Reviews - Amazingcube

This is what Total War: Warhammer could have and should have been! (Apologize for the length of the review but it is a MASSIVE mod that deserves a lot of coverage).

This highly ambitious and amazingly executed mod for the already amazing Medieval Total War II takes the best elements of Warhammer and brings it into one of the most complete and well developed mods even in it's very early development stage!

Positives:

Numerous Factions: From the Ogre Kingdoms To Bretonnia and everyone in between the mod fields the biggest roster of Warhammer armies available. Even in version 1.00 and 1.01, the game contains all four chaos god's armies, the skaven forces, both dwarves and chaos dwarves, Kislev, Bretonnia, 10 of the Empire's provinces, the greenskin tribes, their Night Goblin allies, the Lizardmen, Vampires, Chaos Undivided, the Tomb Kings, the three elven armies, and other armies I may have missed. Chances are your favorite army is already in the game or rumored to be added eventually!

A living, breathing chaos: Instead of just chilling with Bloodthirsters and listening to their death metal, the various armies of chaos actually act until the Chaos Crusades begin. The four minions of the Chaos gods will try to conquer their rivals, the skaven will build large armies and invade until called to action, the Chaos Dwarves will build up their empire, and chaos undivided will act as marauders until every chaos army joins as one to besiege capitals and other cities they deem worthless. You can even be one of these factions and join in the bloodthirsty fun! Just make sure you join in these crusades, or you might be next on the list of targets!

A More Divided Empire: Unlike the actual game, the mod takes the various provinces of the empire and makes them standalone factions. This makes for a more interesting and divided struggle in the early game as the humans try to join forces or usurp each other. Will Reikland assert it's dominance?, is it Ostermark's time to shine?, Perhaps maybe even the Empire will kneel to Bretonnia! All of these fates of the Empire rest in the battles of both the AI and the player.

A Massive Map: From the glorious Empire in the east to the Western homes of the Greenskins, chaos dwarves and Ogres, with the Chaos in the North and islands dominated by the elves, lizardmen and tomb kings, the Old World is massive and will one day bow to your armies as you forge your legacy.

Heroes Of the Old World: With every strong army comes great leadership. The mod knows this well as numerous heroes and villains of the old world command their forces in the great battles. With numerous WIP units being added, there are already plenty of heroes going to be added and with randomly generated generals up for adoption, perhaps you can forge the legacies of the ages with names nobody's ever heard.

With all great mods, there are downsides, and for how early this game is in development, there are issues that need to be addressed.

Negatives

WE DIE FOR THE EMPER... wait it crashed: Don't you hate it when you and your buddies are about to charge a chaos citadel and suddenly out of nowhere before you can confront the demons of the underworld the whole thing crashes? Yeah me too. The mod is somewhat inconsistent with its performance. In many cases you can go dozens of turns without any trouble only to start crashing harder than an irreplaceable Ultramarine flagship into a behemoth hive. This can be easily fixed by just SAVING OFTEN it's an absolute must since these crashes come out of nowhere. In a few instances I have heard of people losing saves since they battle keeps breaking but I haven't personally had this issue but it apparently exists.

Orcs and their moonspeak: So diplomacy is incredibly important as it doesn't go too well when every army hates you. However, this often leads to text errors in the message log. This bug is incredibly minor but does exist so it's important to message it. Also my favorite unit is the chaos unit Undefined placement text. Undefined placement text has great moral and is deadly and fast in combat. Fear undefined placement text for he will wreck you. I believe he was meant to be a hellhound but the game had a translation error. Nothing too big though.

Unit balance, what's that?: For a mod with this many units, it shouldn't come as a shock that they all aren't balanced. In some cases this makes sense, your imperial flagellants should not be able to slay a giant. Yet in other cases I lost a saurus battalion to the vampire zombies. That could just be my terrible leadership but this combined with how some armies have significantly less units makes there a slight imbalance that may need adjusting. However there are many WIP units for these armies and balance tweaks in the works so this should be fixed in time and the smaller factions will get more units.

In total, the mod is not perfect, it is in an early build yet still is exceptional and builds on the older warhammer mods.