Creative Assembly has already proven that the Total War formula can work surprisingly well outside its historical roots, first with the fantasy setting of Warhammer. Now the studio is taking an even bigger leap into the future with Total War: Warhammer 40,000, bringing the massive armies, turn-based campaigns and real-time battles of the series into the grim darkness of the 41st millennium. Based on an early PC demo played during Gamescom, the first impression is certainly promising: this feels like the sort of game that could deliver a long-awaited meeting between Dawn of War and Total War, while still leaving plenty of questions about how the two sides of the formula will ultimately fit together.
What we know
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 combines the series’ familiar turn-based strategic layer with large-scale real-time battles, this time set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe during the Era Indomitus. Players will command armies across a galactic campaign, expanding their territory, managing resources, upgrading fleets and fighting for control of planets and strategic locations. Battles take place on individual worlds, where armies can engage in everything from ground combat around installations to large-scale confrontations involving tanks, walkers and other war machines. The campaign is built around a solar-system-scale structure rather than a single continuous landmass, with planets containing their own regions and strategic locations.
Four factions are planned for launch: the elite Space Marines, numerous and unpredictable Orks, the swift and technologically advanced Aeldari, and the massed forces of the Astra Militarum. Each is intended to play differently, with their own units, weapons and tactical strengths. Players will also be able to customise their forces, including their army’s colors, iconography and name, while individual units can be specialised with different weapons, traits and abilities. The Space Marines in particular can be reinforced from orbit, while orbital bombardments, aerial strikes and other powerful abilities provide additional options during battles. The game also introduces destructible environments, allowing buildings and other elements of the battlefield to be destroyed and potentially creating new cover and tactical opportunities in the process.
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is being developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA. It is planned for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, although a release date has not yet been announced.
What we saw
Our hands-on session took place during Gamescom after meeting with SEGA and was based on an early PC demo build. The session was divided into several parts, beginning with a tutorial that introduced the new combat mechanics, followed by a small slice of the campaign and a larger battle designed to demonstrate the scale of the encounters. The Space Marines were the only faction available during the hands-on, giving us a chance to experiment with their combination of highly capable units, ranged firepower, melee attacks, vehicles, reinforcements and orbital support.
What we thought
The most interesting thing about Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is that the shift to a futuristic setting doesn’t simply amount to replacing swords and cavalry with guns and tanks. Creative Assembly has had to rethink how battles work around ranged weapons, cover, armor and enormous differences in unit strength. That makes the comparison to Dawn of War particularly tempting, but the underlying structure is still recognisably Total War. Armies are moved around the strategic map in turns before individual engagements transition into large real-time battles, while positioning, flanking and managing several fronts remain just as important as they were in the fantasy games. The difference is that the battlefield now feels much more dependent on using terrain intelligently, matching weapons against appropriate targets and knowing when an elite unit should hold its ground or withdraw.
The Space Marines provide a particularly good demonstration of this asymmetry. Small numbers of heavily armored soldiers can survive against huge Ork hordes, but they are not invincible, and simply leaving them in place while the enemy closes in is a good way to lose them. Cover, elevation and the ability to call in reinforcements or orbital attacks give the player several ways of compensating for being outnumbered. At the same time, the Orks demonstrate why that numerical advantage matters, throwing wave after wave of troops at positions that can eventually be overwhelmed. The combination makes the battles feel more tactically demanding than simply lining up two armies and watching them clash, although the familiar Total War DNA remains reassuringly intact. The tutorial also appears to be designed with newcomers in mind, gradually introducing concepts such as cover, suppression, strafing fire and orbital support rather than expecting players to understand everything immediately.
There is plenty to like visually as well. The scale of the battles is impressive, particularly when the camera is pulled back to show enormous numbers of troops fighting across a battlefield before zooming in on individual Space Marines and Orks hacking and shooting at one another. Explosions, orbital strikes, tanks and towering walkers give the setting the spectacle that Warhammer 40,000 demands, while destructible buildings and changing terrain add some substance to the visual chaos. The sound design contributes to that sense of scale, with gunfire, explosions and the constant clash between futuristic weaponry and brutal melee combat helping sell the atmosphere. The new WarCore engine is clearly doing some heavy lifting here, although the early build was not completely polished, with some frame-rate drops and lighting issues visible during the larger battles.
The biggest question is therefore not whether Total War: Warhammer 40,000 looks impressive, but whether Creative Assembly can make its ambitious combination of systems work across an entire campaign. The demo offered only a small glimpse of the strategic layer, making it difficult to judge how moving between planets, managing fleets and resources, and conquering an entire solar system will come together. Customisation is another promising feature that still appeared fairly limited in this early version, despite the ability to create a distinctive Space Marine chapter through colors, symbols and names. With the Aeldari and Astra Militarum also waiting to demonstrate how different factions will play, there is clearly much more to reveal. Still, the basic idea already works better than it perhaps has any right to: Total War’s large-scale strategy and Warhammer 40,000’s brutal science-fiction warfare appear to be a natural fit, and the futuristic direction gives the long-running series a welcome opportunity to rethink some of its established conventions.