This is a tough game to review.

Warhammer 2 is very similar to Warhammer 1, to the point they're almost the same game. WH2 is a glorified expansion pack that is 60 dollars, and still requires the presence of WH1 to run the Mortal Empires map, the big combined map of both Warhammer games that was a big draw of 2's appeal.

But to start more with some pros, let's go through them.

The game is very visually pretty, maps look amazing, unit models are superb across the board. Projectiles and some magic spells do look poor, but overall the set dressing of the game is superbly designed. A great art team worked on this game and it shows.

You get to have all the warhammer manchild toys at your disposal, and lots of attention to detail for the nerds who like the lore and all sorts of heroes/units and battles that you get the chance to experience all in real time. If you're a big WH nerd, this is an easy recommend.

However, that's about all I can say for pros.

The gameplay is a mixed bag here. The building and development is very very streamlined, with pretty much one building chain for every major need. Missile troops, melee troops, cav, income and public order, and then maybe some agent buildings. There's no real developing beyond just improving the population overtime. It's a lot better than Rome 2's cluster♥♥♥♥ system, but mostly since it cult all of the fat. There's nothing terrible, but nothing exciting. It gets the job done.

Battles are very...off. The WH mechanics being ripped from the game board and into Total War seem natural at first, but reveal a lot of quirks. First off, battles are just a lot more messy. Units rout, come back, and rout again nearly all the time, causing frontlines that resemble postmodern art than any sort of battlefield. Unit stats are the king here, and there are very few ways for inferior units to get the best over higher tier units. For example, in previous total wars it was possible to delay elite units with your trash ones to buy time for your own elites to make a flank. In this game, morale shock tactics don't work for very long, and eventually your trash units will just get grounded down by the enemy's better melee.

Melee in general is very underpowered. Melee infantry in particular. They perform almost poorly in every situation, especially on higher difficulties. To the point where the strategy for most higher level players seems to be relying entirely on archers/artillery/ and spells to actually deal damage while using melee heroes and infantry as basically big walls to stop enemy movements. Melee infantry will take too much damage, are slower, and don't deal enough damage compared to their archer counterparts. This makes infantry focused factions like Chaos a real pain to play, and result in my opinion a very stale and boring style of gameplay mostly centered around getting your ranged units in a good position to camp as the enemy army zergs to you with no real tactics or strategy at play.

At the end of the day, there is not much strategy fun to be had here. The magic spells and heroes have always felt a bit odd in total war. Generals are now mostly routed not by their own condition, but by the condition of the army. This makes general sniping an impossibility, especially against Legendary Lords. So this means you're going to be fighting, messy slog fights against units who do not rout, where tactics and strategy mostly disappear and it comes down to who just has the higher number or who has the most OP spell to play. There are no longer any clean decesive victories unless your lord just completely outclasses the enemy lord. Seeing your units chase a fleeing hero off the battlefield, poking at him with their weapons as this high health lord just refuses to die and routs away is really just, weird and feels wrong. It goes against the logic of the earlier titles and actual battle strategy in general. To summarize, in previous titles you killed the general to rout the army. In Wh2, you kill the army to rout the general.

Speaking on spells, they turn this game into an odd mix of Dota and Total War. Fun on paper maybe, but this game it's the worst of both worlds. Heroes overall just aren't very good enough to make an impact on their own, with some big exceptions such as the elf legendary lords. Their spells also tend to be very disruptive to the gameplay, and a well planned attack could immediately be destroyed by some wizard casting a firestorm into your line. Magic can't exactly be countered, just have it's effects mitigated mostly. It confounds the already confusing strategy of the game even more. Faction diversity is nice, but is often one note. If you are Bretonnia, you use cavalry. End of story. If you are light elves, you are using archers. Playing outside of these boundaries is possible, but often just not worth it. It is not as impressive as Rome 1 or even 2's faction diversity. That had steppe hordes, phalana formations, barbarian hordes, and roman legions that all required different tactics to play, and had different methods of play as options. WH2's factions are much more inconsistent, and heavily rely on outside DLC purchases to become playable. The Skaven are fun, but require two dlcs to be worthwhile. The Orcs require DLC as well to become more fleshed out. The factions in base WH2 are fine, but mostly because one is a copy of the other, Light Elves to Dark Elves, and the other is a copy of WH1 faction, the vampire pirates. Which also need DLC to be interesting. The issue of WH1 being separate is also a problem, since some faction campaigns are fun with wh2 dlc, but with wh1's map. Why not just sell a Mortal Empires DLC so you don't need to get the base game? Because ♥♥♥♥ you you need to pay 30 dollars for a game you won't even install.

Overall, the gameplay in the battles is messy, counter intuitive and often the AI cheats on a disgustingly blatant level. Spawning armies directly on your path. Experience buffed to fresh units who never saw combat. Tons of money boosts so they'll always have more armies than you. The ai are just cheaters, and having it be so obvious and in your face is immersion shattering to say the least. It makes losing to them feel unfun and arbitrary, rather than a reflection of mistakes you as player made.

In my personal experience, the early game build up is fun but the campaigns really lose their steam around the turn 40 mark. There's usually nothing to defend anymore as you've dealt with the intial threats, and nothing to do but paint the map against the hapless AI who cheat to stay relevant in your snowballing power. The end game chaos threat is a joke, and CA has acknowledged this for years but no updates ever on fixing it. Maybe when you buy the 60 dollar Warhammer 3 you'll finally get a finished faction. Maybe.

If you want to mess around with your manchild toys in the Games Workshop sweatshop that is CA's Warhammer games now, go ahead. But if you want a serious strategy experience, I would suggest other strategy games.


I would never say this is a bad game. But, it is a very shallow one. Once you have your fun messing with the big dinos or having a spell wipe an army, there is little more to appreciate for this game. Pretty to look at it, but ultimately vapid.

This is a tough game to review. Warhammer 2 is very similar to Warhammer 1, to the point they're almost the same game. WH2 is a glorified expansion pack that is 60 dollars, and still requires the presence of WH1 to run the Mortal Empires map, the big combined map of both Warhammer games that was a big draw of 2's appeal. But to start more with some pros, let's go through them. The game is very visually pretty, maps look amazing, unit models are superb across the board. Projectiles and some magic spells do look poor, but overall the set dressing of the game is superbly designed. A great art team worked on this game and it shows. You get to have all the warhammer manchild toys at your disposal, and lots of attention to detail for the nerds who like the lore and all sorts of heroes/units and battles that you get the chance to experience all in real time. If you're a big WH nerd, this is an easy recommend. However, that's about all I can say for pros. The gameplay is a mixed bag here. The building and development is very very streamlined, with pretty much one building chain for every major need. Missile troops, melee troops, cav, income and public order, and then maybe some agent buildings. There's no real developing beyond just improving the population overtime. It's a lot better than Rome 2's clusterfuck system, but mostly since it cult all of the fat. There's nothing terrible, but nothing exciting. It gets the job done. Battles are very...off. The WH mechanics being ripped from the game board and into Total War seem natural at first, but reveal a lot of quirks. First off, battles are just a lot more messy. Units rout, come back, and rout again nearly all the time, causing frontlines that resemble postmodern art than any sort of battlefield. Unit stats are the king here, and there are very few ways for inferior units to get the best over higher tier units. For example, in previous total wars it was possible to delay elite units with your trash ones to buy time for your own elites to make a flank. In this game, morale shock tactics don't work for very long, and eventually your trash units will just get grounded down by the enemy's better melee. Melee in general is very underpowered. Melee infantry in particular. They perform almost poorly in every situation, especially on higher difficulties. To the point where the strategy for most higher level players seems to be relying entirely on archers/artillery/ and spells to actually deal damage while using melee heroes and infantry as basically big walls to stop enemy movements. Melee infantry will take too much damage, are slower, and don't deal enough damage compared to their archer counterparts. This makes infantry focused factions like Chaos a real pain to play, and result in my opinion a very stale and boring style of gameplay mostly centered around getting your ranged units in a good position to camp as the enemy army zergs to you with no real tactics or strategy at play. At the end of the day, there is not much strategy fun to be had here. The magic spells and heroes have always felt a bit odd in total war. Generals are now mostly routed not by their own condition, but by the condition of the army. This makes general sniping an impossibility, especially against Legendary Lords. So this means you're going to be fighting, messy slog fights against units who do not rout, where tactics and strategy mostly disappear and it comes down to who just has the higher number or who has the most OP spell to play. There are no longer any clean decesive victories unless your lord just completely outclasses the enemy lord. Seeing your units chase a fleeing hero off the battlefield, poking at him with their weapons as this high health lord just refuses to die and routs away is really just, weird and feels wrong. It goes against the logic of the earlier titles and actual battle strategy in general. To summarize, in previous titles you killed the general to rout the army. In Wh2, you kill the army to rout the general. Speaking on spells, they turn this game into an odd mix of Dota and Total War. Fun on paper maybe, but this game it's the worst of both worlds. Heroes overall just aren't very good enough to make an impact on their own, with some big exceptions such as the elf legendary lords. Their spells also tend to be very disruptive to the gameplay, and a well planned attack could immediately be destroyed by some wizard casting a firestorm into your line. Magic can't exactly be countered, just have it's effects mitigated mostly. It confounds the already confusing strategy of the game even more. Faction diversity is nice, but is often one note. If you are Bretonnia, you use cavalry. End of story. If you are light elves, you are using archers. Playing outside of these boundaries is possible, but often just not worth it. It is not as impressive as Rome 1 or even 2's faction diversity. That had steppe hordes, phalana formations, barbarian hordes, and roman legions that all required different tactics to play, and had different methods of play as options. WH2's factions are much more inconsistent, and heavily rely on outside DLC purchases to become playable. The Skaven are fun, but require two dlcs to be worthwhile. The Orcs require DLC as well to become more fleshed out. The factions in base WH2 are fine, but mostly because one is a copy of the other, Light Elves to Dark Elves, and the other is a copy of WH1 faction, the vampire pirates. Which also need DLC to be interesting. The issue of WH1 being separate is also a problem, since some faction campaigns are fun with wh2 dlc, but with wh1's map. Why not just sell a Mortal Empires DLC so you don't need to get the base game? Because fuck you you need to pay 30 dollars for a game you won't even install. Overall, the gameplay in the battles is messy, counter intuitive and often the AI cheats on a disgustingly blatant level. Spawning armies directly on your path. Experience buffed to fresh units who never saw combat. Tons of money boosts so they'll always have more armies than you. The ai are just cheaters, and having it be so obvious and in your face is immersion shattering to say the least. It makes losing to them feel unfun and arbitrary, rather than a reflection of mistakes you as player made. In my personal experience, the early game build up is fun but the campaigns really lose their steam around the turn 40 mark. There's usually nothing to defend anymore as you've dealt with the intial threats, and nothing to do but paint the map against the hapless AI who cheat to stay relevant in your snowballing power. The end game chaos threat is a joke, and CA has acknowledged this for years but no updates ever on fixing it. Maybe when you buy the 60 dollar Warhammer 3 you'll finally get a finished faction. Maybe. If you want to mess around with your manchild toys in the Games Workshop sweatshop that is CA's Warhammer games now, go ahead. But if you want a serious strategy experience, I would suggest other strategy games. I would never say this is a bad game. But, it is a very shallow one. Once you have your fun messing with the big dinos or having a spell wipe an army, there is little more to appreciate for this game. Pretty to look at it, but ultimately vapid.