A multiplayer experience so bad that it's almost unbelievable it was made post-2005. I have never seen such a convoluted, clunky, unintuitive system for simply trying to play with your friends. It's genuinely like Capcom doesn't WANT this game to be multiplayer. Fix it and I'll fix this review.

A cool idea, but updates come at a glacial pace. It desperately needs more assets and multi-level support. Devs need to hire more folks to push out content/features more quickly or it's going to get left in the dust behind other similar upcoming tools (if it hasn't already).

Fix/remove Sanctum and I'll fix my review. Garbage PoE1 mechanic they of course brought back.

A great game but yet another horribly optimized PC port. This game is insanely unoptimized and unstable, with an amount of crashes to desktop that make playing it a lesson in frustration. If you are retrying challenges or hideouts, which require a loading screen every time, get ready for constant crashing.

Fix the crashing, optimize the port, and I'll happy change my review.

Great arpg that strikes a wonderful middle-ground of complexity between PoE's tremendous learning curve and Diablo's more casual approach. It also has a very cool time travel theme with tons of Chrono Trigger references, so plenty of nostalgia and fun easter eggs. If you like designing your own builds, a widely diverse meta, and multiple areas of customizability, this arpg is a must-play.

First let me say that I love Dune and this game DOES show promise and COULD be one of the best Dune games in history... if they're willing to make some pretty huge changes, because it has many fundamental flaws at the moment. Below is a tl;dr, followed by my very long critique.

tl;dr: This is currently a fairly simple, tedious, and forgettable 4X with a slew of underdeveloped features, a lackluster UI, and numerous strange thematic decisions (see below). The game could be great, but I find it unlikely to receive the breadth of changes that it needs to save it from its current mediocrity.

1. This game has a LOT of different resources (solari, spice, water, plascrete, and many many more). While not inherently a bad thing, the UI has them scattered across your screen, many of them in different areas and in varying font sizes. I understand they attempted to group them with their related areas of the game (intelligence near the agent menu, solari near the spice slider, etc), but they should really all just be listed across the top of the screen in the same font size.

2. The UI does not have any single area where you can quickly look at all of your villages, their buildings, and their micro-economies. For example, if you own 5, 10, or even more villages, the only way to manage each of them is just to sweep around the map manually selecting each one. And even when selected, the village doesn't easily present you with its economic status. This game badly needs economic menus and tabs, similar to Stellaris or Civ, that lists all of your villages in a menu with the most important stats summarized, with additional stats available via mouseover.

3. Trading and diplomacy need some serious improvements. If a rival tries to trade with you, there is no opportunity to make a counteroffer: you either take the trade as-is or decline it, which incurs diplomatic (relations) penalties. And diplomacy is almost non-existent in this game. There are only a few treaties, two of which provide some passive economic bonuses and the third which basically just allows you to travel through a rival's territory. As far as I can tell there is currently no way to really make solid alliances or more nuanced trade agreements.

4. Combat is honestly a joke. There is extremely little unit diversity, microing is next to impossible/pointless, and the units just run into each other and attack until they fall over. Units have some entirely forgettable passive effects and military advancement is fairly simple. Military victories are usually a tedious grind in any 4X, but they are doubly so here. You'll notice this point is much shorter than all the others, and that's because combat is so shallow in this game that there's virtually nothing else I can say about it.

5. I understand that this is a 4X and not an RTS, but if you're going to make your 4X real-time and not turn-based, there should be a significant amount of the game that leverages and takes advantage of that choice. Right now the only real consequence of being real-time is that you have roughly a 5-10s window to recall your spice harvesters after you get a worm warning. But you can also freely pause the game at anytime, which you'll often find yourself doing during trades, council voting, building management, and basically any time you're doing anything and don't want to risk missing alerts. Debate all you want about whether 4Xs are better as real-time or turn-based games, but as it is now there is virtually no mechanical reason or design feature that justifies this game being real-time, especially with combat in its current state.

6. Council voting is currently extremely underwhelming and far too frequent. It all just blurs together after awhile, to the point I frequently find myself ignoring it because I just don't care. Don't get me wrong, some of the effects are powerful, but they rarely feel substantial or exciting. It's just kind of a boring and too-frequent mechanic.

7. The tech tree is pretty weak, with under 40 techs in the entire game. Each faction has a few unique techs, which is nice, but with even moderate knowledge income you'll end up researching all the techs you want every game. There are also a few techs that seem absolutely mandatory while many others are entirely forgettable.

8. Operations/missions balance is non-existent. Supply Drops are so insanely good for 100 intelligence you should just be spamming them all game and in every battle. These need rebalanced badly.

9. Ornithopters, while thematic, are implemented in about as boring a way as possible. They're basically scouts from Civ, which doesn't sound too bad, except that they can't be attacked by anything. This removes any opportunity for counterplay and any incentive/need to be careful/crafty with scouting dangerous territory; you basically just turn them on auto-recon every game and forget about them. There's almost no reason to manually micro them.

10. Speaking of manual vs. automatic options: turn on auto-recall on your harvesters. I know, I know: "but mah income, it says it will produce less spice!" Yes, true, it produces about FIVE percent less spice while removing one of the only things you manually have to micromanage. Slipping up and losing even one harvester will lose you far more than 5% of your income. For this to even be a real consideration, it should be at least a 20% penalty of spice income.

11. Now that we're talking about harvesters, let's talk about worms. You know, THE iconic monster of the Dune universe. As it is, yes, they do what worms do: occasionally try to show up and munch a harvester or military units blindly autoattacking each other in the middle of the desert, but that's it. There are no cool spontaneous worm events, no variety, nothing. You just let your harvesters auto-recall and make sure your idiot soldiers don't fight in the middle of sand dunes and you will literally never see a worm the entire game, which is a shame because they look great when they do show up. They are currently just too easy to avoid. They should trigger more often and with far less of a delay, especially in deep desert areas.

12. Where are the Bene Gesserit? Arguably THE most powerful and influential faction in the entire Dune universe, the group that orchestrated all of the events of the books, is weirdly absent. There are practically no Bene Gesserit mechanics: no events, no unique currency, no options in diplomacy, nothing. The only evidence of them at all are a couple councilors and the occasional agent with the randomly generated Bene Gesserit trait. Pretty poor representation of this absolutely iconic group.

13. The AI is bad. Like BAD bad. Like worse than Civ 6 AI at launch bad. Frequently their units just kind of run around in small groups of 2 or 3 doing very little. And if you go for a military victory, you'll frequently see the enemy units running around the map trying to capture villages or just sitting completely still instead of coming to defend their main base, remaining idle all the way until their base is destroyed and they lose the game. The AI needs a complete overhaul, because it is currently extremely easy to exploit or ignore entirely.

In summary, this game has potential, and a solid foundation, it really does, but it needs overhauled in several areas and considerably more development time to deepen the gameplay and really commit to the theme. However, I find it far more likely to launch largely in its current state, and if that happens, I am sadly confident it will be just another dead and forgotten 4X within six months of its launch, and another squandered opportunity with the Dune IP that is just begging to be done right.

I'm about 12 hours in and I think about 2/3rds through the single-player campaign, and while it is a decent tactical, everything is just SO samey. Every level looks and feels the same. Every enemy is bland and forgettable (the game is purely Blood Angels vs Tyranids). And the solution to every enemy type is either "lots of attacks" or "lots of armor penetration"... meaning you only need two different unit types to easily kill everything without ever losing a single unit.

And every level DRAGS on. When you're doing well (which you will be if you're even semi-decent at tacticals -- this game isn't hard), you will often kill every enemy you can see on your own turn and then end up just waiting, sometimes an entire turn or more, for the final enemies to come to you out of the fog-of-war. See, most levels do not end when you finish your objectives like you would think, but rather when you finish your objectives AND kill all remaining enemies on the map (no matter where they are and whether or not you can even see them).

The only real positives I can give this game are that the voice acting and script are very good (if you like/know 40k) and the visuals and animations are satisfying and thematic.

The game is moderately engaging at best but often just a tedious grind at worst. I can't recommend it, even to 40k fans, and definitely do NOT recommend it to non-40k fans.

Absolutely addicting. This game has destroyed my sleep schedule entirely. You will lose hours to this game without realizing it. It's still in early access, so it's a bit repetitive due to the lack of diversity in ships and hazards, but if they continue to generate more varied ship models and hazards (or maybe even figure out a way for them to be procedurally generated), this will become one of my favorite chill-out games.

Update: They actually listened (after getting review bombed) and removed the below shady-ass spyware. With it gone, I've changed my review.

Launches "anti-cheat" spyware alongside the game client that cannot be disabled and runs even if you're only playing single-player. Do NOT buy this game until they get rid of this ♥♥♥♥.

Update: Unbelievably (or perhaps ENTIRELY believably), Creative Assembly abandoned this title. It was brilliant at launch with the very real potential to be the greatest Three Kingdoms game ever made but... they abandoned it instead. There was still so much room for additional starting date scenarios, officers, etc but now we'll never see it. I know this was a spinoff title from the main Total Wars, but it deserved at least two more years of support than it got, with at least one more full DLC and some additional seasonal patches. Genuinely heartbreaking to see such a beautiful game with such promise abandoned on the side of the road.

Original Review: The best Three Kingdoms game made to date. If you, like many fans of the era, have been stuck playing RoTK11 for the last decade, pick this up.