Creative Assembly had a great Summer Game Fest. They snapped up a Best Of SGF nomination for Alien: Isolation 2, and then another for Total War: Warhammer 40K. Total War: Warhammer I through III showed that they know how to bring massive scale to the world of Warhammer, but it’s their move to the grimdark world of Warhammer 40K that had me leaning forward in my seat, hanging on every word. More than 40K with Total War rules, this could be the massive shot in the arm that takes this entire series to the next level. Sure, you hear that a lot in previews, but there’s a lot to love here. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war…and it’s glorious.
The first thing that hit me, and it hit like a macro-cannon, was the sense of scale. Yes, Total War has always put a lot in the field, but seeing massive voidships circling the planet, ready to unleash Exterminatus on the world below changes things. Zooming down a notch, we see entire swaths of the battlespace burning, buildings in ruins as the battle lines of various warzones become clear. Supply lines creating artificial borders, corruption crawling across the ground surface, and enemies locked in an endless grind of meat and bullets fight over territory that might provide more than just ground for the next battle. The range of Warhammer 40k is wildly different from Warhammer Fantasy settings, and the game has clearly gotten an upgrade to accommodate. Armored columns of the Imperium lob shells at foes, Orc Shootas rattle off endless rounds, and aerial bombardment crushes everything and everyone into a fine paste. Imperium and Orcs both have a distinct advantage – endless grist for the grinder. There’s no shortage of Orc boys and, man, we see that almost immediately. Frankly, I’m not sure how many soldiers are on the screen during our demo, but it’s easily several thousand on each side. That’s not the trick, though…
The engine behind the previous Total War games, the Warscape engine, relied heavily on fixed battle lines and melee formations. This new Warcore engine is a brand-new, built-from-scratch engine designed as a foundation for where this series goes next. It brings with it improvements aplenty. Fully destructible environments, buildings, deformable terrain, cover for Infantry, a complete overhaul for animation that is node-based and far smoother, and for the first time in history, multi-platform support that will allow a simultaneous release of the game on PC, as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. All that said, it’s also incredibly good at rendering a massive explosion of bones, meat, red mist, and bits when an airstrike hits in a way we’ve never seen before. Seeing the Aeronautica Imperialis come tearing across the battlefield in heavily armed Thunderbolts, bombarding bridges, defensive positions, and scattering bodies is a sight to behold. This new engine is POWERFUL, and it’s clear the team is enjoying all it has to offer. That brings me to craters.
As I said before, the previous games relied heavily on structure and careful army construction and placement. It was more about fielding the correct block of meat against its counter block of meat, paper-rock-scissors style. Now the troops can and will split up, take cover, and flank in all new ways. They’ll use tanks for cover, and yes – they now have full use of craters. Those same aerial bombardments that took out a boatload of Orc boys now created a massive defilade that they can use to hide behind for cover. We just created the very bulwark they might need to repel our advancements.
In addition to craters, troops now understand how structures work. A semi-destroyed ruin of some buildings now serves as a way for troops to take cover. That worked in previous games, but now they’ll use the height of the building, taking place on higher floors and using the height to their advantage.
Before battle begins, the classic Total War pre-battle sequences become more important. In the demo we saw, we had to hold off a massive horde of Orcs, and dividing up our tanks between potential ingress points can turn the tide. During this sequence, our intention was to funnel the Orc boys through a fun little irradiated waterway, with our tanks holding the nearby bridge. On the other side of the water is a trainyard that’d provide some level of flanking cover, provided we didn’t pop their cork too early. Sure enough, the Orcs were frustrated with attempts to make it through the kill funnel bridge, and they took to the nasty sewer water throughline. Their side completely opened, our Imperium soldiers utilized the flanking to suppress and destroy the incoming foes. They may have been holding off our Imperium soldiers from a head-on attack thanks to those aforementioned craters, but that did little for the elevated flanking positions we used to grind them to dust.
A live demo played in real-time, it demonstrated one thing very clearly, very loudly, and very definitively – this was not Total War with different paint. Vehicles reshape the flow of combat, with tanks like the Lehman Russ (completely with "Drive them closer! I want to hit them with my sword!" meme) trundle forward like mobile fortresses, Ork scrap-wagons roar across the no-man’s land in the center of the field, flanked by a massive variety of Orc boys that frankly had more detail than I could even describe. Zooming in, you can see that each unit is unique. Orc boys tend to strap on whatever nonsense they happen to find on the field, and that’s on full display here.
The presentation didn’t shy away from the brutality of 40K. The battlefield is a ruin of smoke, fire, and bodies. The campaign map feels oppressive. Even the UI leans into the industrial, war‑torn aesthetic without becoming unreadable. It’s the first time Total War has felt genuinely bleak, and it fits perfectly.
While there were heavy notes on further expansion of factions (naturally predicated on the success of the base game), we only saw three that’ll be ready for launch – the Imperium of Man, Orks, and the Aeldari, with the first two being the subject of the demo. Strikingly, you can see the differences both cosmetically and in their animations. The Imperium of Man forms in disciplined lines, bringing their armored superiority and artillery to bear. Slow to adapt, but disciplined and focused once entrenched. Conversely, Orks are simply chaos incarnate. Their units lumber forward in an unpredictable mass, seemingly getting more frenzied with every explosion – they don’t win ferociously, they’re also very loud about it.
Though we didn’t get hands-on ourselves (more on that in a moment), the classic Total War push and pull is still present and accounted for, but it seems like the pacing is different. Positioning and cover matter far more, and when weapons like nukes strike the field, entire platoons vanish in a blistering flash of light and fury. The biggest unknown, however, is the balance.
Total War has always struggled when introducing wildly asymmetric factions, and 40K is nothing but asymmetry. If Creative Assembly can balance that, as well as figure out how ships overhead will integrate into that chaos, this could be the most exciting evolution the series has seen in some time.
Creative Assembly finally did the thing everyone’s been whispering about for a decade: they’re taking Total War into the grimdark. This game is not a simple reskin of the previous trilogy, but a confident and aggressively new approach to the entire franchise, as well as its own approach to combat itself. It showed us combat with a new layer of visceral brutality, marked by every victory that feels purchased with the last drops of your empire’s blood.
The best news came at the very end of the demo – we won’t have to wait too long to try it for ourselves. Total War Warhammer 40K will be playable at Gamescom, running August 26 to 30, 2026, with a closed Beta becoming available for those pre-ordering the game shortly thereafter.
While we don’t have a release date for Total War Warhammer 40K yet, the expected release window is somewhere between late 2026 and early 2027. In the future, there is only war and we can’t wait to unleash it on ourselves very soon.
