Wartales Review (PC)

Wartales was born from the love for games like Battle Brothers, Kenshi or Mount & Blade. Shiro Games’ title draws inspiration from all these games and many others. Described as an open world RPG in which you lead a band of mercenaries in their search for wealth and fame, Wartales sets the stage for a rather sandbox experience that encourages exploration and experimentation.

The game allows you to adjust the level of difficulty, which also coincides with two different playstyles. You can either opt to enable level-scaling or keep levels region-locked and explore to your heart’s desire. Both are perfectly suitable for the formula, so it’s more of what you prefer between exploration or a worthy challenge.

The first thing you do in Wartales is choose your quartet of mercenaries. They will be the only names you’ll remember after you’re done with your adventures. You’re free to customize their look and choose either one positive perk or two positive and one negative perks. Equally important is what background your band of misfits has because it will influence your standing in Wartales’ world.

My mercenaries were ex-soldiers that decided to desert due to their lousy commander. That means that I started with the notoriety gauge very close to being “wanted.” When you steal, attack the local militia or rob caravans, your notoriety gauge fills up and your mercenaries may start being hunted.

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Wartales doesn’t have a main story to follow, but rather region-specific objectives that will allow you to move to the next region when they’re completed. It’s another indication that developers preferred to focus on the sandbox aspect rather than adopt a more narrative-focused approach.

What Wartales does best is to encourage players to explore and experiment with their mercs’ builds. But before you can have a successful, famous band of mercenaries, you need money for their wages and food to feed them. The easiest way to make money is to visit the inn and take up on some of the easiest bounties. More often than not, locations that you discover on the map have quests that reward your mercs with various items that can either be sold or used for crafting.

The crafting system in Wartales is very important at the beginning of the game since it can replace some of your weaker gear. Each of your mercenaries can have one profession that not only helps produce resources or useful items, but also provides a bonus to one of their stats.

Blacksmiths can create weapons and armor, tinkerers can do lockpicks and other useful items, while thieves can steal. The more you use a profession, the faster it upgrades. Although you can switch to another profession on the go, you’ll lose all progression of your previous profession.

The thing is you’ll probably have all the important professions taken by your mercs after you start adding more recruits to your band after you have a steady flow of money and food. While the exploration part of Wartales happens in real-time, the combat switches to a grid-based map. You always start first by deploying your units in certain spots on the map, but there’s an activation bar where you can see which units will act next.

Wartales’ combat system is based on a “engagement” mechanic that’s easy to understand, but hard to master. Once a unit attacks another unit that’s not engaged in combat it won’t be able to move away without getting an attack of opportunity. It makes it easier for highly mobile units to take advantage of hit and run tactics.

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I always start my turn by attacking the enemy leader with my tankiest merc to make sure that it’s engaged. Then I just pound the leader down by stabbing them with my ranger(s). Leaders provide important bonuses to units, so by taking them down first you make the rest of the fight easier.

Every class in Wartales has a specialization that makes it not just more powerful, but it changes how it’s played. You can have a very tanky swordsman or one that focuses on DPS and does a decent amount of DPS. Obviously, there are classes that are by default meant to be played only as DPS classes, but there’s enough variation to allow you to experiment with different synergies.

Special abilities are an important factor in every fight since they’re very powerful. However, they use Valour points that can only be gained by doing certain actions. You have a limited number of Valour points that you can use, but they will replenish after each rest.

As your mercenaries level up and become more powerful, you can take better bounties that are harder to do but pay much better. Once a region is clear, there’s little to no reason to continue to take new bounty contracts. Exploration is rewarded in Wartales, as there’s always something that either replenishes your coffers or makes your mercenaries more powerful.

There’s a little bit of social interaction between your mercenaries too to make things even more interesting. Depending on how you fare in battles, some of you mercs can become real jerks or they can get depressed. Not your ponies though, they’ll always be happy!

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion