Welcome To The Jungle

Creative Assembly’s fantasy battle project enters its second phase with TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER II. 

- Chris Thursten

I’m happy to be ordering Lizard men around. The first Total War:Warhammer zoomed in on the Old World’s heartland, which makes sense—you can’t do Warhammer Fantasy properly without Chaos, Dwarfs, Orks, and the Empire. Even so, I’ve been waiting for Creative Assembly to turn the game’s focus to the stranger things that lurk at the fringe of the setting: the stuff that defies Tolkien and, for me, defines Warhammer.

Okay, okay. High Elves are very Tolkien—but let’s talk about dinosaurs riding other dinosaurs.

Lizard men are serious-minded dinosaur people from space that live in a jungle continent called Lustria. The race and its homeland make up a quarter of Warhammer II’s campaign, which also introduces the High Elves and their toilet seat-shaped home of Ulthuan, the Dark Elves, and the wastelands of Naggaroth, and a mystery fourth faction in the South lands that Creative Assembly are being coy about. It’s definitely Skaven.

This new map and its inhabitants have been part of the Total War: Warhammer plan from the beginning— Creative Assembly’s mission, which will span three games, is to capture every aspect of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle setting in a single sandbox. “There are so many races,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “We want to do them all, and we can’t do them in one game. We made the decision—before we’d even started on the first one—that we had to do three games. Then we designed what each installment of the trilogy would be, knowing they’d eventually all come together.”

Total Warhammer II will have a campaign dedicated to this new map and its new factions. Shortly after launch, however, you’ll be able to bolt both games together to play on one gigantic map with every faction released for both games. Even then, I will probably play as Lizard men.