

And this difficulty almost always becomes the talking point, even for games that seem to hide something more profound beneath their mounds of countless dead (see: The End is Nigh). In this age of quick saves and infinite lives, action-oriented platformers need to be difficult. There's a campaign where each faction races to control a magical vortex by conducting a string of rituals, each providing a significant boost when performed, but if you want to slow the pace you can spring for both this and the previous game, then combine their maps together into a gigantic life-consuming war for domination called Mortal Empires. Meanwhile, the abstract scale of Total War seems less odd when removed from recognizable historical events. Warhammer's factions are strong mixes of trad fantasy archetypes and oddballs like the beloved ratmen called skaven, who are easily set against each other on a big map.


The combination of Total War and Warhammer is a perfect match. The Total War games are a venerable series of historical strategy games with unit-shuffling battles and large-scale nation management. Warhammer is a dark fantasy setting shared by multiple games, popular because of its grim maximalism (it has two Mordors and about three Draculas).
