These grant the traditional range of active and passive skills and bonuses, such as a leadership aura buff (which ensures units’ morale doesn’t break as easily) or a lower cost to army recruitment. Yuri and later other lords and heroes recruited into your selected faction have skill trees to progress. These choices are supported by a light-touch RPG system. As satisfyingly camp as Yuri’s inane late-campaign shouting might be, there is tragedy in watching him succumb to evil even as you make choices on the campaign map that push Yuri further down this path. The fact that this makes it obvious long before it’s explicitly revealed that Yuri is lost to Chaos, or that the commands he allegedly hears from Ursun come from a servant of Chaos, only strengthen the narrative. However, it’s well paced and written, moving from subtle hints that things aren’t quite what they seem to aggressive, gravelly one-liners. The story is nothing we haven’t seen before – Isildur’s corruption by the One Ring in the histories that precede The Lord of the Rings is an obvious inspiration, for example. His portrait, visible during battles in the customary Total War porthole at the bottom of the screen, turns to a pallid, red-eyed, and scarred complexion in an aesthetic reminiscent of Mass Effect 2’s Renegade choice system. Eventually, however, Yuri insists on extreme choices, dismissing all conflicting opinions and generally raving about the sanctity of his mission and the justification it gives for his actions. It can be difficult to tell the difference between hard-line decisiveness in the face of desperate conditions and the mark of madness. The difficult decisions Yuri faces and the frequent dissent voiced by his commanders initially mask that Chaos is gradually corrupting him. It’s a grim premise that makes a suitably determined leader out of Yuri. Without Ursun, the Kislevites are doomed to an eternal winter, dwindling resources, and eventual extinction.
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You take charge of Yuri Barkov, a lord in the Russian-inspired Kislevite faction, as he leads an expedition to find the faction’s lost bear god Ursun. Imagine my surprise then to find that the prologue to Total War: Warhammer III is a 6-8-hour campaign with a full-blown narrative. This includes the time in Crusader Kings III when I arranged fatal accidents for three of my four children to minimize the succession crisis resulting from my imminent death, or the first Total War: Warhammer when a last-minute military alliance ensured I was supported in a siege I had no hope of breaking on my own.
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Instead, their attraction lies in the multitude of systems that interact with one another to give rise to complex gameplay situations that enable the player to spin their own tales. It’s not that Total War games have bad stories, but that grand strategy games aren’t known for crafted stories in the first place. Whatever things I might have expected from Total War: Warhammer III, a gripping and well-told story wasn’t one of them. This article contains spoilers for the prologue campaign in Total War: Warhammer III.