I didn't finish Wartales, and I highly doubt now that I ever will due to the game's enormous scale - but I enjoyed the 20+ hours of it that I did play, and respect the ideas the game was reaching for.
The turn based combat is tactical and clever with some interesting ideas that promote coherent and realistic-looking strategies. The party building is fun and you feel a real sense of ownership over your ragtag group of mercenaries. The world is enormous and filled with stories in each zone, making exploration and progress interesting.
That's where Wartales shines - but where it falters is a lack of clear focus: What game exactly was Wartales trying to be?
When you start your first save you're greeted with massive, game-defining options before you've even interacted with the mechanics. You choose how enemies should scale: proportionally, or by region? It's a huge difference, and how can both reasonably work within one game?
Wartales also encourages you to expand and grow your party - and it feels like the benefit is strength and manpower, while the cost is an increased need for resources and gold to keep them fed and paid. Except.. opposition groups will scale in number with yours, negating your increase in strength and dragging fights out for ~10x longer than they would have been previously. Further growth will only drag the game down.
It felt like Wartales wasn't quite focussed on what it should be, and as a result I was constantly second guessing my decisions from the second act onwards. Should I cut down my party, is there an optimal size, did I pick the wrong enemy scaling?
Those questions turn into obstacles and as you slam into them over and over, you lose momentum and eventually interest in Wartales. For ~20 hours of fun I don't regret playing this game, but I feel like a lack of focus and the potential for fights to transform from quick battles into tedious, slogging wars hold this game back from being truly exceptional.
The turn based combat is tactical and clever with some interesting ideas that promote coherent and realistic-looking strategies. The party building is fun and you feel a real sense of ownership over your ragtag group of mercenaries. The world is enormous and filled with stories in each zone, making exploration and progress interesting.
That's where Wartales shines - but where it falters is a lack of clear focus: What game exactly was Wartales trying to be?
When you start your first save you're greeted with massive, game-defining options before you've even interacted with the mechanics. You choose how enemies should scale: proportionally, or by region? It's a huge difference, and how can both reasonably work within one game?
Wartales also encourages you to expand and grow your party - and it feels like the benefit is strength and manpower, while the cost is an increased need for resources and gold to keep them fed and paid. Except.. opposition groups will scale in number with yours, negating your increase in strength and dragging fights out for ~10x longer than they would have been previously. Further growth will only drag the game down.
It felt like Wartales wasn't quite focussed on what it should be, and as a result I was constantly second guessing my decisions from the second act onwards. Should I cut down my party, is there an optimal size, did I pick the wrong enemy scaling?
Those questions turn into obstacles and as you slam into them over and over, you lose momentum and eventually interest in Wartales. For ~20 hours of fun I don't regret playing this game, but I feel like a lack of focus and the potential for fights to transform from quick battles into tedious, slogging wars hold this game back from being truly exceptional.