Traveling to the Realm of Khorne, for example, puts you in a compact little map and tasks you with filling up a blood meter by beating down armies. It’s a race to secure all four souls, after all, so it’s beneficial to travel to the same realm as your fiercest competitors in order to deny or otherwise mess with them. They also bring the most powerful and influential factions into regular contact, which is excellent, as they can too often become locked in their own respective skirmishes, miles across the map from one another. The Chaos Realm’s influence on the map grows over time, with armies and daemonic agents pouring out to corrupt your territory. These dangerous forays keep the campaign tightly focused throughout. Using these, your main army can teleport to each of the four Chaos Realms, face the trials that await, and secure the daemon souls needed to reach Ursun. But to reach Ursun, you’ll first need to travel through unstable, intermittent rifts. Keen to break free of the tome’s prophetic magic, he aligns himself with one of Warhammer 3’s eight main factions, advising them in the early-game and narrating the cutscenes as you progress further towards your faction’s goal: to save, or in some way exploit, the dying god-bear. More narrative framing comes from the series’ returning advisor: an old, robed wizard with a cursed book. By the end of this mini-campaign, the stakes are in place for the massive, infernal campaign that follows: Ursun is revealed to have been kidnapped by a Big Bad, the young prince has turned into a Daemon Prince (and the leader of a playable faction), and the great god-bear’s desperate roars have begun opening up rifts to the Chaos Realm. The prologue is a linear affair, and it’s perfect for beginners and returning players alike, funneling you through the northern wastelands and introducing you to Total War’s many little intricacies - settlements, buildings, technology, armies, and so forth. Here, we’re introduced to a young Kislev prince heading north on an expedition to find a lost god - a giant bear called Ursun, whose silence has caused the bitterly cold Kislev motherland … to grow even colder. Although you’re free to jump in anywhere, the game recommends starting out with the prologue, as it not only acts as a tutorial or refresher, but sets up the entire narrative framing for the main “Realm of Chaos” storyline.

The new campaign takes place in the northern extremities. This is what it’s all about - not humans versus orcs, but a great bloodthirsty demon riding a dog-shaped Juggernaut. If the original games’ offerings were the big boxed starter sets, Warhammer 3 is the obscure, foot-long creature staring at you from inside the locked glass shelf in the corner. And it’s often at the edges where the most exciting stuff happens. While the previous games explored the two largest landmasses of the Warhammer Fantasy world, this new one sets its eyes on the periphery. The last in the series and the end of an epic trilogy (minus numerous DLCs of course), Warhammer 3 continues to build on the sturdy foundations laid six years ago. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences.

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