Hands on with Total War: Warhammer 3's fiery new survival battles

Is there a more ridiculous faction in the world of fantasy Warhammer than Chaos? There probably is actually – this is Warhammer after all, land of sneaky rats and lizard folk. It is nothing if not broad. But none of those other myriad factions and races and creeds has the word “Nurgle” in it, does it? So Chaos wins.

Anyway, Total War: Warhammer 3. This is “the Chaos one”, by the looks of things, featuring four different Chaos factions aligned to their respective gods: Khorne (the “blood for the blood god” one); Slaanesh (the naughty excess one); Tzeentch (the magic one); and yes, Nurgle, the god of looking like you’d smell absolutely disgusting.

Total War: Warhammer 3 previewDeveloper: Creative AssemblyPublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PC (via Parsec)Availability: Out this year on PC

Alongside these Chaos forces comes a couple of other new factions, Kislev and Grand Cathay, and a new kind of battle. In fact, there are several new types of battle, as we learned from talking to game director Ian Roxburgh (“more detail later” on those) but for now there’s one headliner: survival battles, the boss fight-style mode that we’ve played for a good couple of hours, albeit streamed over an occasionally wobbly Parsec.

There are just four of these in the game’s campaign, one for each Chaos boss that you’ll need to defeat if playing as one of the typical “good guy” factions like those two new ones Kislev and Grand Cathay. Creative Assembly was very circumspect when it came to the details of how these are actually triggered in the campaign, but the answer from Roxburgh so far is that these are “kind of boss battles at the end of seminal gameplay moments within the realms – they are you completing that section, that requirement, in order to progress with the storyline.”