Look for an ammo bar and you won’t find one. In a Total War entry constructed almost wholly around firearms, Creative Assembly has simply erased the mechanic that every other squad tactics game props itself up on — and honestly, thank the Emperor.
At a recent event I spent roughly an hour with an early build of Total War: Warhammer 40k, carved into three slices: a tutorial, a sample of the campaign (customization included) and a single large battle. Every bit of it was viewed through Space Marine helmets, and every bit of it produced piles of dead Orks and plenty of little dudes yelling “For the Emperor!”
This has been a long time coming. The first Total War: Warhammer arrived from Creative Assembly in 2016, and the slice of the community more invested in the 41st Millennium than in the fantasy side has been asking for this ever since. It took longer than anybody hoped. It’s finally in sight.
Siege engines swapped for armor
Ranged units are nothing new to Total War, but at its core the series has been about two armies shrinking the gap and running each other through with swords. That formula gets inverted here. This is the debut title on WarCore, Creative Assembly’s new engine, and the first ranged-centric Total War since Total War: EMPIRE back in 2009.
Where siege weapons once stood, walking mechs now do. Jumping this far ahead in the timeline meant the gameplay had to travel with it.
My tutorial squad was deposited at a crash site with orders to secure it, which served as a crash course in movement, cover and raining missiles down on greenskins. It also laid out the mechanics you’ll be expected to master: strafe-firing, pinning enemies with suppression, and summoning drop pods full of reinforcements from orbit.
Chainswords haven’t lost their voice
Firearms haven’t smothered melee. Nowhere close.
WarCore’s best showcase arrived when I froze the action and zoomed into a marine-on-ork bloodbath. Units slathered in blood. Bodies caught mid-vault over cover. The motorized teeth of Space Marine chainswords kicking sparks off Ork axes as rounds streaked past overhead.
Beneath the fresh coat of paint, though, this remains a Total War game, carrying the same tactically rich strategic playground the series made its reputation on. Even during the intro scenario, the sheer body count on the field and the number of fronts demanding my attention kept me honest. Positioning is still king. Countering is still king. There appear to be more avenues than ever for bending a battlefield to your will.
Rusty as I am, the campaign mission taught me those lessons again the painful way.
The Thetha-Citadel: disaster first, victory second
The brief: take back the nearby Thetha-Citadel Astropathic Relay Station and purge the xeno threat. Orks once more, with their space force already dug in and battering the planet from the surface and from orbit alike.
I surveyed the system before dropping in. Planets circling a menacing blood red star, and what appeared to be an equally imposing Chaos Gate hanging nearby. Neither could be interacted with in the demo. Consider them teases for mechanics still on the way.
Pull the camera back to the planet and a more recognizable Total War screen greets you: zones, cities, armies awaiting orders. Spinning the view across broad stretches of the planet is smooth, and glimpsing space beyond the curved horizon does plenty of heavy lifting in selling the scale.
I trained fresh troops, advanced on the station, and dispatched my Immortals of Demos — the custom chapter I’d assembled and colored in advance — to handle Snaz Braggerz.
Aggressor marines, Intercessors, Dreadnoughts, Repulsor Executioner tanks. I bundled them together and moved out. Then came the poor decisions. Note to self: don’t stretch yourself thin, and dial the game speed back down once things get hairy.
The Orks bore down on my final cluster of marines and tanks, entrenched atop the high ground of a landing pad from earlier in the match. Several tense minutes of gunfire and orbital ordnance later, we broke them and wrecked their Stompa super-heavy walker. Seeing that yellow monstrosity topple and detonate was almost as gratifying as managing it on the actual tabletop.
The Imperium of Man had triumphed again. That confidence boost sent me straight into the “Very hard” big battle Creative Assembly had lined up for us, and suffice it to say the outcome was rather different.
On the subject of that grey pile of shame
Customization looms large in 40k and in miniature games as a whole, so I was pleased the campaign slice led with an early peek at it.
For the uninitiated in tabletop miniatures: the armies you field generally need assembling first, and they show up unpainted. “Grey pile of shame” is the term we hobbyists use, affectionately, for the backlog of models still waiting on us.
The current build offers slim pickings. You can tweak a base, accents and detail colors across the entire armor, along with your chapter’s name and emblem. Nothing more.
The palette, on the other hand, is a different story. Creative Assembly has licensed the genuine paint colors Games Workshop sells. Scrolling the list, I clocked Caledor Sky and Screamer Pink before settling on Mournfang Brown as the base for my Immortals of Demos.
According to the representative on site, far more options and detail will be available by the time 40k ships. Speaking as someone sitting on a considerable pile of grey unpainted units — primed, I swear — I’d love one of those options to be the signature unpainted plastic look. More importantly, I hope it’s pliable enough that physical 40k players can reproduce their own paint schemes. Playing as Space Marines isn’t the goal. Commanding MY Space Marines is.
The stakes
Creative Assembly has ground to recover. How DLC was handled on Total War: Warhammer III and on 2023’s Total War: Pharaoh left a mark, and this is the title the community has spent a decade requesting. What I played is promising. Whether it lands is another matter.
No release window exists yet. Nothing of the Aeldari faction has surfaced, and what’s been revealed so far amounts to glimpses of the depth Creative Assembly claims it’s building. The Total War DNA appears intact. Whether the heavier ranged emphasis and the rest of the 40k influence combine into something genuinely special — or something that’s fallen to Chaos — remains an open question.
Ask the Stompa. It didn’t get a vote either.