Total War: Three Kingdoms review — Best in the series, best in the setting

Total War: Three Kingdoms is the best Total War game and the best Three Kingdoms game ever. I do not make this claim lightly; I’ve been playing various incarnations of both this setting and franchise for two decades. But the setting excellently lends itself to how Total War works, and developer Creative Assembly has adapted the series to Three Kingdoms to make everything fall into place.

Before getting into the game itself, it’s worth discussing what the setting of the Three Kingdoms means, as a whole. In the most superficial sense, it’s a series of civil wars that ended the Chinese Han Empire from the late second century CE into the third. But more than that, the Three Kingdoms era has become a defining event of the literature and culture of civil wars, the way that the fall of the Roman Republic, the Wars of the Roses in England, or the American Civil War create legends for their cultures. This is the story of larger-than-life figures, engaged in a titanic war not just for territory but for strategy and politics and morals, perhaps reaching its pop cultural peak in John Woo’s film Red Cliff.