The pointy end


The real-time battles are more immediately exciting than the numbers game. Units with crossbows chunter out steady volley after volley of bolts, horseriders form up into wedges at the last minute and charge, infantry lock down their shields and absorb damage. Formations are back and there are plenty of them, though it's not always easy to get access to them. There are multiple classes of general to choose from and strategists, while weaker, are necessary because they learn formations as they level up. Some followers have access to them as well, so assigning a herdsman to the general with a cavalry retinue means they'll know the wedge formation.

An army can have three generals, each with a retinue of up to six units. This lends itself to balanced armies with one general for cavalry, one for infantry, and one for archers and catapults. Which is not to say you can't make unbalanced or hyper-specialised armies, it just feels wrong. Generals have personalities that suit their roles, expressed as they banter with each other during battles. They even gain traits and develop rivalries and friendships with each other the longer they spend together. You want to build them and arm them like party members in an RPG.

Units don't have as much personality as I'd like. Now that the Warhammer games exist it's always going to be hard to compete on that front, because no matter how different two kinds of rider are they're never going to be as immediately distinct as orcs or vampires. On the personality front, it doesn't help that units will sometimes stand in place and let you shoot them for a bit too long before doing something about it, or ignore a target you left open and charge the wrong one. Of course the AI has never been the shining high point of Total War so if you're along for the ride you're used to this by now.


While generals have attack animations right out of kung-fu movies, when ordinary soldiers collide there's a lot of milling around and swiping at the air going on. Of course there's none of the over-the-top madness of the Warhammer games, because there aren't hydras breathing fire or giants swinging treetrunks around, but there's also none of the individual clashes that made Shogun 2 so much fun to watch. It's fine from a distance, but unrewarding if you like to hit the slow-motion button, press K to make the HUD fall away, and watch things up close.

Night battles do look gorgeous, though. Troops carry red lanterns on poles and cities under siege fill the sky with floating paper lanterns like low-hanging stars. Battles during winter take place on maps covered in high-contrast snow, while at other times of year farmers might be working in paddy fields as you ride past. Port cities have cranes on the docks and boats in the harbor.

That said, there are no naval battles. The Creative Assembly has given up on them completely it seems, and while armies board ships when they head onto the water, encounters at sea are resolved automatically. Given how important rivers like the Yangtze are to China strategically it's a missed opportunity. Imagine if John Woo's movie Red Cliff, after hours of build-up, ended with someone clicking autoresolve.

Anticlimax is a problem with Three Kingdoms more generally. At a certain point in the campaign the three leading warlords are declared kings and have to fight it out to determine who will be sole emperor. When I marched a decent army into my first opponent's territory they abdicated and surrendered to me, so I switched my attention to the final remaining enemy, the Kingdom of Wu. After many turns spent building armies as strong as my economy allowed, I sent one full stack the long way around via the water to attack his capital from behind while the rest of my armies marched on our shared border capturing villages and small cities.


After a few seasons of this I finally drew his full force out. Wu's best armies stayed close together, but one set itself up in ambush nearby. I discovered it thanks to one of my generals having keen eyes, attacked with superior numbers, and defeated it handily. The rest of his forces were still formidable though, and mine slightly weakened by wiping out the failed ambush. We faced off for the climactic finale. And then on his turn a diplomacy pop-up informed me he wanted to surrender and abdicate.

A relatively bloodless victory is nice and all, and it's a credit to the AI that it knows when it's about to be beaten, but it was a hell of a downer way to end a campaign. I could have said no to the offer and carried on the war but it would have felt like bullying at that point. As I said, the campaign lends context to the battles, and sometimes that context can take away from them as well.

Plenty of these criticisms—an underwhelming endgame, or clunky battle animations, or AI oddness—have been true of other Total War games. Three Kingdoms is no worse than many of them and better than quite a few. I look forward to seeing how things like the diplomacy system and maybe duels carry on into Warhammer 3 and whatever else comes next, it's just hard to look past Three Kingdoms' role as another iteration on a familiar formula.

That's the problem with there being so many Total War games at the moment. A new one comes out while the last two are still fresh in our memories. Three Kingdoms is a very good strategy game in which to experience 2nd century China, and I've spent dozens of enjoyable hours with it. When you zoom in close on the right details, whether it's two generals duelling or an enemy turning the vassal system against you, it's grand.