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amazon Total War Three Kingdoms reviews
Total War: Three Kingdoms – The theme “Three Kingdoms” has always been an obsession with the “ethnic” of the Total War game series.
So since the release of Rome: Total War in 2004 with a powerful modding toolkit, many modders have spent thousands of hours building the world of the Three Kingdoms for… addicted.
Even with later versions of Total War, there is always a large modder community devoting their strength to creating a detailed “Three Kingdoms” with detailed maps, characters, and military units. it is like a well-developed game.
Not only that, there were tens of thousands of letters requesting for Creative Assembly, the “mother” studio of the Total War game series, asking the company to officially make this game with this fascinating context.
But the company constantly … ignored when focusing on the scenes that have a lot of experience to form Total War: Shogun 2 or Total War: Rome 2 to save time for research and development. More strength for the world of Total War: Warhammer with many serial versions, intertwined to satisfy the “craze” of a large community of gamers from the West.
It was not until 2018 when the company “revealed” the Total War: Three Kingdoms project, the fans’ desire was answered.
Many gamers watched every step of the game’s development, each trailer, each game screen, each battle on the beta still full of bugs … and then all broke when the game launched.
The storm called Total War: Three Kingdoms swept through the gaming industry and formed the most dizzying record in the history of the Total War franchise, with more than a million copies sold in the first week of release.
After a lot of waiting as well as a good start, is the game worth the long wait from the fans?
With a way of up to 20 years, the Total War series has made strides with almost year-by-year improvements in both screen mechanics, graphics engine, and additional elements to create games playing always keep “fire” in the hearts of fans of the strategy game genre.
Therefore, it can be said that Total War: Three Kingdoms has converged all the quintessence of the studio during the past time with a multitude of familiar elements and fits like “shoemaking” for the mixed game genre between 4X and this squad strategy (Squad-based Tactic).
That means you’re still “playing” the game the old way: building and balancing socio-economic components, researching technology, building troops, then bringing your huge force “kill” everywhere to expand our territory to more strongholds, build relationships with one side, defeat the other and then gradually spread the war machine around so that we can win the final victory.
Simple as that, so the fans’ “enduring” of the game series only take about … 10 minutes to be able to get used to the modified interface of the game series, to suit the context of the game.
But when you go deeper into the “battle”, you will easily discover a big difference between Total War: Three Kingdoms compared to the previous versions, even so much that the formulas that make up your previous work must also be re-considered.
The first obvious difference is that Total War: Three Kingdoms has separated production works such as farms, mines, trading points … from citadels, ramparts, and residential areas, creating whole dense bases that need to be controlled by the player on the map to create an economic and political base for a land.
These points are all populated, which means that you can still recruit soldiers in this place, keep and maintain security, cut off tax collection supervisors … The small land also became very messy many times over the previous versions.
Just imagine that, with a district into “tiny”, there are also two “followings” projects, only a small map of a province including a few cities is enough to make you work hard, like managing a medium-sized empire in the previous version of Total War: Rome 2.
If you leave these bases and are taken over by the enemy, you will face great problems due to the crippled economy, having only the people without other production facilities will seriously threaten to stockpile food, produce resources, recruit units that need special resources, or more simply, people will be less happy when their rations are cut, starvation, natural disasters and … The army yellow scarf fight again.
This leads to another corollary in Total War: Three Kingdoms, that the military units have to “move” in a reasonable way, to ensure both defense and security for the land, but not a loss. It costs too much to maintain the “salaries” for this army. Besides, is a game based on the plot of two famous historical and novel series, which depicts deeply historical character lines, so the “Characters” feature has been deeply developed with many personal elements are “added”, highlighting the character’s characteristics besides the “hero battle” system that was quite completed on the previous Total War: Warhammer game series!
The characters all have political tendencies, personal relationships with other characters (and also with other feudal lords) with a full range of distinct skill boards, weapons and accessories, and customization parts are different, enough to affect these characters in the game screen, much more complicated than the character systems just … for versions of the previous Total War game series.
The role of the characters in Total War: Three Kingdoms is also highlighted many times through Romance mode.
In this mode, the “heroes” are not merely a slightly more powerful unit with unique skills. The selection of characters, the fighting strength of the heroes has been enhanced, even enough to change the situation of the whole game scene.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Romance mode doubles the replay value of a game that takes a lot of time for gamers like Total War: Three Kingdoms.
As usual of the Total War game series throughout the years, Creative Assembly has upgraded its graphics engine to a new level with more powerful effects, more beautiful, and also … much heavier.
The most obvious is that most models from characters, buildings, to the terrain of hundreds of different battle maps in Total War: Three Kingdoms are built very meticulously, closely with the materials in the history of both the resolution of the surface texture and the smallest details in the costumes, weapons, and warhorses of each character.
Since Total War: Shogun 2, the game team of the company has made good use of Motion Capture technology to bring the smooth movement of characters now, with Total War: Three Kingdoms, both of these elements have been strengthened and extended to new heights
It must be said that the “martial arts director” of the company had to work hard to research thousands of different martial arts, with hundreds of weapons when fighting on horses and on foot combat to create combat scenes beautiful.
Lighting effects, explosions as well as physical effects are also applied and expressed deeply, harmoniously with two tones of effects “Records” and “Romance” with two different expressions.
If the color tone “Records” is more realistic with a gray frame, even a dirty part of the battlefield dust, the tone “Romance” shows a much brighter, clean, and purer expression. It is simply an effect, but also very easy to satisfy the taste of each gamer, vividly demonstrating the spirit of the world in the game.
In addition, cut-scenes and in-game scenes are all constructed using three different tactics.
These are the scenes depicted with Chinese ink-based ink pen, pre-rendered clips, and cleverly manipulated cutscenes where Total War turns: Three Kingdoms becomes a full-blown Chinese art piece that gives a strong, deep impression to any gamer who comes to the game.
The look is so unique, the sound is not inferior when the game development team has worked hard to create a huge collection of high-resolution sounds with a powerful voiceover team, blowing soul into every nook and cranny of the game, from the impact of weapons, the sounds of horses, to the fierce screams of killing on the battlefield.
The soundtrack system is performed by a somewhat old composer with Total War games Armin Haas with a very difficult request from general director Janos Gaspar to show the “soul of the Three Kingdoms” for each song background.
This is a real challenge, especially for foreign musicians “imbued with” the influence of Western music. As a result, Armin Haas used a very skillful method to accomplish this difficult task, which is to set the soundtrack to ancient Chinese poems to keep the soul of the Three Kingdoms dense throughout the game.
Although still a bit Western, it must be said that the soundtracks performed extremely well during the very long playing time of the Total War: Three Kingdoms campaign.
Tight gameplay, a satisfying graphics engine, a massive realistic sound system, and ear-sounding soundtracks have made the bulk of Total War: Three Kingdoms a success.
But if you are the “hardcore people” of the game series about Tam Quoc, you will feel a little bit … craving!
Most of the events in the main game focus on developments that took place in a very short period, only from 190 AD when Dong Trac burned to Luoyang, moving the capital to Chang’an until the battle of Xich Bich divided into three countries.
Previous elements such as the uprising of the Army Yellow Scarf invaders from 184 have not been clarified, although the Yellow Towel faction is favorably included in a free DLC for game presets.
The events after the Great War of Xich Bich are not described thoroughly, mostly led by players and completed their own stories.
Perhaps all of these factors will be added later through later DLC versions, especially when the market has been extremely profitable in recent years and other games in the series. The game also performs very well this tactic.
Another problem that players themselves also find somewhat “deprived” is the desirable “Deep Thought” system for games on the theme of the Three Kingdoms.
Nearly throughout the game’s duration, every problem of the plot is solved through some event (event) where the player must meet the necessary conditions to “call” out from the script.
The only thing a player can do is use the military engineer of important generals and characters, taking advantage of many available contradictions to create an unexpected “turn of the world”.
In this regard, there is another game related to the Three Kingdoms theme is Romance of the Three Kingdoms series of Koei Tecmo game company from Japan. This game, although not as strong in terms of tactics and battles as Total War: Three Kingdoms, players will be freer to easily use many strategic and tactical tactics to gain great advantages, win thrillingly and dramatically, just as depicted in the story.
However, Total War: Three Kingdoms is still a great game for fans of the Three Kingdoms theme when it brings a true world of both image and sound and a gameplay mechanic that is refined over a long time development and results from over 20 years of Creative Assembly with Total War game series.