Total War: Warhammer II - The Shadow & The Blade

I track Total War DLC the way some people track football fixtures, so when a Lord pack lands at Mixed on Steam I want to know exactly which half of the package is dragging the score down. With The Shadow and The Blade, the answer is pretty clear after a few campaign runs: the split is almost exactly 60/40 in favour of the Skaven side, and the 69% positive rating reflects that frustration more than any actual failure of design. Malus Darkblade leads Hag Graef and arrives with the most narratively interesting mechanic in the pack. He is permanently locked in a tug-of-war with the Slaaneshi daemon Tz'arkan, who is bound inside him, and you manage that possession across the campaign via a Daemonic Influence meter. You can lean into the daemon's dark whispers for powerful items and followers, or resist and stay in control - but mismanage the balance and Malus becomes a liability in his own army. It is genuinely tense resource management, and the constant banter between Malus and Tz'arkan on the campaign map is one of the better bits of flavour writing CA has produced for this series. The problem is the starting position. Hag Graef sits in climate-hostile territory with limited expansion vectors, and early turns can feel punishingly tight until you stabilize or confederate Malekith. Subsequent patches did smooth the roughest edges of the possession mechanic - the replenishment penalty was moved to only trigger at maximum possession, turning most of the meter into a conditional buff rather than a pure threat - so if you heard the launch complaints and walked away, it plays more cleanly now. Deathmaster Snikch leads Clan Eshin and is the more mechanically novel faction on paper. His Shadowy Dealings system lets any Eshin character perform covert actions - theft, sabotage, inciting rebellions, city burning - all at 100% success rate, spending a shared resource called Eshin Schemes that refills slowly up to a cap of five. Clan Contracts from the four Greater Clans (Mors, Pestilens, Skyre, Moulder) layer on top, shifting your reputation and unlocking discounted specialist units. In theory, this captures the whole fantasy of running the Skaven underworld's premier assassination bureau. In practice, the three quest-chain covert actions that form Snikch's campaign spine lock him out of the battle for several turns each time they trigger, so the faction's best lord is absent for a chunk of the fights that actually matter. The Eshin Triads - stealthy polearm infantry that shred light units - and the Poisoned-Wind Mortars with their area-denial splash are genuinely strong battlefield additions, and Snikch himself in open combat is a hero-killing machine whose warpstone Weeping Blades strip 50% armour on contact. The toys are good. The campaign wrapper around them is where the design runs thin. On the battlefield unit front, the Dark Elves get Scourgerunner Chariots (extremely fast, built to hunt monsters and large targets), Bloodwrack Medusas (whose gaze ability causes outright gore explosions rather than petrification, and hits hard against grouped infantry), and Bloodwrack Shrines. None of these feel redundant against what Dark Elf rosters already have. The High Beastmaster Lord type also comes with the pack, filling out a slot the faction was missing. Both lords are fully playable in the Mortal Empires campaign as well as the Vortex, which matters for anyone already deep in a cross-game save. Bottom line for strategy players doing due diligence: this is a DLC that rewards Skaven fans more than Dark Elf fans, delivers one outstanding character in Malus and one campaign structure that feels undercooked in Snikch, and has been improved enough by patching that launch-era criticism is partially stale. If either of these factions is in your regular rotation, the mechanical additions justify the cost at a discount. If you are purely a Dark Elf player and have no interest in rat ninja politics, it is a harder sell.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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