Total War: WARHAMMER III

Total War: WARHAMMER III was always going to be judged on a promise made years before its release: that the trilogy would eventually unify into one grand campaign combining every race, legendary lord and map from all three games. That campaign, Immortal Empires, finally arrived, and by most current accounts it delivers. Getting there, and living with the game since, has been a considerably rockier story than the campaign itself.

The payoff the trilogy was building toward

Immortal Empires is Total War: WARHAMMER III's centrepiece, and it's genuinely the game the series had been promising since the first entry: every faction from all three games sharing one enormous continuous map, each with wildly different playstyles, mechanics and legendary lords to command. Layered on top of the series' real-time tactical battles — still the genre's clearest benchmark for spectacle, with armies of monsters, magic and mass infantry colliding across detailed battlefields — it's an ambitious, genuinely impressive achievement when the underlying systems are working well. Reviewers who've stuck with the game specifically credit recent updates with meaningfully reducing anti-player AI bias and fixing balance issues that were serious complaints earlier in its life.

A launch that tested even loyal fans

Getting to that point took time the game didn't necessarily earn gracefully. Total War: WARHAMMER III launched in February 2022 in a state serious enough that long-time series veterans, including players with thousands of hours across the trilogy, said publicly and at length that it needed significant further work before it matched its predecessors. That's a notable thing for a series with this level of built-in goodwill to hear from its own most invested fans, and it set the tone for a reception that's been actively recovering rather than starting from a position of trust.

The DLC structure that keeps the complaints coming

Layered on top of that recovery is a persistent, current complaint about how new content is sold. Total War: WARHAMMER III currently carries 34 separate paid DLC packages, and new race packs are frequently priced at roughly half the base game's own cost each — a structure reviewers describe, with real frustration, as meaning "basically anybody" playable requires substantial additional spending beyond the initial purchase. That's a familiar complaint in this genre broadly, but it's sharpened here by how central faction variety is to what makes Immortal Empires worth playing in the first place.

A forum policy that made the trust problem worse

In 2023, in response to mounting anger over DLC pricing and content — specifically criticism of the Shadows of Change expansion — Creative Assembly introduced a new moderation policy for its official Steam forums, banning users who organised boycotts and stating plainly that "the right to discuss is a privilege — it is not an entitlement you earn by playing the game." The policy was widely and publicly read as an attempt to suppress criticism of the DLC pricing rather than engage with it, and it drew coverage and condemnation well beyond the game's own community. Whatever the intent, the practical effect was to turn a pricing complaint into a broader trust issue, and it's a real, well-documented episode that colours how a meaningful share of reviewers now describe their relationship with the developer.

Final verdict

Total War: WARHAMMER III has become, by most current accounts, the grand campaign this trilogy was always meant to deliver, and the improvement since its rocky 2022 launch is real and worth crediting. It settles at 6.5 rather than higher because the game's relationship with its own community has been genuinely damaged by decisions that go beyond design — an expensive per-race DLC structure, and a 2023 moderation policy that told players their criticism was a privilege rather than a right. Buy it for Immortal Empires and the battles, budget carefully for the DLC that actually interests you, and go in aware of the history behind the score you're reading.

Price and review data checked 5 August 2026.

If you'd rather your strategic progression didn't come wrapped in a per-faction DLC bill, Wanderer keeps its whole persistent world free to access.