Wartales is an excellent game with a wealth of engaging features. Right from the start of Early Access, when all of the goals were met, and the features were implemented without a hitch.
Wartales is a tactical role-playing game with sandbox elements in which you take command of a band of mercenaries and guide them across a vast Medieval world in search of wealth. The game supports solo play and cooperative multiplayer for up to four players. It’s a unique take on the strategy genre due to how it differs from other role-playing strategy games. The game features group management, turn-based tactics, character customization, crafting, and non-linear role-play. The game entered into Early Access back on December 1st of 2021, receiving very positive reviews on Steam. The Early Access is over, and the game has officially launched as of April 12th.
In Wartales, you start your adventure with a series of questions that affect things such as your starting companions, their classes, crafting materials, happiness levels, party bonuses such as the constitution and critical damage increases, and much more. You can even choose an option where your companions are deserters fleeing an abusive captain, and this will increase your troop’s suspicious level by 50, making it more likely that patrol units and guards, etc., will try to stop you and make you pay for your crimes.
Wartales is an open-world game with six main regions, with version 1.0 bringing a new region called Alazar, but at the start of the game, you’re presented with the option to choose. If you want to play in an Adaptive exploration mode, the difficulty of all the regions adapts dynamically to your group’s size and your unit’s power. You can also play region-locked Exploration mode, where each region on the world map has a set difficulty. So you’ll have to improve your troops before you’re able to successfully explore some of these more dangerous areas.
It’s nice that the game has some urgency over such an important aspect of open-world gameplay. There are also a few choices to be made for game difficulty. You can choose novice, experienced, or expert for both combat difficulty and the Wartales‘ survival difficulty. So if you’re not a huge fan of resource management and survival elements, you can choose novice for your survival difficulty, described as management difficulty tailored to be flexible and unintrusive.
In contrast, the expert survival difficulty is described as surviving and saving money will be painful. However, you can change the game’s combat and survival difficulty at any time. Three different save options also give you limited save points to work with while playing. Free save mode lets you create several save points, and then there’s an Ironman mode.
Now the questions you answer at the beginning of the game do choose your force starting companions’ classes, of which I found six main classes in Wartales Ranger, Brute, Swordsman, Archer, Warrior and Spearman. There’s even another one called Prisoner, but it’s a much more limited class type. Each of these classes has its own specialization, which is like a subclass choice, and has its own passive and active skills.
For instance, an Archer Beastmaster can have a passive skill that allows her to control animals in battle. This character also has a taming Arrow skill which applies fury to the targeted animals. You get to customize your starting companions by naming them and customizing their appearance, choosing their starting weapons utility skills and traits, which range from bloodthirsty, which increases critical hit chance to stocky, which increases a character’s carrying capacity.
Worrying about things like food, sleep, morale, and the weather is all part of what makes Wartales a challenging game. You take control of a small group of explorers, merchants, bandits, mercenaries, or whatever else and direct them to become a powerful army, complete with unlocked ranks and specialized units. There’s an engaging crafting/profession system, a varied world to discover, and positive progression. You can take pride in your companions, but remember that you will probably lose a few of them, whether in combat or you’re not taking proper care of them.
But you can and will be able to recruit new companions. There are eight human companions, two ponies, two fighting borers, and a bear making 13 companions. Remember that the more companions you have, the more resources you need, such as food and wages. So it’s up to you to find that correct balance between power and manageability. The same mechanics of management that increase immersion slow down and disrupt gameplay. Wartales makes it abundantly clear that both food and money are extremely valuable to your team.
When you enter the world for the first time, you can see that Wartales‘s world has that medieval more grounded art style, and you’ll notice that if you don’t have the game paused, time will go on. There is also a day and night cycle. Merchants will be out traveling the roads, guards will be patrolling, and perhaps most importantly, the more you run around, the more you let time go on. Your troop’s fatigue meters will be draining when the fatigue meters get too low, you’ll have to set up camp and the rest of the risk companions dying.
Resting is as simple as just clicking see or clicking on the tent icon, and then the game will bring you to a resting area where your party will be granted around a campfire. If you click on the campfire, this is where you not only feed your companions with the food you’ve granted cooked or brought, but you can also turn wood into coal, pay your companions their wages and, of course, complete your rest.
In Wartales, some areas are more dangerous than others to rest in. So be sure to look at your danger level before you risk a random encounter. On the top right, there is a smiley face icon representing your troop’s happiness level. If happiness gets too low, companions may start to leave your troop, while on the opposite end, the happier you make them, the more special passive bonuses they will receive, such as an increase in experience gained.
You also have crafting stations at your camp, such as an early-on workshop that you’ve given. Once you assign a companion to that particular profession, you can craft many valuable, essential items. With this workshop, you can make torches, lockpicks, fish hooks, rope tents, hitching posts, cooking pots, and camp chess, and you’ll be able to discover much more blueprints the more you play.
You’ll also notice that crafting these items does come with a material requirement. For example, if you want to make a tent that generates valor points and increases maximum valor points by one, valor points are used in combat for certain skills. So, to craft a tent, you need to have six leathers, six cloths, two iron ores and two ropes. These materials can be found and gathered in the open world; some need to be crafted, and many can be bought from certain vendors. You can also customize your camp by adding structures and moving everything around.
Wartales offers a tactical turn-based combat mechanism. As you’re out adventuring, you will be confronted by Bandits and questioned by guards, or you may even be on a quest to retake a mine. And many of these encounters are going to lead to bloody battles. When combat begins, Wartales takes you to an instanced tactical battleground. At the start of the combat encounter, you can shuffle your party members around to different points on the battleground to get the best tactical starting position for each party member.
And then, when combat begins, you can choose any party member that you want to take that particular turn as long as they have not gone yet in that round of combat. So whom you choose to start the combat with is completely up to you. Once you perform a melee attack on an enemy that is not already engaged, that enemy unit can only attack your party member that engages them in melee combat. Unless they want to disengage, which rocks an attack of opportunity. This works the same way for you and your party members if an enemy engages you.
Depending on their attributes, each character is allowed to move a certain distance on their turn. They get to use one of their weapon attacks. But you may also notice that some skills require valor points. And you can actually use valor skills in the same turn if you have valor points available. Your party shares a pool of these limited valor points, and they’re represented by little diamonds, and once you use them up, they have to be regenerated through resting. It’s really important to keep in mind that there is friendly fire in Wartales.
So party positioning in Wartales is really key, especially with your range of characters. Hitting your own troops deals damage to them but also deteriorates their relationships with each other. If characters are wearing armor, they’ll have an armor bar above their health bar that needs to be depleted before an enemy can cause damage to the actual hit points bar. If a character is dealt a killing blow, that character will take on a condition called dying. where they cannot do anything but move. If they receive healing while in this dying condition, they can get right back into combat.
But they will permanently die if they take more damage before being healed. The armor is easily damaged and needs to be repaired after each battle. Your soldiers are weak and cannot recover from wounds without medical attention. It’s possible to be ambushed on the way to a job, lose a significant amount of armor and health, and be forced to spend all of your resources healing and repairing before you even start work.
After combat is over, you gain experience loot and influence points. Influence is used to recruit new Companions and even perform certain actions, such as persuading someone in dialogue. You also get the opportunity to heal your party with medicine and repair their equipment with raw materials. Still, you can also repair equipment at forges with blacksmiths. As you play, you will be on the lookout for better weapons and armor and more materials to craft better weapons and armor. Each companion has a main and offhand slot, an armor slot, and a slot for a backpack accessory and a belt accessory.
When you level up, you get to increase your attributes, of which there are six- strength, dexterity, constitution, willpower, critical hit, and movement. When you reach particular levels, you also get to specialize in class-specific active and passive skills. For example, you can choose Valorous Victory at level 2, which makes it so that every time this particular unit kills an enemy, you gain a valor point. And then, at level 3, you can take Frenzy Smokescreen or Poisoner.
When you discover building towns or cities, the game will take you to an interactive screen for you to navigate. In different towns, you can find different types of buildings, such as the forge, the town hall, the marker, the inn, the apothecary clinic, etc. When you click on a building, you can talk with some of the NPCs to buy or sell items. And you can even attempt to steal items. Though If you think the thief mechanic is easy, just wait until you run into one of the hundreds of randomly placed soldiers who not only know you stole something but can also sense your theft from far away. In Wartales, stealing will get you caught every time.
Any act of theft will increase your wanted status. When you come across ends, there will probably be plenty of recruits to choose from if you need new troops, and NPGs let you pick up bounties that reward you with gold. And NPCs that offer other types of quests. For example, you can buy information from NPGs, and a particular piece of information will point you toward a quest where someone desperately seeking help or something new can be found. And once you buy a piece of information, a circle will appear on my map indicating where you need to head to.
The story has a rather gloomy atmosphere and plot. In some games, the level of gloominess is exaggerated to the point where the player wonders why they should bother fighting for such a hopeless place. However, Wartales strikes an acceptable balance between murdering refugees, cleaning the sewers so the town doesn’t smell, and a regional war in which neither side appears to be inherently superior. There is a plethora of interesting and mundane choices to be made. Your goal in Wartales is to explore and complete different regions while growing more powerful along the way.
It has a bit of a sandbox element to it, allowing you to do whatever you want. There are no specific main narrative quests, but there is an element of Wartales called Paths that will give you some direction in how you want to make a name for your troop. The four paths in this game are Power and Glory, Trade and Craftsmanship, Crime and Chaos, and Mysteries and Wisdom.
When you take a deeper look at each of the Paths, you will see that there is a list of challenges to complete that will unlock more challenges. For instance, the Path Crime and Chaos will take you on a treacherous journey through raids, thefts, caravan attacks, and murders. You could well become the defenders of the common folk of the five kingdoms or their persecutors.
There are also Knowledge points in Wartales that are earned by exploring. The more knowledge points that you obtain, the more blueprints, patterns, and recipes you can unlock in the Wartales‘ Compendium. You can use knowledge points to unlock different abilities, such as running in the open world by holding down the shift button.
Running, of course, does use up your fatigue quicker, but it’s definitely useful to be able to run when you’re being chased by bandits patrol units. There’s even a knowledge perk called Cannibalism which allows your group to devour human corpses, pushing your survival boundaries to another level. The Compendium also contains blueprints and schematics for your workshop, an anvil, cooking pot, apothecary table, and runes.
However, Wartales’s strength lies in its content. Although the tavern quests tend to repeat themselves, the game’s many zones, professions, and crafting options provide plenty of variety. It’s awesome that you stopped to gather herbs so your alchemist could make poison oil for your assassin’s blade. Managing your party’s stress by fishing for just enough food to get you to town and collect your bounty money is part of what makes the game enjoyable. Suppressing a bandit group in order to provide your blacksmith with ore for crafting new armor presents a high risk or reward scenario.
Everything in Wartales seems absolutely vital to your survival. The rewards for putting in effort and exploring ancient ruins are high. It’s great knowing that my scholar has dug through the ruins and unearthed an ancient blade that puts my leader light years ahead of the competition. That doesn’t even account for the different social strata and connections within the party.
In the end, the more you play Wartales, the more you’ll find that many of the mechanics get deeper and deeper. The game is enjoyable as a whole. RPG-style strategy games are always more fun when played with a large group of people, and Wartales delivers on that front. It’s not a heavy RPG by any means—the story and dialogue are pretty sparse—but the turn-based combat is where it shines.
