Building the Glory of Kislev with Yuri Barkov in Total War: WARHAMMER III | Adli's Quick Games Review

Header for Total War: WARHAMMER III.
Credit to CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, Feral Interactive, SEGA, embedded from Steam.

This article is in English. Untuk membaca versi Bahasa Indonesia, klik di sini.

Notice and Specs

• This article aims to share information about this game.
• There is no intention to infringe on any copyright.
• The copyright for any images, videos, or other media used in this article belongs to their respective owners, whether developers or publishers of this game, unless otherwise stated.
• The author is not an employee, internal staff member, or official representative of the game's developer or publisher. The author's relationship with the game's team is limited to that of an independent creator partner through the SEGA/ATLUS Summer Sale campaign.
• This article purely reflects the author's own perspective.
• This article is based on the author's personal experience playing this game. Future patches or changes to this game may not be reflected in this article.
• This article was translated from Indonesian to English with the assistance of Claude, an AI by Anthropic. Translation quality may not be on par with that of a human translator.

Introduction

This is the first Total War game I've ever tried from the franchise. Even though I've tried a few games from the Warhammer franchise, this one feels different. So... would this game actually be fun to play?

Game Details

Detail

Trailer

Check out the game's trailer below :)

Total War: WARHAMMER III Announce Trailer - Conquer Your Daemons | Coming 2022

Credit to Total War channel on YouTube.

Adli's Gameplay

Want to watch my gameplay video? You can check it out below:

Teller's Duty, Yakuza 0: Director's Cut, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and 6 other games!

Credit to Adli_HM channel on YouTube.

Review and Recommendation

Short Review

Honestly, I was a bit on the fence about whether to accept the offer to play this game — Total War: WARHAMMER III — or not.

But eventually, I decided to give it a shot. Maybe it'd be a good fit.

And surprisingly... It was pretty good.

Yep. Seriously. The game was quite fun to play, and I genuinely enjoyed it — enough to clock in a total of 3,2 hours. For more reasons why, I'll break it down in the Why Should You Buy It? section.

Adli's Recommendation

[VERDICT: YES]

Why Should You Buy It?

So, why should you buy this title?

Great visuals and cutscenes!

The visuals are solid. Impressive, and they really paint the picture of being in Northern Europe — fitting the cold, wintry setting. The cutscenes are great too, genuinely giving you the feeling of being at war and having to become the ruler of this land.

Freedom!

This game, while it does have plenty of tutorials, guidance, and direction, also gives you a lot of freedom. Yes, in the early portions — if you take The Lost God mode like I did, as someone who's never played this game before — you'll be guided through the various features available in the game, step by step. But eventually you'll be given the freedom to use those features however you see fit. From choosing which troops attack which enemy, to deciding which character to send toward a specific foe. City development, adding abilities to certain characters, and much more. So your hands won't just be following instructions the whole time — but you are the one who can shape your destiny.

Great audio!

The audio is... great. The SFX is great, the ambient sound is great — it genuinely feels like you're in the middle of a large-scale battle. The voice acting especially. Impressive, it truly sounds like real people speaking in character. It feels genuinely interactive. When you make a good call, they'll respond with words of support for your decision. And if you mess something up or send a character in the wrong direction, they'll say something about it too — with a sarcastic jab like, "Great idea, just what we needed to fail completely." 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

The story isn't hard to follow

The story is... unexpectedly not that hard to follow. Seriously. Yes, the genre involves fantasy. But... it's not difficult to keep up with. I've played for 3.2 hours and I still know what's happening, who's who, why we're here and there, and so on. Usually, games in the fantasy genre can be heavy and hard to follow. But this game... somehow isn't nearly that difficult to keep up with.

The discounted price is incredibly cheap 👀

The discounted price is... really low. Compared to full price, that is. Full price sits at USD 60. Expensive! That could cover a month of internet and a few days of food. But right now... it's USD 9 😐 So it's a steal if you want to try out the Grand Strategy genre...

Any Downsides?

Even though I was paid to create content related to this game, I still need to uphold my integrity and give an honest, objective review. So I'll also note the downsides I found in this game.

Optimization is lacking

Yep. Unfortunately, this game... even though it's a large file — around 85 GB — is not very well optimized, especially at the start of the game, and when running in fullscreen... at High settings.

Yeah. Honestly a bit puzzled too.

Because this game has actually been out for a long time — four years ago — and it doesn't seem like it should be that demanding. Yes, the world is vast, but... it doesn't feel like it should be that resource-hungry. But unfortunately, at the start it was demanding, particularly on my GPU. After lowering several settings to Medium, switching to Windowed mode, and setting the resolution to 1600x900p, the game ran smoothly, and my GPU only peaked around 85% at its most demanding.

Small UI?

This one genuinely left me a bit puzzled too. In the settings, there's actually an option for it, but somehow it can't be clicked? Not sure why. So the UI, which feels "a bit small," can't be scaled up in size. Maybe there's a mod for it? But I never looked into any mods, so I've just been playing the "vanilla" version this whole time.

Camera and controls feel... limited?

This one's a bit confusing too. Maybe it's intentional? But personally, I'd prefer using Q and E keys to rotate the camera. It usually feels more comfortable. Unfortunately, camera rotation in this game uses the mouse 😐 It's a bit uncomfortable at first, but over time, you do get used to it...

Long loading times

Hm, this one's a bit baffling too. Why does the loading take so long during the transition between area exploration and the combat session? It can be almost a minute before entering the battle. Maybe the game needs to load a whole new world along with all the characters who'll be fighting?

Slow conversation?

This one I genuinely don't know 🤣

Honestly, the voice acting is great as I said above. But the speaking pace feels really slow 🤣 Is it because I'm Indonesian and more used to faster-paced conversation? Who knows 🤣 But it feels like when someone is giving directions — like Gerik — the speed is roughly 0.75–0.8x of normal speaking pace. Maybe intentional? I don't know 🤣

Closing

Even with its downsides, this game is an interesting one to try — especially if you're like me and rarely play Grand Strategy games, and maybe want to dip your toes into the genre. I personally streamed it for about an hour, then continued offline for a total of 3.2 hours, and genuinely enjoyed the whole thing.

Yep, offline it was even more fun on its own. Busy expanding, hiring new Lords, meeting new characters — I already have three characters and several Lords! — and my territory has grown quite large, which means yes, I was genuinely enjoying this game 😀

Yes... Even with a few shortcomings as I described in the Any Downsides? section above, the game overall is enjoyable to play — especially for someone like me who rarely tries games in this genre out of fear that it'll be too complex to grasp.