#Total war three kingdoms ps4 series#
The series has always struggled with maintaining a strong campaign from beginning to end, but in this incarnation, Creative Assembly seems to have solved the issue. On my SSD, loading times switching between battles and the campaign map were 15 seconds or fewer, and the battles themselves, until they got massive, tended to avoid slowdowns.Īnd … all that isn’t even the best part of Total War: Three Kingdoms. Perhaps most impressive, given how much the Total War series has been built on being the most technologically advanced strategy game on the market, Three Kingdoms runs smoothly - more smoothly than the recent Warhammer incarnations. The UI is smooth and attractive at almost every level the music is delightful and the campaign map is beautiful across all four seasons. Almost everything about this game is gorgeous and smooth. It’s also tremendously aesthetically appealing - when was the last time a tech tree made you happy just to look at? - in a way that matches the rest of Total War: Three Kingdoms. It’s a superbly elegant system it’s not essential, but it’s helpful for understanding at a single glance how every part of the system fits together.Ībove: The tech tree of Total War: Three Kingdoms Progressing down the green branch will improve your Champions’ happiness, get you more money from your peasants, grant new spearman units, and improve food production both directly and via buildings. This all folds back into the way Three Kingdoms does its tech tree - a literal tree! - where each major branch corresponds to one of the elements/colors. A Champion will generally have spear infantry accessible for them to recruit to their retinue, whereas sending them to help build infrastructure tends to be in ways that increase food, population, or taxes. So, for example, green is the color of Champion classes - the best duelists - which corresponds to agriculture and peasantry in building types, and spear infantry. Each of the five elements - Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire - corresponds to colors: yellow, purple, blue, green, and red.Įach of these connects to character classes, buildings, and unit types. Total War: Three Kingdoms is built around a clever and aesthetically satisfying set of intertwined systems based on the Chinese elements. It’s not the only one in the game, either.
But it is a satisfying one, with comprehensible and interesting causes and effects. This isn’t a difficult or complex process. So you’ll find a strategist with her archers, a vanguard with his cavalry, and a sentinel with his infantry, as well as corresponding personalities.
This can lead to you building armies to match characters who get along with each other as people as well as characters whose retinues have units who mesh well together. The more they interact with each other, by being in the same army, or by being in the same province as each other strategically, or being on the ruler’s council together, the more those characters start to like - or hate - each other. Each ends up with Crusader Kings-like traits, where Indecisive characters dislike Decisive characters, and Fiery characters piss off almost everyone around them. Those characters? They all get along with each other in certain ways. This is the story of larger-than-life figures, engaged in a titanic war not just for territory but for strategy and politics and morals, perhaps reaching its pop cultural peak in John Woo’s film Red Cliff.Ībove: Deng Ai in Total War: Three Kingdoms But more than that, the Three Kingdoms era has become a defining event of the literature and culture of civil wars, the way that the fall of the Roman Republic, the Wars of the Roses in England, or the American Civil War create legends for their cultures. In the most superficial sense, it’s a series of civil wars that ended the Chinese Han Empire from the late second century CE into the third. But the setting excellently lends itself to how Total War works, and developer Creative Assembly has adapted the series to Three Kingdoms to make everything fall into place.īefore getting into the game itself, it’s worth discussing what the setting of the Three Kingdoms means, as a whole. I do not make this claim lightly I’ve been playing various incarnations of both this setting and franchise for two decades.
Total War: Three Kingdoms is the best Total War game and the best Three Kingdoms game ever. Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23.
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