Total War: Warhammer III

Steam Reviews

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• Not recommended Posted October 6, 2025 on Steam I want to love this game and the Total War series, but I struggle more and more every year, every release. Going back to the Skullmuncha issue where CA flat out said it was impossible to fix, I fixed it in 5 mins before even getting dressed for the morning. I turned it into a mod and it's amazing, CA remembered how to fix it! CA has proven they don't even TRY let alone CARE. The textures for races coming from the old games are over saturated and look like garbage, STILL covered in red dots in some areas. YES CA THEY ARE STILL THERE! I fixed these textures, manually, by hand over the last year and offered to give the textures to CA and told them I wanted NO COMPENSATION and they said no, it would increase the file size too much. I checked and compared the textures on my end, rebuilt the data pack with my textures and the increase in size was barely noticeable. My process to make these fixed textures didn't increase the size of the textures at all. They assumed I AI upscaled the textures which I didn't. I did this BY HAND, combining the diffuse and specular in photoshop, sometimes even having to remake the material maps because of how terrible they look. (Vampire counts and chaos especially) On to the actual game. Ever since Shogun 2 (I didn't play the earlier games much so I can't say anything on them) the games have been left in a mess of a state, sometimes even unplayable. Support drops when there are simple bugs in the game that users complained about for years and CA never fixes. EVERY game needs a community bug fix which is unacceptable. This is deserved. CA brought this on themselves. Fix your stuff EDIT A lot of people keep misunderstanding the point of me posting this. I DO NOT CARE IF THEY USE THE TEXTURES OR NOT I LOVE THE GAME AND WANT IT TO GET BETTER TREATMENT AND CARE I am upset and frustrated with how the company treats the game and the community.
• Not recommended Posted November 28, 2025 on Steam This is one of those games where I wish steam reviews weren't just a simple Yes or No recommendation. At its core, TW:Warhammer III is a good game that stands out from games in other Total War series due to its variety and uniqueness of factions, units, and playstyles. Even if you're not into the Warhammer franchise, you can enjoy this game if you're into strategy, big battles, and fantasy. The sound is good, the visuals are good, the voice acting is great. The battles can be very entertaining. I like the game, I really do. However, I just can't RECOMMEND buying the game for people new to the series. Let's get this out of the way first. The DLC situation with this game is particularly egregious. Even if you paid full price for this game, you only get a fraction of the factions unlocked. And even those unlocked factions in the base game aren't fully unlocked, portions of it, legendary lords (which determine your starting point and playstyle) and even some upper tier units, are locked behind DLC. The DLCs combined for Warhammer III can cost you way more than twice as much as the base game. But let's say you like the game, you decide to buy all the DLCs for the WH3... and yet, you still don't have everything unlocked. Why? Because not only do you need to buy all the DLCS for WH3, [u]you need to buy Warhammer 1 AND Warhammer 2 AND all their respective DLCs in order unlock everything[/u]. In addition, they don't support cross platform, so if you have WH2 on epic and WH3 on steam, guess what? You gotta rebuy WH2 on steam just to unlock the stuff for WH3. But let's say you're mister/missus money bags and you don't mind spending a couple hundred dollars to unlock things in the game. There are many minor (not game crashing) bugs and bad design choices that aren't terrible on their own but are horrible when they all come together. Not all factions are equal, and understandably so, as it's difficult to perfectly balance a game around all these factions and legendary lords that can completely change how you play a faction, but those are not the bad design choices I'm talking about. For example, in the previous games, minor settlements can gain walls if you built the correct building and upgraded it. Certain factions were unable to do this but gained other advantages to make up for their lack of walls. In WH3, they've completely done away with gaining walls in minor settlements for every faction without making up for it. As another design choice, they've nerfed the garrisons defending your settlements. By design, the AI, to compensate for not playing as smart as a human, gets more resources and have less upkeep, which allows them to field more armies than you (and the higher the difficulty, the more resources and less upkeep). This results in the AI generally being in more places and able to just steamroll your minor settlements, regardless of your defensive buildings, if you don't have an army babysitting it (and most factions can't support having an army babysitting every settlement). In the previous games, the walls forced them to siege your minor settlements buying you time to get an army over to save the settlement, but in WH3, it's like playing Whack a Mole with all their armies running around going for your undefended bits, which quickly gets very tedious. It wouldn't even be so bad if your major walled settlements were choke points or something, but no, the AI just waltzes on by. Just a bunch of bad design choices coming together to make a horrible (and very common) situation. There's also all these weird (but not game crashing) bugs that just ruin things sometimes. The more commonly noticeable one is when the AI gathers several armies around a town and... just sits there doing nothing (for possibly the entire game). And this is a VERY common occurrence. The other more commonly noticeable (well, if you play with a faction with ranged units) is that sometimes your ranged units just stop firing at will. They'll shoot if you manually tell them to attack a target but that defeats the purpose of firing at will. They could have clear line of sight to the target, no obstacles, on a flat plain, with ammo, in range, and they just won't fire at will. This makes things particularly unpleasant if you're playing a range heavy faction and downright cost you some battles if you're in a big battle and you don't notice your ranged units doing absolutely nothing because you were busy micromanaging another part of the battle. Even melee units will have brain farts at times where you order them to engage/chase an enemy unit and they just walk in and stare while the enemy is busy whacking away at them or just follow (and not attack) the enemy that's running away even though your unit is faster and should be cutting them down while running. I could go on but this review is long enough as it is. I like the game but I just can't quite recommend it buying it especially if you're new to the series. I understand companies need to make money, but it just doesn't feel like the value is worth how much they're charging. Some people can argue that just the base game alone is worth it but you definitely feel the difference when you play a base game faction and find out some of your unit roster is locked behind DLC. And if you're expecting people to spend hundreds of dollars, at least try to keep it as bug free as possible.
• Not recommended Posted October 1, 2025 on Steam I can't in good conscience recommend this game despite having 1800+ hours playing it and 2100 hours in Warhammer 2 plus purchasing all the DLC's. I love it, I love the setting, but I'm in an abusive relationship with Creative Assembly. No matter how many times they hurt me and take my money without delivering a properly finished or optimized game, I just keep coming back for more. Great example: right now Lizardmen and Tomb Kings major factions' AI are completely broken. They just sit in their starting settlements and do nothing, which causes a major ripple effect since other nearby factions just steamroll these inactive AI factions. Vote with your dollars more intelligently than I did and force CA to fix their jank. Otherwise we'll keep getting situations like releasing a DLC where one of the lords (Nakai the wanderer) can't recruit his main units (kroxigors) for 8+ months.
• Not recommended Posted October 27, 2025 on Steam Jumping on the bandwagon to give a big thumbs down to my favorite game franchise. Creative Assembly rightfully deserves the negative criticism that is flooding them right now. Game 1 was a pretty decent run, and then Game 2 had a rough start with the code branching fiasco (which happened again), but by the end of game 2, it was in an excellent state. Game 3 has been a PR and development nightmare. The release was crap. Between game 1 and 2 they had the issue where their development branches diverged from each other. This caused issues that they had to basically resolve by rewriting the code into a living branch, and they promised that they would do better so it wouldn't happen again. It is clear that on release, Game 3 did not include a large number of recently added QoL updates that were put into Game 2. So they lied. Realms of Chaos: A good concept, but nobody really asked for it, and it was just something to tide people over until Immortal Empires was released so people could play with all the factions. The resources would probably have better been used for releasing with Immortal Empires itself. What is probably saddest though, is that they spent all the resources creating the campaign and the individual chaos realms, but they couldn't be bothered to add those to the Immortal Empires map so you could have a similar experience with other races. Sure, it might not have been as polished as the initial races, but game 3 didn't come polished. It needed to be repaired after release. Siege Rework: I don't think the siege rework was very good. New maps that aren't just walls are pretty nice, yeah, but turning the siege defense into a tower defense game was a bad move. Sieges in the current state of the game are still pretty bad. Walls are very difficult to hold due to siege towers and ass-ladders. What is supposed to be a very serious defensive tool is a meme that most people ignore. It's better to hold the city choke points than to stay on the walls where you'll get waylaid. Hopefully the new siege rework when it comes will improve things with the removal of ass ladders. Shadows of Change: They moved to increase the price of lord pack DLC by a significant margin. The original Grim & Grave DLC was around $9 for 2 lords, some new units, and their mechanics. With the new DLC system of 3 lords, each lord pack costs $9, more than double the cost for a single lord, albeit there is a discount if you buy the whole bundle for a 3-lord DLC together. Shadows of Change was not worth the cost, it is probably the lowest quality DLC that released for WH3. It's pretty sad considering the Chaos Dwarf DLC was one of the best with a great race, great mechanics, and all accepted even though the price was so high. DLC Schedule: 2025 was supposed to be the year of Total War. As of yet, we have had 0 DLC releases this year. The last DLC was December of 2024. There have been some QoL updates, but it seems that at this point the current engine has since lived past its usefulness. DLC comes out and causes game-breaking bugs, I don't play WH3 as much as I used to, but it is somewhat disappointing that the schedule of DLC releases has been so few and far between to getting more content for races that need it and for other game 1 and 2 factions to receive more and even end times DLC. It's clear that they don't have many people working on the game anymore, and it shows with the pacing and quality of content. Creative Assembly seems to have already moved on from Warhammer 3. Hyenas: Nobody wanted this and they blew 100 million dollars on it, yet they're still making terrible choices and refuse to properly support their one solid stream of revenue that they have left: Warhammer 3. Three Kingdoms was a massive success in China, but they axed it and betrayed the Chinese audience, so there goes that money. None of the latest historical games have seemed to gain much notoriety or popularity on account of fantasy provides more cool battles and mechanics as opposed to human people army guys. I'm not anti-historical, I just think after Total War Warhammer, there's nothing left in historical games to keep my interest for more than a while. Bugs Bugs Bugs: The game is beyond the limit that their very old and decrepit engine can handle. Warscape Engine came out in 2009 with Empire Total War. We're at 16 years with the engine, and every time they patch the game, they manage to create a new game-breaking bug. Cavalry being unable to hit anything, Armor-Piercing Damage turned off, AI becoming braindead and unresponsive, it's very clear that the game is on hospice. Was it ambitious of them to try and shoe everything into Warscape? Yes? Does it work? Kinda. Are there problems? Absolutely. Although I have written this negative review, the Warhammer Total War series remains one of my favorite games of all time. I love Total War and I want the games to be good and successful. It's just becoming clear that Creative Assembly just doesn't make the decisions that are best for the franchise. With how badly they have stewarded Warhammer 3, it has eroded my faith in the company that even if they were to announce something awesome such as Total War Warhammer 40k, or Lord of the Rings, I just can't bring myself to wholly support it. There have been too many lies, too many broken promises, and too much disappointment. Price of Entry: Total War Warhammer is an expensive game, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I have pre-ordered almost everything since game 1, mind you here and there I waited for a sale. I have also tried to onboard multiple people into the series from scratch, and let me tell you, it is an ordeal shopping to get into the game. What games do I need? What DLC? Sure, Games 1 and 2 are easily half off if you wait for a sale, but that's still $60 on top of the game 3 price tag. I can't completely criticize CA for the price point though. Until game 3 they did a mostly good job on the game and it was usually in a good state. They put a lot of content into DLC which I can't in good faith say they should just give away for free. DLC came with free content, balance and bug fix updates, and a DLC release was usually a cause for celebration whether you paid or not, especially considering you can still fight new races and units with what you have. I think what CA should probably do is rebrand their old DLC into race packs that are cheaper and easier to digest than the old games and content. If I only want to play the Empire to give the game a try and have all the Empire content for the best experience, I have to buy Warhammer 1, Grim and Grave, Hunter and Beast, and Elspeth. At current prices (No Sale) that comes out to be $148 including Game 3's price. This just isn't sustainable for someone who wants to try out the game. CA has made plenty of money off the older content, and should consider a system to ease the burden on new players who want to try a specific race out. It shouldn't be an $88 price tag to play one race and ignore the rest. I paid in for all the content updates and bug fixes, but not everyone has that money or was here for it. Sincerely, a long-time Total War fan. Edit: SlayerFox found a typo. Thanks for commenting! I have corrected it. I also added a blurb about the price of entry.
• Not recommended Posted October 6, 2025 on Steam "The right to discuss is a privilege—it is not an entitlement you earn by playing the game" - CA's PR department
• Not recommended Posted September 8, 2025 on Steam As much as I consider this game VERY fun, the amount of DLC you have to buy in order to play.... basically anybody, is just plain awful. At some point you have to just give it up, because you cannot morally be selling a $60 game that only has like five groups of guys in it and then lock the other 20 behind DLCs and previous titles. Not to mention that factions and their units are often split across MULTIPLE DLCs, so if you want the Lizardmen as a complete faction for example you'll have to buy like 3 different packs. What the actual hell is this?