Leana Hafer
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Writing For
IGNLatest Reviews
Total War: Warhammer is brimming with exciting ideas, interesting characters, and outright, skull-stompingly delightful units and faction mechanics. The current roster of starting positions in the campaign feels thin, but each army therein is a distinctly different experience. Some factions (Vampire Counts, Greenskins) are more fun than others (Dwarfs), but...
Once you break free from the tactics-focused mindset of most RTS games, Ashes of the Singularity is a challenging, engrossing, and cerebral exercise in strategy that has me mentally iterating on army compositions, build timings, and board deployment schemes even when I’m not playing it. The campaign comes across as...
Put simply, I love Deserts of Kharak. It succeeds where so many RTS games fail, giving a multitasking commander all of the information, unit options, and control flexibility needed to remove needless barriers between what your brain wants your army to do, and what it’s actually able to execute at...
Anno 2205 is an engaging and strategic city builder with unique challenges in each of its attractive biomes. But ultimately, it manifests as a never-ending treadmill of trying to supply the picky, luxury-loving consumers of the 23rd century with more techno-garbage. The combat missions and side quests aren’t that in-depth...
Blood Bowl 2
Blood Bowl 2 is a smashy, satisfying, irreverent combat-sports melee that leaves just a bit too much of the outcome up to the six-sided dice. The inclusion of some seemingly unfinished playable races is a definite stumble, but a campaign with spectacular presentation and deep, crunchy multiplayer league options blitz...
Attila is an adept refinement of Rome 2. From the desperately paced campaign map down to each individual skirmish on the ash-specked earth, it’s a cleaner, better thought-out experience. There are more impactful decision to make, and better utilities with which to make them. The political systems are still some...
Grey Goo
Grey Goo is likely the best traditional RTS not made by Blizzard in the past five years. The cinematic, exciting presentation of the campaign is a big selling point by itself, even if the mission structure and actual scenarios are less than revolutionary. Despite my high-level balance concerns, I know...
Craft the World has a lot of personality, but like the layers of earth it gives you to explore, it’s surprisingly shallow. The progression in the campaign mode doesn’t leave you with any great sense of accomplishment or completion, and the sandbox mode doesn’t give you enough freedom or things...
Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault is an adept interweaving of the strategic, tactical, and personal facets of warfare. A clever campaign with hard, meaningful decisions to make at every turn is hindered only by how zealously it insists you live with the consequences of those decisions – even if...
Persona 5 was already a strong front-runner for being the best JRPG ever made, and Royal really gets me wondering what else could even compete. The excellent story and its lovable, multidimensional characters along with the challenging, tactical combat are all refined and back for another round with new surprises...
If Earthblood had at least been a fun beat-em-up, I would have been disappointed by the missed opportunity but glad we got a somewhat decent game about that one aspect of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. But the clumsy, unsatisfying combat even takes the teeth out of that and leaves nothing much...
It may not be up to the grandeur of Three Kingdoms or Warhammer 2, but A Total War Saga: Troy is a significant step up from the previous Saga game, Thrones of Britannia. Troy is simply dripping with style and offers exciting, diverse campaign objectives that enthusiastically retell the timeless...
