Total War: Warhammer II came out for Windows PCs on 28 September 2017, and it asks players to save a world or break it. The Creative Assembly developed it, Sega published it, and Feral Interactive brought it to macOS and Linux on 20 November 2018. It is a sequel to 2016’s Total War: Warhammer, set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy universe.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
The Great Vortex Is Failing
The Eye of the Vortex campaign opens on a crisis. Millennia ago, a conclave of High Elf mages forged an arcane vortex to drain the Winds of Magic from the world and blast the Daemonic hordes back to the Realm of Chaos. Now the Great Vortex falters.
Four races move on it. Prince Tyrion guides the High Elves in stabilizing the maelstrom. The Slann Mage-Priest Mazdamundi sends his Lizardmen north from Lustria. The Witch King Malekith leads the Dark Elves out of Naggaroth, sensing opportunity in the vortex’s demise. A fourth race stirs in secret.
Each playable race gets its own story and cutscenes. The Vortex gives four factions one goal and four different reasons to want it.
Malekith, Mazdamundi, and the Race for the Vortex
The campaign alternates turn-based map management with real-time battles. Players move armies, manage settlements, and run diplomacy with AI factions. When armies meet, the fight happens in real time.
The announced campaign races are the Lizardmen, High Elves, Dark Elves and Skaven. The Tomb Kings and Vampire Coast arrived later as paid downloadable content, along with The Huntsmarshal’s Expedition, the Chevaliers de Lyonesse, Broken Axe, Heralds of Ariel, the Slaughterhorn Tribe, and Ironbrow’s Expedition.
Four races, four outcomes, a single goal: control of the Great Vortex, for good or ill.
Mortal Empires Is the Real Prize
Owners of both Total War: Warhammer and Total War: Warhammer II unlock Mortal Empires, a combined campaign that plays as a sandbox rather than a story. It is free, but it must be downloaded manually from Steam.
That is the correct trade. The Vortex gives the sequel a spine, and Mortal Empires gives it a floor plan. Players who own races from the first game get those races unlocked for multiplayer in the second.
Battles, Multiplayer, and Custom Armies
Custom battles let players build their own real-time fights, and online multiplayer supports both battles and campaigns. The campaign can be played online with another player in co-operative or head-to-head modes.
The bird’s-eye isometric view keeps the battlefield legible while armies collide across the landscapes of the New World.
What the Four Races Demand
The race design is where Total War: Warhammer II earns its reputation. Lizardmen, High Elves, Dark Elves and Skaven do not play as reskins of one another. Each brings its own roster logic to the same map, and the Vortex campaign forces those logics into direct competition.
The later paid factions extend that variety, though the full roster arrives in pieces rather than at launch.
The Sequel That Fixed the Formula
Total War: Warhammer II succeeds because it stops treating the campaign as a tutorial for the battles. The Vortex gives the turn-based layer a clock, and the clock gives every settlement decision weight.
Mortal Empires is the better sandbox, but the Vortex is the better game. It has an ending, and the ending has stakes.
An 8.8 Out of 10
Total War: Warhammer II is the rare sequel that improves by narrowing. Four factions, one vortex, and a campaign that knows what it is about. Mortal Empires demands a manual download, but that does not dim what The Creative Assembly built here.
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