Now Playing: A World Betrayed (DLC)

After what felt like something of a content drought for Total War: Three Kingdoms, we have a new DLC following hot on the heels of the recent Mandate of Heaven DLC – A World Betrayed. Like Mandate of Heaven, A World Betrayed shifts the action to a new campaign start date – 194. So, once again, we’re faced with a familiar campaign, but with a new twist.

Unlike MoH, however, this new campaign doesn’t offer as significant a change from the core 190 campaign. It’s focused primarily on two characters – Lu Bu and Sun Ce – characters that already feature in the 190 campaign, but are now promoted to faction leaders, each with their own unique campaign mechanics.

I’ve played primarily as Lu Bu, so this review will be mostly based upon that campaign, but I’d say that both of these ‘new’ factions are pretty fun to play. Lu Bu has a mechanic called ‘momentum’ which grants the ability to reset your movement points after each battle. This builds a ‘momentum bar’ that grants further extensions to movement range, army bonuses and character satisfaction the higher it goes.

 

Playing as Lu Bu is all about maintaining your momentum, continually moving from one battle to the next. It results in a very rapid campaign in which you can build your personal prestige very quickly – I triggered the Three Kingdoms war and declared myself Emperor after only 28 turns on Hard. I’ve had a real blast with this campaign, and with this DLC in general, but the problem is, I’m not sure I can really recommend it.

A World Betrayed has released at the same price as Mandate of Heaven. And if you’re going to charge a similar price, I’d expect a similar level of new content. But compared to MoH, A World Betrayed is sorely lacking as far as new content goes.

Mandate of Heaven introduced new characters, factions and mechanics to the game, but A World Betrayed is essentially only re-purposing existing characters – Lu Bu and Sun Ce. The content that you’re paying for in A World Betrayed, in my view, doesn’t match the asking price, and that’s why it’s a hard one to recommend.

 

But it’s a tricky one to judge, because like Mandate of Heaven, A World Betrayed is more than just the DLC – it includes a pretty sizeable patch that overhauls various aspects of the existing game and adds quite a lot of new stuff entirely for free. In fact, the free content patch that dropped alongside A World Betrayed is, in many ways, much better than the DLC itself.

It introduces around 16 new characters, each with unique art. There’s been new additions and improvements rolled into the Spy system. There’s a great new ‘mercenary contract’ diplomatic option that allows you to fight for gold on behalf of other factions. All of the ‘bandit’ factions have also received a campaign overhaul.

They have an entirely new approach to the technology tree based upon the territory they seize, the income they receive and the infrastructure they can support. Oh, and there’s also a new free playable bandit faction, with its own unique mechanics.

All of this stuff is great, but it’s also all free and not technically a part of this DLC. Obviously, free updates like this are essentially funded through DLC sales – one wouldn’t exist without the other – and that’s why, despite feeling that A World Betrayed shouldn’t be priced at a similar level to Mandate of Heaven because it doesn’t offer a comparable level of new content, I don’t really feel short changed.

It’s a tricky one, because the DLC and the patch, taken as a whole, is really good. But this review is purely of the paid content included in the DLC, and in that regard, the DLC package is somewhat lacking. If you’re a fan of 3K then it’s something I’d still recommend picking up at some point, but it might be best to wait for a sale.

6/10