Every time I give a mixed rating. My heart feels heavy. Since I like to highlight what works well, and what doesn't, critique, offer suggestions, and move on. Wartales(WT) is passable for me. After struggling to play for two months since the launch in April of this year. But, I wanted to see as much as I could. Because I love supporting indies and especially if they have role-playing elements. After over forty-five hours I decided it was time to review WT before my feelings soured further.
A medieval low fantasy tactical RPG with sandbox gameplay. As someone who loves medieval and low fantasy settings, this was a no-brainer to watch out for. And I’ve been watching the developers work closely ever since. Avidly reading patch notes, whooping in delight when roadmaps appear and progress is made. Waiting until the final day when the official release arrives.
First let's start on what WT is about, then move on to the critique or what I call my mixed feelings. There is no central story from which your company of mercenaries must follow throughout your journey. Instead, you complete scenarios in each region of which there are six to explore, fight, trade, and even play detective. Upon finishing, some are related to a scenario, the progress bar in the top left corner will fill up until you reach a hundred where you can partake in the final province mission before you move on to another place. Times will vary to accomplish your goals. In my experience, they can range from eight to twelve hours to thoroughly comb one sector with a majority of sidequests done. And I had already progressed past four of them. Was one-third of the way done on my fifth before I couldn’t take it anymore.
The main meat here holding up a chunk of your time is the combat portion. Turn-based emerges when you encounter a hostile in the overworld. Honestly reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin(D: OS) a lot since you can maneuver your party members in any direction. Not a grid or hex-based. Use abilities as long as you have valor points. Points you can earn every time you rest. These don’t recharge every fight, so be careful utilizing them. However, there are skills you can attain to increase temporary valor points to mitigate the loss. One of the cool things you can do is switch any weapon/shield that can grant you new toys to play around with. I could switch from a greatsword that allows me to hit multiple enemies in a 160-degree radius in front of me. Then switch to a different sword allowing my character to charge forth through multiple bandits caught unaware. Swap my shield to inflict a debuff causing a cannibal to be more susceptible to damage and more. I appreciate this since it makes equipment management useful in combat(You need to unlock the skill later, you cannot switch weapons early on). Entrusting the player to carefully manage new powerful weapons containing lackluster effects. Old weapons with cool spell sets that do a bit less damage. And while you cannot use the environment to your advantage akin to D: OS. The underhandedness of Wartales comes into play here. Regarding debuffs. Can’t wreck through a baddie's health or armor? Use poison to whittle down their health(HP). Stack that up for more damage. Still not enough? Here’s bleeding taking off “X” percent of their maximum HP. Burn them too. And watch how the effect can spread to nearby guards in close range and yourself if you’re close enough. And if that’s not enough there is even corrosion and disarming foes too! I haven’t gone through the whole list because each class has its skill tree unique to them.
An acceptable amount of class variety here. In spears, swords, hammers, axe, bows, arrows, daggers, and animals, suffice it to say there is a varied amount of choices you can pick and specialize your companions. I had fun recruiting new troops and setting them up with new equipment I had on hand after defeating an annoying private army. A nice way to build up your mercenary crew. Interestingly enough, I don’t believe there is a limit. I've read other reviews noting bigger sizes. I was able to manage over twenty units. Twelve are battle-ready, while the rest such as my ponies and prisoners cannot fight. So overwhelming odds against a lone soul or two to four is well immensely satisfying to decimate. Didn’t have any issues paying wages and feeding them either. I suspect a larger group could be a hassle.
You mainly find your busy work to do upon entering a tavern and talking to an emissary near a bounty board. From there you can accept contracts to eliminate a troublesome group, destroy a rat infestation, and even find tombs(these are underground dungeons). These contracts, if you can excuse the radiant missions(Basically filler and repeat again and again) are decent in that some of them you come across as you traverse the big overworld. See a merchant under attack, help a family solve a murder, find the missing person, hunt down a group who terrorized a village, etc. Side content, for the most part, is all right, since they're just a bit below the quality of the main quests for a scenario.
Nonetheless, let’s move on to my critique. Not a positive or a negative. But for the sake of transparency, I’m noting them down. Suggestions in the end parts.
Experience(EXP) contribution and how that is earned needs a major overhaul. Early on, leveling up your troops is not a big issue. It starts to become a bigger problem as you head to the middle portion and then final parts. If I could sum it up in one word. Grindy. The max, as far as I know, is twelve. I was only able to reach level eight for a small portion of my crew while the rest were in the six to seven range. And facing off hostiles in the eighth to ninth resulted in battles being time-consuming averaging out to 15-30 min engagements, each time I encountered a sizable group against my party. Why does it take a while man? Do you not have the best equipment? Trust me, when I say my crew is built comparable to a tank capable of withstanding the hardest of blows. And strong enough to deal devastating damage, eliminating them swiftly with one guy. Hell, I've even used my min-maxing skills to maximize every centimeter of damage at my company’s disposal to inch my way to victory so I would say I was very prepared. I was not prepared to struggle on the grind. I had to download a half-EXP mod on the Nexus to circumvent the horrible grind I saw every time. Only used it after the 3rd region. For reference. The amount to go from six to seven is 2600. And from eight to nine you require 4200. You can imagine the rest as you climb to twelve. Having to start from zero and reach the next tier starting from seven to eight. 3500. Let’s do the math. Winning rewards 50 -/+ EXP. During endgame 50~. Still has the same payout. Hold on, WHAT THE F$#%. Do you expect me to grind to the seventh!? For each of my companions?! Do you know how many engagements that will take? 70! Now multiply that number by the average it takes to complete one. 15-30 min. 1050 minutes to 2100 minutes which if converted to hours comes out to 17.5 - 35! You can forget about me grinding past the ninth! These numbers are an average based on how many times I batted heads versus evil people in every region. They should not be inferred as everyone’s experience of WT. They could vary. I also changed the difficulty to the lowest so I'm not bothered with deep engagements. Facing off a group for an extended period of time runs the risk of potentially losing a valuable unit you trained up until now. Lose one? Recruit another fella starting from the lowest tier level. If your party is at eight but a majority are at six then hello newbie six. There is no rewind mechanic if your unit dies. They died? Ya gotta bury them.Or eat them for one food.
Oddly enough, I’m reminded of my time playing Xenosaga Episode 2. Due to similar lengthy fights. The image is one of the longer battles. Do you want to know the average there? Five to fifteen minutes for an average brawl past the midportion. And boss skirmishes can easily double or bloom more...Sighs
Personally dislike using mods since I prefer to expose myself to what vanilla content there is to offer. I had to break my rule to see if it can help lessen my frustration. Providing my troops a better chance. Ultimately the mod is a bandaid to the underlying problem of how EXP is earned. I think offering up more substantial rewards for side/main content and during your professions(I'll touch on this later) would help lessen the grind as well as provide a better outlet than the default method.
I feel auto-battle should be available to ease turn-based encounters. And not as a requirement to face each mob. At least an option to auto-complete for randoms you face in the overworld. Thereby lessening the tedium of entering a clash with some schmuck who somehow concludes they can face my hardcore mercenary company? An optional toggle in the settings you can check off or on depending on your preference. Hostile mobs? Auto-battle is activated. Turn-based for the side/main stuff. This way you don’t have to spend a lot of time battling and can do whatever you want such as fishing. Yes, there is fishing here and a host of other activities you can do for example lockpicking. There are more than eight professions to mold your members. Of course, they start at a newbie tier before they can become masters. So if you want to construct one of your companions as a thief you can do that. Cook? Essential. Woodcutter? Yup! Bard sure! Miner, yes, please! Necessary for my blacksmithing job. No problem. Alchemist too? Wow, what is this Witcher? Sign me up!
The user interface especially when hitting a button on your keyboard(Alt) highlighted items of interest & humans. Forming a barely noticeable outline. Alternatively, an option to include a more player-friendly outline should exist to prevent players from having to squint too hard. Therefore, allowing players to find anything else in the environment. Finding any secrets out in the overworld or inside corridors. I had to spend the majority of my time swiping my mouse left and right and up and down to double-check that I didn’t miss anything.
For some reason, I had stutter issues in combat and outside. Didn’t impact me in a major capacity. Occurred uncommonly in my playthrough as well as in random instances during traversal in the overworld. More time in the oven to be optimized some more to spawn smoother playthroughs. And I tested this with lower settings on my computer as well to see if that made a difference. Nope, still the same. So beware of that. Thankfully no bugs or glitches are here.
Last but not least, a more central story would be appreciated to hook players more into worldbuilding. Could be better and more cohesive. Despite the murders, cannibalism, private army vs. government, politics, factions and backstabbing. A harsh gritty adventure awaits. If only the developers linked me closer to the stories told by the people living in this harsh gritty world. Generate heavier incentives, so players care more for the alchemist nearby whose family member was kidnapped. Oh, the barkeeper is friends with the one who was kidnapped. Time to save them! Oh, you helped the mayor in the 1st region? Nice! They’re a good friend of mine. Why back in my day, we were young whipper snappers… And so forth to link the main/side stuff combined. Further meaningful content alongside memorable and fleshed-out characters. NPCs and missions are scattered, offering up little cultural significance both in the history of the world and the characters living in it. And while I was satisfied for my first fifteen hours, the majority and rest of my time left me in a state that leaves me befuddled.
I am left sighing at the end of the day due to a multitude of factors. A combat system that seems fine in the beginning except marred by troubled enemy encounters that can reach long engagements. Fatiguing the player and forcing them to grind a lot to stand a better chance versus the mid to endgame elites. An unoptimized product prone to stutters, you may come across and a user interface has to be refined to outline interesting objects/people. In need of a central plot to connect all scenarios and link to flesh out the worldbuilding and parties' efforts more. Thereby, producing a difficult item to recommend. Looking back on the patch notes I think they developed each region as a checklist. Focusing on adding new regions, connecting them superficially, and presenting a foggy vision that isn't as clear as it remains as a list of tasks to do and finish at your leisure. Full of systems and mechanics focusing on breadth instead of depth on gameplay and not on the finer details of what I mentioned earlier to hold everything in an interconnected manner. Creating a sort of mix of fulfilling and unfulfilling content to explore beyond the surface level. A mile wide, an inch deep example.
There is potential here. I can see it. Shiro Games could improve with patches. However, I cannot recommend Wartales in good conscience. I can only offer a grimace and a read/watch more label to ensure your purchase is solid. To those who enjoyed WT, I salute your dedication to playing through everything. Sadly I can’t bring myself to say I enjoyed it to a degree. I find myself shaking my head rather than nodding since I had plenty of big flaws rather than full of praise.
6/10
Edit: Removed, added, clarified some text to explain my thoughts better and made it a bit less negative. 99% of review still intact.
A medieval low fantasy tactical RPG with sandbox gameplay. As someone who loves medieval and low fantasy settings, this was a no-brainer to watch out for. And I’ve been watching the developers work closely ever since. Avidly reading patch notes, whooping in delight when roadmaps appear and progress is made. Waiting until the final day when the official release arrives.
First let's start on what WT is about, then move on to the critique or what I call my mixed feelings. There is no central story from which your company of mercenaries must follow throughout your journey. Instead, you complete scenarios in each region of which there are six to explore, fight, trade, and even play detective. Upon finishing, some are related to a scenario, the progress bar in the top left corner will fill up until you reach a hundred where you can partake in the final province mission before you move on to another place. Times will vary to accomplish your goals. In my experience, they can range from eight to twelve hours to thoroughly comb one sector with a majority of sidequests done. And I had already progressed past four of them. Was one-third of the way done on my fifth before I couldn’t take it anymore.
The main meat here holding up a chunk of your time is the combat portion. Turn-based emerges when you encounter a hostile in the overworld. Honestly reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin(D: OS) a lot since you can maneuver your party members in any direction. Not a grid or hex-based. Use abilities as long as you have valor points. Points you can earn every time you rest. These don’t recharge every fight, so be careful utilizing them. However, there are skills you can attain to increase temporary valor points to mitigate the loss. One of the cool things you can do is switch any weapon/shield that can grant you new toys to play around with. I could switch from a greatsword that allows me to hit multiple enemies in a 160-degree radius in front of me. Then switch to a different sword allowing my character to charge forth through multiple bandits caught unaware. Swap my shield to inflict a debuff causing a cannibal to be more susceptible to damage and more. I appreciate this since it makes equipment management useful in combat(You need to unlock the skill later, you cannot switch weapons early on). Entrusting the player to carefully manage new powerful weapons containing lackluster effects. Old weapons with cool spell sets that do a bit less damage. And while you cannot use the environment to your advantage akin to D: OS. The underhandedness of Wartales comes into play here. Regarding debuffs. Can’t wreck through a baddie's health or armor? Use poison to whittle down their health(HP). Stack that up for more damage. Still not enough? Here’s bleeding taking off “X” percent of their maximum HP. Burn them too. And watch how the effect can spread to nearby guards in close range and yourself if you’re close enough. And if that’s not enough there is even corrosion and disarming foes too! I haven’t gone through the whole list because each class has its skill tree unique to them.
An acceptable amount of class variety here. In spears, swords, hammers, axe, bows, arrows, daggers, and animals, suffice it to say there is a varied amount of choices you can pick and specialize your companions. I had fun recruiting new troops and setting them up with new equipment I had on hand after defeating an annoying private army. A nice way to build up your mercenary crew. Interestingly enough, I don’t believe there is a limit. I've read other reviews noting bigger sizes. I was able to manage over twenty units. Twelve are battle-ready, while the rest such as my ponies and prisoners cannot fight. So overwhelming odds against a lone soul or two to four is well immensely satisfying to decimate. Didn’t have any issues paying wages and feeding them either. I suspect a larger group could be a hassle.
You mainly find your busy work to do upon entering a tavern and talking to an emissary near a bounty board. From there you can accept contracts to eliminate a troublesome group, destroy a rat infestation, and even find tombs(these are underground dungeons). These contracts, if you can excuse the radiant missions(Basically filler and repeat again and again) are decent in that some of them you come across as you traverse the big overworld. See a merchant under attack, help a family solve a murder, find the missing person, hunt down a group who terrorized a village, etc. Side content, for the most part, is all right, since they're just a bit below the quality of the main quests for a scenario.
Nonetheless, let’s move on to my critique. Not a positive or a negative. But for the sake of transparency, I’m noting them down. Suggestions in the end parts.
Experience(EXP) contribution and how that is earned needs a major overhaul. Early on, leveling up your troops is not a big issue. It starts to become a bigger problem as you head to the middle portion and then final parts. If I could sum it up in one word. Grindy. The max, as far as I know, is twelve. I was only able to reach level eight for a small portion of my crew while the rest were in the six to seven range. And facing off hostiles in the eighth to ninth resulted in battles being time-consuming averaging out to 15-30 min engagements, each time I encountered a sizable group against my party. Why does it take a while man? Do you not have the best equipment? Trust me, when I say my crew is built comparable to a tank capable of withstanding the hardest of blows. And strong enough to deal devastating damage, eliminating them swiftly with one guy. Hell, I've even used my min-maxing skills to maximize every centimeter of damage at my company’s disposal to inch my way to victory so I would say I was very prepared. I was not prepared to struggle on the grind. I had to download a half-EXP mod on the Nexus to circumvent the horrible grind I saw every time. Only used it after the 3rd region. For reference. The amount to go from six to seven is 2600. And from eight to nine you require 4200. You can imagine the rest as you climb to twelve. Having to start from zero and reach the next tier starting from seven to eight. 3500. Let’s do the math. Winning rewards 50 -/+ EXP. During endgame 50~. Still has the same payout. Hold on, WHAT THE F$#%. Do you expect me to grind to the seventh!? For each of my companions?! Do you know how many engagements that will take? 70! Now multiply that number by the average it takes to complete one. 15-30 min. 1050 minutes to 2100 minutes which if converted to hours comes out to 17.5 - 35! You can forget about me grinding past the ninth! These numbers are an average based on how many times I batted heads versus evil people in every region. They should not be inferred as everyone’s experience of WT. They could vary. I also changed the difficulty to the lowest so I'm not bothered with deep engagements. Facing off a group for an extended period of time runs the risk of potentially losing a valuable unit you trained up until now. Lose one? Recruit another fella starting from the lowest tier level. If your party is at eight but a majority are at six then hello newbie six. There is no rewind mechanic if your unit dies. They died? Ya gotta bury them.
Oddly enough, I’m reminded of my time playing Xenosaga Episode 2. Due to similar lengthy fights. The image is one of the longer battles. Do you want to know the average there? Five to fifteen minutes for an average brawl past the midportion. And boss skirmishes can easily double or bloom more...Sighs
Personally dislike using mods since I prefer to expose myself to what vanilla content there is to offer. I had to break my rule to see if it can help lessen my frustration. Providing my troops a better chance. Ultimately the mod is a bandaid to the underlying problem of how EXP is earned. I think offering up more substantial rewards for side/main content and during your professions(I'll touch on this later) would help lessen the grind as well as provide a better outlet than the default method.
I feel auto-battle should be available to ease turn-based encounters. And not as a requirement to face each mob. At least an option to auto-complete for randoms you face in the overworld. Thereby lessening the tedium of entering a clash with some schmuck who somehow concludes they can face my hardcore mercenary company? An optional toggle in the settings you can check off or on depending on your preference. Hostile mobs? Auto-battle is activated. Turn-based for the side/main stuff. This way you don’t have to spend a lot of time battling and can do whatever you want such as fishing. Yes, there is fishing here and a host of other activities you can do for example lockpicking. There are more than eight professions to mold your members. Of course, they start at a newbie tier before they can become masters. So if you want to construct one of your companions as a thief you can do that. Cook? Essential. Woodcutter? Yup! Bard sure! Miner, yes, please! Necessary for my blacksmithing job. No problem. Alchemist too? Wow, what is this Witcher? Sign me up!
The user interface especially when hitting a button on your keyboard(Alt) highlighted items of interest & humans. Forming a barely noticeable outline. Alternatively, an option to include a more player-friendly outline should exist to prevent players from having to squint too hard. Therefore, allowing players to find anything else in the environment. Finding any secrets out in the overworld or inside corridors. I had to spend the majority of my time swiping my mouse left and right and up and down to double-check that I didn’t miss anything.
For some reason, I had stutter issues in combat and outside. Didn’t impact me in a major capacity. Occurred uncommonly in my playthrough as well as in random instances during traversal in the overworld. More time in the oven to be optimized some more to spawn smoother playthroughs. And I tested this with lower settings on my computer as well to see if that made a difference. Nope, still the same. So beware of that. Thankfully no bugs or glitches are here.
Last but not least, a more central story would be appreciated to hook players more into worldbuilding. Could be better and more cohesive. Despite the murders, cannibalism, private army vs. government, politics, factions and backstabbing. A harsh gritty adventure awaits. If only the developers linked me closer to the stories told by the people living in this harsh gritty world. Generate heavier incentives, so players care more for the alchemist nearby whose family member was kidnapped. Oh, the barkeeper is friends with the one who was kidnapped. Time to save them! Oh, you helped the mayor in the 1st region? Nice! They’re a good friend of mine. Why back in my day, we were young whipper snappers… And so forth to link the main/side stuff combined. Further meaningful content alongside memorable and fleshed-out characters. NPCs and missions are scattered, offering up little cultural significance both in the history of the world and the characters living in it. And while I was satisfied for my first fifteen hours, the majority and rest of my time left me in a state that leaves me befuddled.
I am left sighing at the end of the day due to a multitude of factors. A combat system that seems fine in the beginning except marred by troubled enemy encounters that can reach long engagements. Fatiguing the player and forcing them to grind a lot to stand a better chance versus the mid to endgame elites. An unoptimized product prone to stutters, you may come across and a user interface has to be refined to outline interesting objects/people. In need of a central plot to connect all scenarios and link to flesh out the worldbuilding and parties' efforts more. Thereby, producing a difficult item to recommend. Looking back on the patch notes I think they developed each region as a checklist. Focusing on adding new regions, connecting them superficially, and presenting a foggy vision that isn't as clear as it remains as a list of tasks to do and finish at your leisure. Full of systems and mechanics focusing on breadth instead of depth on gameplay and not on the finer details of what I mentioned earlier to hold everything in an interconnected manner. Creating a sort of mix of fulfilling and unfulfilling content to explore beyond the surface level. A mile wide, an inch deep example.
There is potential here. I can see it. Shiro Games could improve with patches. However, I cannot recommend Wartales in good conscience. I can only offer a grimace and a read/watch more label to ensure your purchase is solid. To those who enjoyed WT, I salute your dedication to playing through everything. Sadly I can’t bring myself to say I enjoyed it to a degree. I find myself shaking my head rather than nodding since I had plenty of big flaws rather than full of praise.
6/10
Edit: Removed, added, clarified some text to explain my thoughts better and made it a bit less negative. 99% of review still intact.