Total War: Three Kingdoms Critic Reviews

Total War: Three Kingdoms is as close to flawless as you'll find, with a fantastic balance of 4X strategy and character-focused development and emergent storytelling. The battles are frantic, with increased tactical opportunities through duelling. City development is more intuitive and less restrictive, though still requires thought and all of this takes place on a China that looks downright fantastic, where even the UI and menus look great. This is the Total War experience and a new high for the series.

More than just a good Total War game. Its variety in play, riveting campaign mode and improved performance move it up to one of the best games in the RTS genre.

Total War: Three Kingdoms sets a high watermark for the series and a new bar for the genre. Its attention to detail, high level of polish and differing faction mechanics means you can blissfully spend hundreds, even thousands of hours playing and still find something new and beautiful to engage with. It blends larger than life characters with historical authenticity, and technical polish with tactical finesse...I can see myself playing for years to come, and I can’t wait to see where the series goes next.

Massive enhancement of all systems is perfectly complemented by beautiful audio and visuals. You won’t regret this trip to China!

I really don’t have sufficient superlatives to use here. Beyond best-in-setting and best-in-franchise, Total War: Three Kingdoms is a game that instantly contends for best of the year, or best in its genre. The setting and franchise here give it high expectations, and Three Kingdoms surpasses those expectations at almost every level.

Total War: Three Kingdoms uses excellent pacing and strong character mechanics to create a consistently exciting and challenging historical strategy campaign.

Creative Assembly has managed to make the series feel fresh without changing its core, delivering one of its best entries to date. It looks and plays great, and it comes with many, many hours of content.

CA took a huge gamble with its latest release and it really paid off. Three Kingdoms offers a very polished campaign with a strong narrative and robust diplomacy and espionage systems. Together with the immersive management of faction characters, the series are steering towards deeper micromanagement and a more challenging and deeply immersive experience. Romance mode might not be everyone's cup of tea but there are also other options for the more historically inclined fans.

There are few licenses that are able to last over time while maintaining a high level of quality. The Total War saga is one of them and this new episode is no exception to the rule. Even better, this is probably the most successful episode of the saga. Filled with novelties, offering a colossal amount of content, and having a mastered artistic direction, we quickly forget the few technical issues in order to launch body and soul into the conquest of the title of Emperor of China. Moreover, we can't hide our joy seeing the huge replayability of the game which once again promises several dozen (hundreds?) hours of fun.

Total War: Three Kingdoms captures the spirit and essence of the time period. It's filled to the brim with unique and thematic detail, with aesthetic beauty that's a wonder to behold.

Three Kingdoms, to me, represents the best of both the historical and fantasy sides of the franchise. It creates stories that are compelling to play through and watch, using a vast number of systems working in harmony to achieve it. It creates the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows, and it does it all while still improving upon the Total War formula.

The setting in China is a bit strange for us Europeans, but the game as such is with its new mechanics the best in the series.

Three Kingdoms is the most divergent Total War I’ve seen since Total War: Warhammer. I would in fact call it the first post-Warhammer historical installment, taking what is good in fantasy and using it to compliment the historical components of the game. On top of that, it revamps both diplomacy and spying, two aspects of the series that desperately needed updating.

Regardless of which way you choose to play, you get a supremely balanced, intelligent, and deeply strategic game in Total War: Three Kingdoms.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is, perhaps, the franchise's most ambitious game. After a few "little-games", Creative Assembly makes "all-in" with new features and the old-good things. The key was not to replace fields but to be better in them, and we have no doubt that they have achieved this.

A hugely enjoyable mix of historical realism and exaggerated action that is both surprisingly accessible and filled with an impressive depth of tactical options.

Creative Assembly successfully combines Three Kingdoms with Total War, and using the brand-new Romance Mode, bringing us to that chaos times. For those who love Three Kingdoms or Total War series, this is no-doubt a must-try game.

It’s not without its UI issues, but Total War 3 Kingdoms provides a beautiful, rich strategy that is well paced while enjoying a new layer of story depth through diplomacy and intrigue.

Three Kingdoms is one of the best historical Total War games. It has a deep strategic map with a lot of options to guide your faction to the crown of China. The battles, of course, are amazing and epic.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is an ideal representation of what it means to be a PC exclusive series in 2019. In addition to having beautiful graphics and a wide-ranging set of features, it fully utilizes a PC player's understanding of turn-based strategy games to provide a complete, full-scale war experience.