Total War: Three Kingdoms preview: A complete overhaul of Creative Assembly's historical approach

Few previews feel so fraught with danger as Total War. It’s a series with some very high highs, including the original Rome, Medieval II, Shogun II, and (more recently) the Warhammer games. Then there are the disappointments, including the infamous Rome II and last year’s Thrones of Britannia. And I bring up Warhammer and Thrones of Britannia to show how hard the pendulum can swing. 2017 brought one of the best Total War games, 2018 one of the worst.Worse, these are games that take upwards of 20 or 30 hours to play a single campaign, and it’s often hard to tell whether it’s worth the time investment until you’re most of the way through. Strategy games are difficult to read, that way. A developer can tell you how systems ideally work, tell you the underlying numbers, tell you the unit names and the theme and the goal, but there’s an ephemeral quality that’s hard to pin down, a cohesion that a game either finds or fumbles.To read this article in full, please click here