Warhammer: Vermintide 2 was the hook and Total War: WARHAMMER II was the chain that pulled me into the Warhammer Fantasy universe. This world is amazing and contains extremely in-depth world building and characters, all of which have been fully utilized for this game. I have never played a Total War game, heck even a Grand Strategy game in general, and this game really showed me what I was missing. I probably won't play any other Total War games anyway because I don't care for the historical settings, but at least I know I can play more then just action games.

TW:W2 has got so much fun packed into it from the units to the campaigns to the battles. At first I thought this game would focus on the battles, but apparently it is more focused on the campaign map, similar to other strategy games like Civilization I think. I am not disappointed though because the campaign map is also a blast, having you move your armies around to conquer cities around you and ambush any enemy army that enters your territory. Dealing with diplomatic relations is also really fun, trying to get factions to trade and ally with you while demanding money from them. There is lots of room for little anecdotal stories that you can tell to friends like how you back stabbed a rival clan by befriending them temporarily to place your troops in their land just to attack all at once or how you ended up being at war with every single faction by accident. There's a lot of memorable moments to be had in this game.

The battles are another large part of the game, and while I end up auto-resolving the ones I can easily win or have no chance of winning, it is still fun to go in from time to time and set up my armies in a way to flank the enemy or charge straight into them. I love that there is a cinematic mode for the battles because all of the units in the game have awesome attack animations that make them so fun to watch. There's even a custom battles mode where you can pit whatever overpowered army you want against a group of Bretonnian peasants and watch them all get slaughtered. Some of the DLC in this game I have bought just to watch the new units fight in this Cinematic custom battle mode.

There is a lot of DLC for this game, and even more when you consider that all of the Total War: WARHAMMER DLC also works in the game. It can be quite expensive if you are looking to buy it all, but you don't need to because you just buy the DLC for the factions you want. For example I have only played as the Skaven and Vampire Coast so I don't need to buy the High Elf/Dark Elf DLC because I don't care about them. I also really enjoy the fact that the TW:W DLC and other content works in this game because that means you can have a massive world where everyone is fighting each other and it is just so cool.

Again, I have never played a Grand Strategy game like this before but I have ended up really enjoying this game and I think you should try it if you like the Warhammer fantasy setting even if you've never played one either. You may need to watch some tutorials but I think after the basics, the rest of the game isn't very hard to learn. For the standard $60 I think it's a bit pushing it, especially since you'll probably end up paying more for DLC, so I think $30 or less is a great price for this game. I give it a 5/5 and I am really looking forward to the third installment in the Total War: WARHAMMER Series.