Recent reviews by Ranplex

Best Game I have played in a long time.
Engaging Story, beautifully written Companions and a Character Development that bonds you emotionally to those Companions. A Home-brew DnD 5e Combat System, many different Options to solve Quests, Battles, or to influence the Story itself, a humorous Dialogue or Situation every now and then and an absolutely lovely Soundtrack just round up this Gem of a Game. 10/10 for sure.

Disclaimer: Not everything I mention here is possible from the get-go, you will need quite a few dlcs and even warhammer 1 in order to get the most out of this game, but most of the dlcs definitely dont feel like a rip-off (aka. Paradox DLCs..) and you wont need any to enjoy the game. You only are interested in the Empire? Just get their DLC, or maybe you are a High Elf and Greenskin Player? The Warden and the paunch is an excellent dlc and Grom the Paunch is easily the best campaign in the game imo. Just pick and choose and get the pieces you want, or buy them later if you are unsure now.

Sooo..
it is probably one of the best total wars out there, each factions feels unique and is very enjoyable (except for beastmen, ♥♥♥♥ you guys in particular) and has its own roster, special unit types, charme and their own campaign mechanics. You want an army of giant rats using gatling guns and sniper rifles, and throw a literal nuclear bomb into the enemies (and well, your own rats because ♥♥♥♥ them)? Sure go ahead, or do you feel more like rushing everyone with a horde of orcs and trolls, sorrounding everyone and drowning them in a green wave in the Name of Gork and Mork? Maybe you are interested in Archers and small elite units as your army? Well, The High elves boast incredibly strong ranged units and even dragons so you can enjoy the view while your enemies are getting shot and are bruning alive trying to get through your reliable defensive melee infantry. Not your style? How about some Literal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Dinosaurs and Gators charging into an army and chewing up everything they see while your casting your magic to make your enemies explode? A horde of undead zombies taking the bulk of the damage while your giant vargheists and therrorgheists wreak havoc zhrough the enemies lines and your vampire lord resurrects the fallen enemies soldiers? Well, sounds kinda boring? How about we add some gunpowder into the mix with the Vampire coast faction, which will devastate a whole army from afar with their Artillery (especially their Big Bertha) and everyone lucky enough to survive will get blown to pieces by thousands of guns facing towards them. Well, you like the artillery but arent much of a vampire fan? The Dwarfes field insane line-holding infantry and a vast amount of Artillery and some ranged units to deal the damage, and even have some gyrocopters which are pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless! You want a more balanced approach to all of this? Well the Empire, the main human faction in the game, fields solid infantry and ranged units, have probably the most fun artillery in the game(Helstormrockets) with which you can devastate any horde army in 2 or 3 salves, have excellent Cavalry and even tanks and other cool stuff to play with. You really loved medieval 2 and fell in love with the typical france gendarmes Knight and Lancers Doomstack? Bretonnia, which is a Free LC, is based on the france and english culture, everything in their society is evolved around chivalry and honor. they have the best cavalry in the game and their dirty peasant units are dirt cheap. Just dont get involved in sieges with them. You love Egypt? The tomb kings are another undead faction, they field massive stone structures like sphinxes and giant scorpions and can storm any army with their numbers later in the game as they dont have any upkeep, but rather have to research tech and get more buildings in order to unlock more army slots. There are still factions i havent mentioned like the beastmen, chaos and Wood elves, and even then that isnt all, every race has their own subfactions with their own unique leader, each one having their own starting position, bonuses, campaign victory conditions and their own campaign story, based on which one you picked your playstyle on both the campaign map and in battles can and will change dramatically.

So, thats how battles compare between the different races, but is the campaign any different between them unlike many other total war games where its more or less always the same mechanics except for some horde mechanics in the newer games. Well, i wont go too much into detail, but while most subfactions will feel the same except for some like skarsnik, Grom and Eltharion and some others, there is quite a difference between races. Lets see what the empire got. They are based off of the Holy roman empire, and in the game you will have to deal with infighting vassals all the time, and have to gain their trust in order to Confederate them and get their territory and their special lords and unique units. It feels very rewarding going from a single colour army to a colourful united empire army with red, green, blue, yellow outfits instead of just red. Now you cant just chill out and wait an eternity for them to like you enough, they will get attacked and if they cant defend themselves you will get a penalty, which means you have to militarize and protect your vassals so they dont lose their ♥♥♥♥. Skaven are completely different, there are so many of them that there isnt enough food for all of them, so while you keep expanding you have to constantly keep your foodstocks up so you wont get a revolt in pretty much every city you own, because even the skaven hate skaven. In order to expand faster you probably cant just go around the world conquering everything you see, but rather have to grow your own under-empire beneath cities of other factions, which you can build up to give you more bonuses like more food or income or even build a bomb benath the city to destroy it(and well, your undercity aswell but who cares right?). most factions have their own unique mechanic which makes them feel very different to other races in the campaign map as it allows for more playstyles and possibilities.

Now there are still bad things, the diplomacy overall is still lacking a ton, and the AI still isnt the best in the campaign, although at least it feels better in battles. Sieges are an absolute disaster as you can only attack from the front, in contrast to rome or attila where it actually feels liek you are defending a city vs an enemy from all 4 sides instead of having a helms klamm every. single. siege. Every bit of the beautiful assymetry of the game dies here. Attacking is mindless, just smash all your beasts onto the gate and rush every other small infantry unit onto the walls. Defending is just trying to hold 3 or 4 chokepoints while trying to somehow get some cavalry or ranged units behind the enemy to get a nice charge, which, while it can be challenging, is very boring to do after a few times.

Welp, that game has a horrible dlc policy with a lot of cut out content, but it still somehow makes it worth every dollar you spend into it, there are basically unlimited hours of playtime you can get out of that game even without any dlcs.

A really great and addicting game, where even "boring" activities suddenly become very exciting, immersive and will make you feel like you are in a medieval world.
The Combat system is well made, as it is skill based and needs training, which fits well with actual medieval combat.
Graphics are awesome,the world and especially the forest is immersive and look like they are real.
Story has so far been great, even the sidequests were nice and made fun, while also not repeating themselves and having more than one option to complete the quest.
Of course it has problems, as it has quite a few bugs, like getting stuck in walls or trees etc, some graphic bugs etc
This wasnt too much for a problem for me though, as most of the time it was rather funny ^^( I was able to fire swords with my bow once :D)
Performance is a big problem however, as i sometimes only have 30 to 40 fps in some cities (with an overclocked GTX 1080 in 1080p!!) it still feels rather "lagless" though. In the forest the performance is quite well though, with me having about 100 fps while in it.
At the beginning my textures took quite a while to load when entering a city f.e., and loading times when speaking to npcs were quite huge, however, with a few codelines added in the config and giving the game enough RAM this is not a problem at all anymore^^ Check out the Nexus mod site for the fix
, the mods name is" Texture streaming improvements - No more texture pop in"
Performance and bugpatch is coming out in about 2 weeks though, so those points may not be viable anymore in the future.
And the last thing is, of course, the save option,
you cannot save whenever you want, only if you buy a rather expensive(at least for the beginning) potion to save.
Not ideal, lost 3 hours of progress once because my game crashed and the game didnt save in that time for some reason and i had no money to buy those potions. However, there are already mods in the nexus to prevent that, so thank you community! :D
Definitely recommend this one !
Especially with all those mods coming out in the future ^^