Total War - the series - often struggles with faction variety. Historical fidelity mostly asks that people from the same area and time period fight each other with similar technologies and concepts of warfare, and spicing things up for gameplay purposes often means dipping into the ahistorical, poorly documented, or theoretical. Look at any of the games about WW2-era tanks, boats, or planes and you'll often find that these games create a sense of progression by extending the timeline decades in either direction. Total War isn't immune to this - Creative Assembly will take any excuse to give a faction some kind of ninja unit - but a complaint I've commonly heard from newcomers to the series is that factions feel same-y, with each game creating 1-3 faction archetypes and letting those define the gameplay. Small nuances that determine how each faction should play are either completely invisible to a new player or difficult to intuitively balance. The player asks how much they should lean into their faction's gimmick in order to strike that balance, and the Warhammer games answer confidently: Crank that shit to 11.

If you're playing the Mesoamerican dinosaur faction, it's a pretty safe bet to invest in melee. The King Arthur faction whose population is divided into an illustrious knight class and mobs of untrained peasants probably wants you to play around the horse guys. The gameplay hook for each faction should be obvious from their theming without even glancing at the stats, and Creative Assembly have done a fantastic job of making them just as distinct on the broader campaign map. As a result, factions can feel unique from one another even within the same "race", and the asymmetry forces you to constantly make new, interesting decisions as you try to mitigate your opponent's strengths while playing to your own.

What's more, CA have gone absolutely nuts in bringing the fantasy elements of Warhammer Fantasy into the game. Every friend of mine who's played this game for more than a battle or two has at least one unit that they can gush about for non-gameplay reasons. For me, I'm a Pirates of Sartosa guy, so it's the Necrofex Colossus - a sort of giant, bipedal undead mech made out of the rotten timber of sunken ships and the flesh of their crews, acting as "artillery" by walking right up and blasting you with a cannon at point-blank range. The animations are wonderfully expressive, selling the gameplay fantasy and character of each and every unit regardless of your familiarity with the setting: The rats are a loose, jittery swarm of units while the rigid, rickety ground troops of the Tomb Kings stand in contrast to the inhuman, predatory swiftness of the creatures they employ. It's the feeling of playing with all your action figures at once - GI Joe vs. a bunch of Lego figures vs. a Stormtrooper - with all the vivid effects your childhood brain could imagine and all the strategy you'd need to keep you engaged as an adult.

Best of all, TWW2's co-op campaign is an actual blast. The diversity of the factions combined with the number of leaders in each faction means that both players can pursue the exact flavor of strategy gameplay that they like. If you can at least tolerate the battles, TWW2 lets the owner of an army assign individual units to each player. Divide them up equally, or control the entire army while your friend plays Dynasty Warriors with your general. There's a lot of room for co-op shenanigans with this feature alone, and it's my favorite co-op strategy game as a result.

There's so much to this setting and the Total War games have shown a tremendous willingness to engage with all of its quirks, resulting in an end product that is bursting with flavor. It has taken tremendous restraint to write this review, because it could've very easily been a soup of GIF links and bullet points about all the cool, goofy, clever stuff that you'll be exposed to simply by playing the various campaigns. Play any of these games and it will quickly become obvious why people have spent decades in love with this universe.