Play This Right Now
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If you told me 10 years back, when I started playing Total War: Warhammer as a brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed strategy gamer, that we’d eventually reach The End Times period, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are: three games, 110 legendary lords and factions later, Immortal Empires has successfully sliced and diced the best bits of Warhammer Fantasy and chucked them in a big cooking pot of delicious fantasy goodness.
It’s both the biggest and best Total War campaign Creative Assembly has ever attempted and you can now play it for just $9 (£7.49) by purchasing any of the characters from the Lords of the End Times expansion. Originally, you had to own all three games, then that was softened to just the third instalment, and now all you need is Boris, Thanquol, Nagash, or The Glottkin, though this version of the campaign doesn’t let you play everyone.
It’s funny, though, while The End Times are a desirable era for a strategy game about bringing chaos to the world, or throwing back an endless tide of destruction, they were supremely unpopular in Warhammer Fantasy. How do you end a setting with 30 years worth of characters and lore? The answer is not well. But that’s the genius part of the Lords of the End Times’ expansion fantasy—you can rewrite the whole thing.
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One of my first campaigns in the expansion was playing as the Fay Enchantress—effectively Warhammer Fantasy’s version of the Lady in the Lake—who was really done dirty in The End Times lore, being sacrificed to resurrect Nagash. Instead, I fought my way to his Black Pyramid in the Land of the Dead and crushed him in a climactic final battle. Revenge is sweet.
It’s easy to see why so many disliked The End Times. Besides its inconsistencies and u-turns in established character-defining lore, so many beloved figures ended up dying off screen, or were reduced to mere mentions summarizing where they happened to be when the world literally tore itself apart, like a tick-list of who’s dead—spoilers: it’s everyone.
But you can change that now. Maybe you don’t like what happened to Volkmar or Balthasar Gelt? Maybe you want Karl Franz to win against The Glottkin? Or maybe Grimgor beats Archaon in this timeline? Maybe you just want to kill Mannfred over, and over, and over, and over (I know I do). This expansion’s greatest trick isn’t portraying the end of Warhammer Fantasy, it’s letting you subvert its fate endlessly, forever. It’s officially the end of The End Times.
A big part of that fantasy is obviously the long-awaited endgame scenarios. After 10 years, Archaon finally has a proper Chaos invasion, and having played it, I can confirm it’s quite scary. The Everchosen rallies every Chaos-aligned lord behind him and is functionally immortal until you destroy his invasion fortresses dotted across the map and weaken his Chaos host. But every settlement he razes devastates provinces and stays razed until you defeat him, meaning you’re on the clock in terms of stopping the world’s transformation into a hellscape.
There’s also the Great Ritual of Nagash and the Skaven Vermintide, if you prefer your apocalypse undead or rat-flavoured. Hell, you can even have them all active at once if you want the most loreful version of The End Times. HELL, you can even become the endgame if you’re playing as Archaon, activating the Chaos invasion when you grow powerful enough and setting about your task bringing ruin to the world.
It really is the cherry on top of the mouth-watering cake that is Immortal Empires. This isn’t the end for Total War: Warhammer, either. Though Creative Assembly is still working on issues with campaign AI, and factions like Bretonnia sorely need a rework to catch up with others, there’s still the promise of more characters, units, and campaign support in the future. As someone with 3,212 hours in this trilogy, $9 seems like a pretty good value entry point for what I’d consider to be the greatest rendition of Warhammer Fantasy’s world put to code.
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