Wartales Review Summary

Freedom, choice, and replayability: The game emphasizes player freedom through open-world exploration, impactful choices, and varied character builds. Players can explore at their own pace, make meaningful decisions, and customize their characters, leading to high replayability. This freedom allows for unique and personalized experiences.

Deep, strategic turn-based combat: The game features engaging turn-based tactical combat that rewards strategic thinking and careful planning. The combat system is deep and flexible, with diverse classes, perks, and abilities. Battles require players to consider terrain, enemy positioning, and character skills, making each victory feel earned.

Engaging mercenary company management: The game features in-depth mercenary management, requiring players to balance recruitment, equipment, food, and wages. Mercenaries have individual personalities and concerns, influencing their relationships within the group. This creates a dynamic and engaging experience where players must carefully manage their team to ensure their survival and success.

Good graphics and atmosphere: The game has good graphics and a great atmosphere. The art style perfectly complements the gritty, realistic tone of the game. The game provides a good atmosphere, and the music is successful.

Enjoyable and well-implemented crafting: The game features well-implemented and enjoyable crafting mechanics, with everything serving a purpose. Crafting professions allow for making a tremendous amount of stuff, if you can find the resources. The crafting includes crafting mini games.

Repetitive gameplay loop and content: The game suffers from repetitiveness in quests, combat, and environments. Many reviewers noted that battles become monotonous, quests lack variety, and the adaptive difficulty scaling can make progression feel pointless. This issue is further compounded by a lack of enemy variety and repetitive map design.

Tedious and flawed combat mechanics: Many reviewers found the combat mechanics to be flawed, citing issues such as long battle times, poor enemy AI, and a lack of strategic depth. The initial combat placement system and the scaling of enemy numbers contribute to tedious and unrewarding encounters.

Weak overarching narrative structure: The game lacks a compelling overarching narrative, with reviewers noting the absence of a strong main storyline and a proper ending. The regional stories feel disconnected, and the world can feel empty after completing the content in each region. This contributes to a lack of long-term engagement.

Shallow character/class progression: Several reviewers criticized the game's character progression, class balance, and crafting systems. There are concerns about limited skill options, class imbalances, and a crafting system that quickly makes looted gear obsolete. The profession system also feels underdeveloped, limiting character specialization.

Missing quality-of-life features: The game lacks essential quality-of-life features, such as a quest log, auto-resolve for battles, and intuitive inventory management. The absence of these features makes the game feel unpolished and frustrating to play.

Mercenary company management is key: Players manage a mercenary company, focusing on their needs like food, wages, and equipment. Characters can specialize in professions like blacksmithing or cooking to support the group. This management aspect is central to the gameplay loop.

Recruit and manage large squads: Players manage and expand their mercenary company by recruiting new members from taverns, prisons, or captured enemies. There are no limits on squad size, allowing for large groups with diverse units, including animals. The game adapts enemy numbers based on the player's party size.

Large world with varied regions: The game features a large world map divided into regions, each with unique quests and points of interest. Players can choose between an adaptive mode where enemy levels scale or a region-locked mode with fixed difficulty. Exploration is rewarded with resources and opportunities.

Player-driven story, regional quests: The game emphasizes player-driven stories through regional campaigns and side quests. Players make choices that impact narrative outcomes, though these may not significantly affect other regions. There is no main plot, allowing players to create their own story.

Diverse activities and freedom: The game offers diverse activities like caravan raiding/protection, arena combat, and pet acquisition. Players can capture wild animals to fight alongside them. The game provides freedom to play as a hero, bandit, or live off the land.

Frequent crashes and performance issues: Many players report significant performance issues, including crashes, freezes, stuttering, memory leaks, and FPS drops, even on high-end hardware. Some suggest the game is poorly optimized, with problems worsening over longer play sessions or after updates. Some users are also reporting black screens and corrupted save files.

Smooth performance for some users: Conversely, some players report smooth performance, even on lower-end PCs or the Steam Deck. The game seems to run well for some, indicating that performance may be highly variable depending on system configuration or game settings. Autoswitching between handheld and docked peripherals is seamless.

Minor gameplay and pathing bugs: Players have encountered minor bugs, such as pathfinding issues with guards or problems interacting with resources due to terrain. These issues are generally not game-breaking but can be immersion-breaking.

Execution animation visual glitches: Some players have reported visual glitches during execution animations, including character and weapon rendering issues. These issues can sometimes be resolved by installing the game on an SSD. Crossbow execution animation lacks smoothness and sound effects.

Camera and turn micro-freezes: Players are experiencing camera issues, micro-freezes during enemy turns, and performance degradation on the world map. The camera is permanently zoomed in at a low angle, making it difficult to locate troops. The camera lingers on computer-controlled characters after their turn, creating a static image and wasting time.

Highly engaging, recommended overall: The game is widely praised and recommended, especially for fans of the tactical RPG genre. Reviewers highlight its engaging gameplay, immersive world, and the freedom it offers players. Many consider it a must-have title, with some even comparing it favorably to genre classics.

Worth buying, especially on sale: Many reviewers suggest purchasing the game, especially when it's on sale. Some feel the full price is too high, while others believe it's worth the investment, particularly given the amount of content offered. This suggests a good value proposition when discounted.

Needs optimization, more content: Several reviewers mention the game's potential for improvement, citing the need for better optimization, more diverse enemy types, and a more user-friendly interface. Some feel the game is too long and becomes a slog, suggesting a need for pacing adjustments and more varied content.

Significant bugs, save issues: Numerous reviewers report experiencing bugs, crashes, and save data loss, particularly in Ironman mode. This is a significant concern that detracts from the overall experience, leading some to recommend frequent saving or avoiding certain game modes until these issues are resolved.

Adjust difficulty for replayability: Some reviewers suggest playing on harder difficulties for subsequent playthroughs to maintain a challenge. They also recommend prioritizing zoned difficulty to experience a sense of progression. This indicates that the game's difficulty can be adjusted to suit different player preferences and playstyles.

Bleak medieval setting, no magic: The game is set in a bleak, low-fantasy medieval world without magic, but with alchemy. Players manage mercenaries in a region-based open world, dealing with conflicts, bandits, and epidemics.

Region-based open-world exploration: The game features a region-based open world with self-contained narratives that contribute to the larger conflicts. Players explore the world, complete quests, and determine the fate of each region.

Manage mercenaries, take contracts: Players manage a mercenary band, taking contracts to kill bandits, deliver messages, trade goods, or rob travelers. The game focuses on the mercenary troop rising to fame.

Ongoing updates, slow progress: The developers are committed to updates and improvements, which ensures a promising future for the game. However, the game's progress can feel slow.

Enemy level scaling, large battles: Enemy levels scale based on the player's level and the number of soldiers. The game requires a minimum of 10 units, leading to encounters with at least 15 enemy units.