Reviews

• victorkane115

  Aug 15, 2023

  Really big sandbox, just missing the sand.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 23, 2023

  Good groundwork, lots of continuing work to be done. Not a diamond yet, but with polish it could be. 6.5/10 with 9/10 potential. The first 15 or so hours in this game are amazing, they built a cool world for you to explore. Great mini-games, great XCOM like combat, mid tier RPG system, cool art style, wonderful blending of Mount and Blade with XCOM with multiple other influences sprinkled in. Then you get to the 20-25 hour mark and realize that the game just becomes an incredible grind to get better gear. Your character levels don't really matter, your character abilities don't really matter without great gear, and your party size is almost more a hindrance than a help as enemy groups will ALWAYS scale with you. If you are super lucky you might get a single group of enemies that have the same unit amount as you. While this is usually isn't an issue as your characters are more powerful then the enemy, it makes you feel like you NEVER get ahead. You will NEVER have an advantage over the enemy due to numbers, which makes having a large company feel worthless. In cases like the rat hives, and in wolf packs great! In cases of bandits and high level opponents this is so painful.(Note that the enemies will not scale with the total level of your characters, they will scale with the highest level character. Having a group of 6 with 1 lvl 7, and 5 lvl 5s will get you an enemy group of lvl 7s.) To the devs credit, the enemies do NOT scale their abilities, they will always remain the same(exception for faction abilities that show with certain groups later on) making certain enemy groups easy to defeat at nearly any level. Here are a few more notes: -If you don't have the materials to create better gear, you will find yourself traveling vast portions of the map wasting your food and money, clicking on farmable resources that you wish you could buy in excess(wood, leather, ghost hides), only to get trapped in the gameplay loop of, mission->money->resources->crafting with looting speeding the process along. -Heal system makes sense, and is well thought out. -Armor system is painful and makes you want to pull your teeth out. Having to pay to consistently repair the armor on ALL my characters felt like an intentional method to slow the game down in order to stretch game time. Having an armor durability system allowing the armor to break, offering less protection at lower condition makes more sense, this system seriously sucks. -Food is a cool system and does a good job of putting a survival element feeling into the game. You will rarely go hungry, and food sources are easy to come across, or buy. No issues to speak of with this. -The amount of resources around the map is pitiful given how often you are expected to have them.(Purely map collected resource points: wood, flowers, iron, mushrooms, etc.) -Many resources can only be acquired from certain mobs, makes perfect sense, but the amount you receive is hardly worth the effort. Killing an entire pack of 8-10 wolves can reward you with 3-5 leather. An incredible waste of time that again serves to lengthen the game as this resource is fairly difficult to buy but incredibly important. -Crime and stealing is a very odd mechanic. It just makes no sense. The patrols are incredibly easy to dodge, the detriments are nearly nonexistent as your crime only lasts for as long as you can. Just makes no sense to me at all. That being said, its super useful and can help you avoid a lot of costs. -World map items are genius. The pinion mechanic is brilliant and more mechanics similar to this would really make the game shine. -Combat is easy to grasp and presents similar to XCOM. It is very odd that status effects never appear to end without player intervention. Poisoning and Burning can quickly become very dangerous for the unprepared player. Burning patches of ground continuing to burn during rainstorms, and poison clouds that never dissipate is another oddity. -Character RPG elements are mid-tier to lacking. While you do have the ability to customize your characters, many of the abilities that you get(whether active or passive) feel very similar and offers limited amount of playstyles with certain characters. Your characters stats do effect the gameplay, but only slightly, as the largest bonuses are gained through equipment bonuses and not necessarily through experience. Late game a high level character with many aptitude points will be better than a low level character, but a low level character with the best gear in the game vs a high level character with lvl 1 gear is no contest, The gear level makes a MUUUUCH bigger difference than the character stats. This is my biggest issue with the game as it feels that there is no point to developing your characters as the gear means much more than their stats.The exception to this is character professions -Character professions are a very cool element added to the game, HOWEVER characters being locked to one profession really sucks. If characters were able to still reach level 2-3 in other professions while specializing to reach level 5 in one main would make much more sense, and would offer much more options in team composition. The game uses this system to inflate the amount of characters you need in your party as you need more characters to fill all the professions. Additionally, you gain profession experience at painful rates. Thieves gain experience at a very fast rate, while anglers and cooks xp bars move like molasses. Regularly this would be no issue as character professions would be an afterthought and could be put to the side, however in this game many important recipes and buildings that offer numerous buffs are hidden behind character professions that much be individually developed. Don't like smithing? Too bad its really important or you are going to spend a ton of time farming. Don't like crafting your own medicine? Pay the price in time spent in the town at the apothecary and you will never be able to get too far from town. Don't care for the camp layout system? Too bad, it matters where your characters go and that you cook better food and create useful tools. My point is that the game gets so micromanaged at times that you feel as though you cannot even accomplish some of the simplest tasks without needing to make a mission out of it. -Capturing injured enemies and animals is a wonderful mechanic but its incredibly underpowered and should be avoided unless attempting to capture a powerful animal. The animal that you capture will be considered a new company member and will artificially inflate your company numbers against the next enemies you encounter. Perfectly fine if you have captured or bought a bear, but a wolf, or a boar? They are nothing but fodder and will get you killed against enemies more powerful than them. This title has so much potential and I can see a truly awesome game that just needs some polish.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 8, 2022

  I've never felt inclined to write a game review before, but I can appreciate that this dev team is VERY actively responding to critiques so I wanted to help out. I haven't played a turn-based game since the HOMM series and this little game is really scratching that itch (btw if you know what that stands for then congrats, you're old too!). Being early-access, there have been a number of rough areas of the game but a lot of them have been taken care of. My first play-through was about 55 hours and I was genuinely surprised by how addicting the gameplay was. Story Telling/Fantasy: I'm not terribly interested in elaborate cut scenes and hit-you-over-the-head storytelling. I like to feel immersed in the world and have some idea why I'm in an area killing or gathering but I don't want it to interfere just being able to play. This game feels like it walks that line perfectly, providing just enough story telling without it getting annoying. Combat: The tactics are simple enough to stumble through without reading any guides but surprisingly thought-provoking when you consider the difference between builds and how they play off of each other. I'm sincerely enjoying the challenges this game throws at you. Content: It's a good amount for an early-access game but I'm definitely excited to see more of this world and some new enemy types. The updates have been timely with significant content coming in with each new patch. Biggest Issue: Level scaling... the one everyone has been complaining about. It's what made me quit after a few dozen hours because the encounters get harder with every level you gain or for each member you add to your party so it feels like you are being punished for growing instead of the opposite. Improvement become solely based on gear upgrades and there is no point whatsoever to add members to your group since it just adds tactical complications and increases ration requirements. The fix: With the latest patch an option for 'region-locked' was added to completely disable level scaling. I began another play-through and finally hit a point in the story where I need to go grind up some levels to be able to pass the enemy I was facing. This is it! This is the game I wanted Wartales to be! I immediately stopped playing to come write this review. Additional thoughts: As an avid hardcore RPG player the 'hardcore' mode in Wartales seems a little too intense since you are locked into turn-based combat. Even losing a single member of your group is an extreme set-back and there often isn't much information about enemies prior to engagement so it's extremely difficult to play 'safe' and still explore all the game has to offer. On the other hand the 'save' modes are too carefree and don't carry any consequences at all since you can spam the reset. I would love to play something in-between these two modes but I don't know if that's possible. Maybe a version where you have to recover all your gear/weapons with only what you have stashed and/or a massive gold penalty. Last thought... PVP? Battlegrounds? This game hits a whole new level of tactics when an actual human is on the other end and the meta would be taken to an extreme. Minor stuff: - The hotkeys are great and seem to be a new feature. Can you add some labels like a little 1...2...3... in the corners of the buttons? - Compass-snap-to-north. I personally hate changing the view direction but it's necessary sometimes to see around obstacles. I just want to be able to reset it quickly to 'normal' both in battle and on open ground. All in all, solid little game. I'm really enjoying it and look forward to checking out whatever else Shiro games comes up with.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 8, 2022

  I think I'm in love with this game, but it's taken 100 hours of binge playing to figure out why. The cheap and easy thing to say is that 'if you love XCom, but wanted a more medieval/ fantasy setting, you'll love Wartales', but there's so much more here. The first/ biggest thing I actually love about Wartales is that it's actually got more in common with tabletop war gaming, than it does XCom (in particular kill team, bolt action, and Legion). When you enter combat, you arrange your soldiers and take turns pushing them into your opponents, hopefully taking units off the board before they take yours. Like some of the more recent entries on the tabletop scene for skirmish scale fights, you and your opponent will bounce activating different units on the board. To help, you'll be able to see which units they'll activate, while you'll have the freedom of being able to activate anyone once a round; so there's something to be said about removing earlier units before removing those that will activate later, etc... Like table top wargaming, fights generally come down to the weaponized trigonometry of figuring out distances. Maybe your opponent will be activating that swordsman early, but you can measure out how far they can move and strike, and realise you can just deploy so you're out of their range to negate the activation. To help add colour and depth, your weapons and units all have different skills which take advantage of things like range, status effects, and positioning. I was delighted to see that some of the tricks/ strategies from tabletop war games also applied here, like denied flanks or last-first activation's. Adding more colour to this are the 'champion' mobs which mirror XCom's 'Alien rulers' who can act several times a turn, letting them be immensely powerful without necessarily letting them get killed through sheer activation economy. For those who played Warhammer and enjoyed the customising the loadouts of your army, there's plenty of that here. Rangers (rogues) can be built to be grenadiers with poison and PBAOE dagger attacks, or straight up chain killing murderers who play completely differently. Archers and spearmen can just be ranged dps, or area denial units. Depending on traits, gear, and synergies, you can build a really interesting army that hums just the way you want. Beyond the table top comparisons, Wartales also delivers a continuity of gameplay. It's really neat to have your soldiers level up, and grow relationships with one another while also being these incredibly fragile pieces of art. In games like Fire Emblem or Triangle Strategy, you can lose characters but the nature of the story means there are some characters you need to keep seeing in cut scenes so their deaths lack a lot of weight. Here, your mercenaries are just... people you dragged out of a tavern with the promise of riches and prestige (or perhaps, dreams of not-starving-to-death). Which means they're all expendable, which keeps the stakes tense when you're choosing to commit your best tank to the front line, or risk plunging your rogue behind enemy lines. With that said, there are some (minor) negatives. Character design is pretty bland, with most of your soldiers and civilians looking like the same stock images that you'd expect to find in crude visual novels. Some of the skill descriptions need to be clarified as some are woefully poor compared to others, and sometimes I find the camera doesn't let you put your units precisely where they're allowed to go, which can be frustrating. It's like there's a language to the game about precisely where you can stand to cleave, or when you can expect certain things to work or not work which only comes out by playing the game. On the one hand, maybe we can call this a means of developing mastery, but in the early hours it can sometimes feel like you just wasted your turn because you didn't quite understand how that ability works (not terribly unlike miniature war games). Story wise, I think the game is kinda thin. Because it's so open world, and all of your characters are basically interchangeable, it doesn't ever feel like you're part of the story as much as you're the person flipping the pages in the book. This isn't to say there aren't choices in the game (do you save these plague victims, or do you let the mob lynch them?), but your involvement in these choices always feels like you were just the person who walked in at the moment they were making the choice, as opposed to you being on some gritty mission of revenge/ love/ patriotism, etc... My next gripe isn't particularly fair in that I think most games suffer the same issue, but Wartales does take a stab at solving for it which is very commendable. The gripe is that as your heroes get stronger; what do you do? You can certainly have mobs get stronger, but then you're not actually any stronger for it? What's the point of getting stronger, if it just means all my enemies get tougher? Inversely, Wartales has an option for battles not to dynamically scale, in which case you can absolutely outnumber/ outclass your opponents, but inevitably this means that end game content will require a full roster of titans; which may clash with the initial small unit skirmish mode that you spent most of the game playing. As someone who really enjoys having smaller parties (preferrably the 6 - 8 range); I think running a campaign with 16 soldiers and 4 pack animals (and all the logistics behind having to feed and pay that many units) would become complicated. However; while I don't think the core question is answered with dynamic content, I do really appreciate that an attempt was made. My final gripe is that there isn't a lot of variance in the fights themselves. Every fight I've been in has been some variant of 'kill all their people' which gets bland. Occasionally you may want to capture someone, or to protect one friendly npc because their death will lose the mission; but 99% percent of everything you do will be 'kill all bad guys'. I've found one mission that involved holding a position until your characters could find a way to escape, and one more trying to flee from overwhelming odds; and I'd really like to see a lot more of this sort of content. If you're put out by the same-ness of character designs, that all battles are just permutations on the same battle objective (with very few exceptions), or that you will be responsible for the story of the game; this may not be the right game for you. Inversely, I think Wartales is a great game if you're into tabletop war games and are looking for something that simulates the intricacies of building a list and carefully pushing and pulling miniatures across the board. With the option of dynamic combat, I think this game also shines for those who want to slowly build up a small army, or those who'd prefer having a small squad of heroes; which is also really cool. If you also enjoy the more administrative portions of an open world game (like making sure you have enough food for a long trip, or making decisions about whether your party will help refugees or rob them), I think this game becomes a must buy.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2022

  It's ok in the early game but a few hours in and the cracks start to show. The turn order for combat always goes you, then them, then you, then them and so on. This means the best strategy for all combat situations is to lock the person who's turn is next in combat with you. This makes all fights seem relatively the same. The bigger your party gets the bigger other parties get, which seems fine at first but it actually means a smaller party is probably better to have rather than a big one. I also feel like combat is bloated with too many unnecessary effects and status effects. Game is fine but I feel it can be a lot better and has some room for improvement.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 27, 2022

  Really impressed with Wartales, and I'm a pretty picky old grump. Medieval mercenary sim par excellence. Lead your mostly amoral troop through the hazards of a beautifully crafted world that really evokes the era. Immersion is a subjective, personal experience but here you will find rich soil for your own head lore. The characters have no background stories, but you can name them, and they distinguish themselves on the battlefield to earn traits that add to their own individual personalities. You can commission officers for tactical bonuses. A seemingly endless trove of gear with unique qualities of their own further add to the potential for individuation in the troop. This is important because you may soon be leading a dozen or more mercs that need to be discerned from one another on the field. Also, it helps with player investment in the characters, something that grows as you play. Combat is a somewhat fresh take on turn-based tactics. At the outset of battle the characters are seemingly placed at random and you are able to maneuver them into position before attacking. This is the stage when I survey the enemy position and develop a strategy of attack that will ensure victory. Depending on the placement of troops, there is no end of strategies that you can employ to out-maneuver the enemy. This results in some very satisfying victories. And when a perfectly planned and placed strategy goes sideways, battles can be restarted without penalty. Also, there's a critical kill cam that makes it all the more rewarding. The game assumes that, because you bought the game, you must be an intelligent person. It is correct. You don't need to be guided with hovering tags and glowing icons because you pay attention when a potential employer explains the job. You explore, you find your own work. Just like in medieval times, the economy is harsh. The game does not hand you anything for free, and mercs are expensive to keep paid up and fed. But when they're happy, well rested and plump, they perform better. Bear in mind that they make decisions based on pay and not on any conception of right or wrong. They may even take a job and then flip sides when the counter offer turns out to be better. Okay, can't be a grumpy old man without a coupl'a gripes. One: early on, movement on the world map is agonizingly slow. This sucks because many times you will simply need to explore around and look for an objective. But, it's not long in the game before you can invest in points to increase speed and even run for short bursts. The game hopes you are a patient person. Two: there really needs to be a party management screen or hovering panel. When i get some new gear, disseminating it to the mercs that will benefit the most from it is a process of opening each character panel individually and reviewing their gear one at a time. It would be really nice to be able to do this from a party management screen instead. All in all, this is a must play for any turn based tactics fan, absolutely worth the price. For now, I am deliberating on whether I should keep playing, or wait for full release. There is a full game here already that you can expect to sink 80-100 hours in if you want. And more is coming. Thanks for reading. Peace!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 9, 2022

  Hm... 42hrs in my first playthru. 42hrs in the first area alone. I felt like with the EA, I hit the limit with my team too quickly. Got the hang of the whole, fight, run home, repair, eat, fight, run home, repair, eat, etc. fairly quickly. As ambitious the concept of Wartales sounds like, I couldn't really feel emotionally attached to my team/character as I would in games like Kenshi, Mount & Blade, Crusader Kings, etc. I didn't really feel attached to the mini-stories around the area as well. I was excited to play the story of farmers wanting more with life but once I started playing, it felt like your backstory has nothing to do with how you play or how it dictates the world. A game title like "Wartales" feels like a "Play the way you want to with the backstory you want" type game. But this is just purely, fight, loot, repair, eat, sleep, repeat. Oh, uhm.. once I figured out how to effectively and efficiently craft items for trade, it added an additional 10hrs of gameplay of renewed excitement realizing I could make more money by crafting from random loot and selling the crafted items. But then I hit my limit again once I managed to consistently stay over 1000 gold or so. After all that and completing the first area and moving to the second, I felt like I hit a wall to play this game as it felt it's a rinse and repeat regardless of the region you're in or the background of your team. Overall, this EA reminds me of other EAs I played where I play for a solid week or two and then hit a hard stop for many years as it just didn't feel wholesome or satisfying. I guess I'll keep TRYING to play a bit more to see what else I can uncover.. I don't really thumbs down games but would definitely give this game a "MEH" for now. Maybe other users have a more fulfilling and exhilarating experience instead?
• gamedeal user

  Apr 23, 2023

  in the past couple years i've often found myself in front of my PC staring at a screen and wondering where all of the joy and excitement ran off to. some days i turn my computer on purely out of habit to then realise that there's noting i want to play. Have I grown out of games? are games no longer fun? or am i just a different person to the cheery eyed youth i see in pictures of the past? This game proved to me that the real problem is games because this is the first game that i've genuinely enjoyed and looked forward to getting home from work to play in literal years. 10/10. A true masterpiece of the low fantasy setting with a innovative UI and story. the combat is nothing new but its reliable and well built.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 8, 2022

  WAIT FOR FULL RELEASE! This game is very appealing, the combat is very pleasant, even a bit innovative, graphics are nice, mechanics are quite intelligent, difficulty is not hand holding, it's well coded, it's not poorly optimized, and you can right now get 50-100hrs of fun. but you really are better off if you wait. A crapton more content is planned, and way more important, the map is unique, it's hand crafted, unlike battlebrothers, it will always be the same from one playthrough to another, this means this game is ment to be played once or twice, and if, like me, you've played it in EA, any future additions will come as less appealing since you'll have new regions but will still be playing in an environment you already know. The charm of this game comes from exploration and surprises, but will you play again for sure if any novelty is diluted in an already old experience? Wait. It's without doubts a good game now, it will be a good game, do you want to have 50hrs of immediate fun or 200 in the future?
• gamedeal user

  Dec 3, 2021

  Do you like turn based tactics? Do you like party maintenance sims? Do like being punished for biting off more than you can chew and learning the world through a series of, what you eventually realize are completely avoidable, misfortunes? Then this is the game for you! Equal parts RPG and sandbox party sim, this game is exactly what I've been looking for after hitting 'the end' on replays and mods on Battletech, X-Com, and Darkest Dungeon.