Sometimes, when I’m winning a Total War battle handily, I like to pick an absolutely haggard group of low-tier hopelesses and spend the rest of the fight zoomed in on them, narrativising their high-stakes struggles in a rich and velvety internal monologue that monopolises my attention so fully that I more or less ignore the rest of the battle. That these are among my absolute favourite Total War moments may say something about the level of satisfaction to be found elsewhere in the series’ strategy sandboxes, at times as robust as ancient oaks, others as stale as ancient wotsits. It may be an admission on both our parts that, for all its simulated complexity, Total War is really for people who’d be just as happy playing with those little elasticated catapults and plastic castles, if we could still sit on the floor without our pelvises crumbling into soup mix.
Total War: Pharaoh, which I will acknowledge once and once only as being officially stylised PHARAOH, is almost certainly the most systemically interesting and quality-of-life-full a Total War game has been at launch for a very long time. Three Kingdoms has better diplomacy, Warhammer has unequivocally better goblins, but none are as refreshingly cavalier and passionately thorough with the blueprint of what Total War has the potential to be. CA Sofia should be immensely proud of what they’ve done here, but the realities of Total War’s ridiculous release schedule now clearly mean that even a studio as willing and able to innovate so much in such a short time frame are effectively prevented from producing a genuinely exciting strategy game. I’d love to tell you these new plastic castles are more fun than your old ones, but there’s not even any catapults.