves.
Total War: Warhammer 3 previewPublisher: SegaDeveloper: Creative Assembly, Feral InteractiveAvailability: Out February 17th on PC, Mac, Linux
Anyway, I am Grand Cathay, where you choose one of two legendary lords as your main character. I have chosen Miao Ying, the Storm Dragon – a woman who can transform, would you believe it, into a Storm Dragon. The other is her brother, Zhao Ming, the Iron Dragon. Your main goal as Grand Cathay, in the story-sandbox playpen of the Grand Campaign, is essentially to turtle. You start out near a giant wall, the other side of which is full of Chaos enemies and corrupted land and all that horrible stuff – only the wall has been breached. There’s also a bar that fills up over time, which you can slow down with certain strategies (a big disc called the Wu Xing Compass that you can point in different directions, largely based around manipulating the winds of magic system, is one, kind of like how you can set a regional decree to focus on growth or money and whatnot).
When the bar fills up, the Chaos goons arrive, assaulting the wall in one of three places in vast numbers, and so early on with that wall already breached it’s just about tidying up your land before you secure the gate and get to work on the grander objective (briefly: defeating four Chaos baddies on their own turf, in those horde-like boss battles we tried out a little while back, and then rescuing a god-bear from an ice prison). But I digress. Right now the wall’s breached, Chaos everywhere, go deal with that.