Recent reviews by Matt the Moo-Cow

I have played every total war since the first Shogun, except Medieval 1 and the Warhammers, and this is no joke my favorite Total War ever. I may be biased because I also grew up playing Dynasty Warriors, so I was already enamored with the Three Kingdoms period of China, however I think the mechanics and gameplay of this title manage to separate it from this perspective.

The most obvious positive is: this game has hands-down THE BEST diplomacy of the franchise so far. It feels so comprehensive and you can do essentially whatever you want most of the time, even on higher difficulties. Allies finally FEEL like allies, and they don't abandon you when you become powerful like in previous titles (particularly the BS Shogun 2 Realm Divide), and Vassals finally serve a measurable and direct purpose. The ability to trade food for income and vice-versa is a great addition, and enables you multiple avenues by which to obtain income, even if you are in one of the poorer factions.

While this game suffers from a faction-to-faction air of "sameness" in unit types (not counting the Nanman), in my opinion this has the same effect as Shogun 2 where it makes the game more fair as you're not going to be a heavy Roman army fighting against a full-stack of horse-archers or whatever other cheese-armies the AI usually spits out. The real uniqueness is in the generals. Having played and loved Dynasty Warriors, I wasn't as apprehensive about the new prominence of superhuman generals in a historical title as my other history-loving Total War players. Although there is a "Records" mode that allows you to play with them as normal classic Total War generals, the real strength of the game is in "Romance" mode.
With the duels, the RPG elements among the characters, this is the first Total War since Medieval 2 where you genuinely grow to care about them, and want to build as amazing of a roster as possible.

My main gripe with the game is the Nanman. While an essential addition for variety and map-fill, they are borderline broken in battles, steamrolling your troops even at a massive disadvantage in every statistical category. They're even worse than Huang Shao in being utterly frustrating to fight, making you want to just throw a bunch of stacks at them and auto-resolve rather than fight them yourself, as the AI-you seems to have some magic formula for defeating them. However, if you're not playing as Sun Jian, Ma Teng, Shi Xie, or Liu Yan you won't have to worry about them.
My only other issue is that even after countless patches, the game is still a little unstable. This is the only game I have that will randomly crash every other time I play it, although the frequency of this is way lower than it used to be.

Lastly, I believe this game has the most engaging late-game of any of the Total Wars, it no longer just being a big snowball effect making the ending a breeze like in past games (particularly Rome 2), and yet is not as frustrating as Realm Divide. It is fair, pitting you and your vassals against the other two most powerful factions on the map and their vassals, resulting in some fairly believable wars. Each step in approaching the end-game -- increasing your prestige little-by-little -- feels justifiably like an accomplishment, and keeps you hooked turn after turn.

While I understand the historical Total War community's dislike for this game for its inclusion of fantasy elements (and believe me, I want Medieval 3 as much as anybody), this is to me the most polished and enjoyable Total War game to date. It is modern, it is fun, and it is EXTREMELY addicting.

Waste of money right now. What you get with this game (currently) is exactly what you see in the trailer. A miniscule amount of entertainment in possibly the smallest skateable area since THPS 1. The controls are clunky and unresponsive, and don't feel natural even after getting the hang of them. While there's a bit of fun learning how to do tricks the interest doesn't last very long. The skater himself often does odd unnatural poses that brings to question the quality of the motion capture. There is absolutely no customization whatsoever, you're stuck with what you see in the trailer. The framerate tanks for no reason. I hope this game improves drastically over time with much larger areas to skate, customization, and overall performance, because as it stands right now I'm getting my refund.

After 3 years, I'm still coming back and playing this for hours on end. I finally won my first campaign as Parthia, because I would always just start new campaigns. I'd say the strongest point of this game is the start of campaigns, when literally anything could happen, any AI faction could rise up and become a major player. You can play the same faction infinite times and your experience would be different each time.
However, the biggest problem I have with the game, the reason why I was never finishing campaigns, is how stale the endgame is. It gets super repetitive once there are only a handful of factions left, and there's hardly any diplomacy at that point, just conquest after conquest. The politics "mini-game" seems tacked on, or not fleshed out to its potential. And Diplomacy can sometimes seem strange, factions refusing to trade with you even though you have tons of resources and they have none. Every once in a while a faction will declare war on you right after agreeing to a treaty.
But in the end, the strengths of this game come out on top. Battles are epic, especially when they're between two powerful and advanced factions. The growth system for cities is ingeneous, and the wide variety of cultures at play insure a unique experience for each faction (outside of the Greek city-states). This went from one of the worst Total Wars at launch to one of the best. It's in my top 5, maybe arguably my top 3 with Rome and Shogun 2.
9/10, would recommend.