A turn-based grand strategy game on the scale of Total War: Three Kingdoms often struggles to present a consistent and meaningful challenge across hundreds of turns and dozens of battles. With this foray into ancient China, however, Creative Assembly seems to have finally hit an elusive sweet spot with its campaign tuning. A political and tactical landscape that’s almost never boring, filled out with gorgeous, stylized graphics, an excellent character system, and massive performance improvements over previous games in the series leave no doubt who the new emperor is around these parts.
Three Kingdoms offers you two ways to conquer its sprawling, attractively exaggerated map of 200s CE China. Records mode is closer to classic historical Total War, where generals are mere mortals accompanied into battle by a bodyguard regiment, and real-time engagements play out slowly and less decisively. It also led me to feel like I might as well be playing any other historical Total War game, though. That’s not a deal-breaker given how many other things are fresh and exciting on the campaign map, but I was never all that tempted to give it much of my time when the other option is so much cooler.
Source: IGN Games Reviews
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