My honest review of Total War: Warhammer 3 from someone without buyer’s remorse

So I got the game practically for free, which honestly helped a lot because I didn’t need to justify spending $500 on DLC by forcing myself to like it. Looking back, I think I fell for some false advertising from this sub. I made a thread about a year ago asking if I should buy the game, and I guess I missed the red flag where people talked more about their hours played than the actual game itself.

I wish new players knew just how battle-focused Warhammer 3 is. It’s basically a battle simulator. If you want a more campaign-focused experience with deeper strategy, you probably won’t get that here. The campaign side feels very watered down, and there’s not much actual strategy involved. So many times I started a campaign wanting to plan and strategize, but instead it was just nonstop battles.

The land battles are okay, but the game mostly revolves around stacking stat buffs. Once you hit a certain threshold, your armies become practically invincible. There also isn’t as much tactical depth as people claim. Terrain barely matters, and the AI is pretty broken. Enemy armies often don’t coordinate properly, artillery AI seems bugged half the time, and the only consistently smart thing the AI does is target your ranged units with cavalry and try to flank.

Sieges are terrible too. The AI completely falls apart, and the pathfinding is awful. And honestly, I have to call some people in this community out: fixing AI issues in 2026 should not be some impossible technological challenge.

Overall, I have around 600 hours in the game, and I think once you get past the honeymoon phase of trying every faction and mechanic, it’s time to move on. It’s still a good game because it’s Warhammer Fantasy, especially if you get it heavily discounted, but it is definitely not worth the full $550 experience.

I didn’t even bother with the endgame because by that point it’s just more battles, and the battles get repetitive. It’s also hard to immerse yourself in a thematic playthrough because the map feels so overcrowded.

And honestly, the game isn’t as popular as this sub or the main Total War sub make it seem. The game is practically dead on YouTube and Twitch, barely anyone posts on the forums, and most of the positive discussion I see comes from those two subreddits. Meanwhile, the historical Total War community on Reddit seems to have a much more negative opinion of it.

A lot of people who praise Warhammer 3 as the greatest game ever also seem weirdly defensive of Creative Assembly because it’s a British company. Even most of the major content creators for the game are British.