Wartales - turn-based mercenary band RPG by Northgard developer - now with Skelmar Invasion DLC

[The Wall]

Whenever I see JewTron shill for some game, that's always REDFLAG #1.
Goyim cattle won't eat WOKE digital porridge. Start feeding them diet-WOKE and then slowly increase WOKE in porridge

 

[ArchAngel]

It looks and tastes like WOKE Bud Light beer. Mandatory female soldiers with butch lesbian haircuts in every group. Female Inquisitors, female Jailors in MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE inspired World. Soldiers and Mercenaries with zoomer haircuts. Unity/Unreal assets cobbled together. Zero unique art style. Zero World simulation. Battles feel like bunch of marhsmellowmen are swinging swords at each other, using Unity/Unreal asset animations. Zero original or good old tactical or strategical features. Any feature marketed on front page that looks WOW! at least something new in wolrd of medieval mercenary company simulation games! Wrong. It's just some lazily put together event pack pop-up windows with few + and -, no real integration of that feature into game World. Like merchant outposts

Copy-Paste some skill trees that are safe and popular/ Copy-Paste some ambient music cheaply bought/ Copy-Paste some writing that's neither here nor there

Mechanically toothless 3D Battle Brothers in diet-WOKE Game of Thrones setting with zero art direction
If you HAVE to play this, instead of fucking bitch or playing original / making your own Battle Brothers => You're hopeless gaming crackhead

This game shows how much Western gaming devs are pathetic as programmers, artists and human beings
Perfect ca$h grab for current (de)genearation of zoomer&millenial Steam midwits. BattleBrothers for diet-woke White Midwits

You must be fun at parties..

 

[agris]

i like how The Wall gets straight to the point, no lube

 

[pickmeister]

With a bit of abrasive for extra pleasure.

 

[ArchAngel]

I am enjoying this game. A bit of exploration and a bit of not that complex but fun TB combat. And everyone has legs and graphics are pleasing enough.
Also there is enough character/team building mechanics in the game that there is just enough things going on where you got stuff to do.

 

[Whisper]

It looks and tastes like WOKE Bud Light beer. Mandatory female soldiers with butch lesbian haircuts in every group. Female Inquisitors, female Jailors in MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE inspired World. Soldiers and Mercenaries with zoomer haircuts. Unity/Unreal assets cobbled together. Zero unique art style. Zero World simulation. Battles feel like bunch of marhsmellowmen are swinging swords at each other, using Unity/Unreal asset animations. Zero original or good old tactical or strategical features. Any feature marketed on front page that looks WOW! at least something new in wolrd of medieval mercenary company simulation games! Wrong. It's just some lazily put together event pack pop-up windows with few + and -, no real integration of that feature into game World. Like merchant outposts

Copy-Paste some skill trees that are safe and popular/ Copy-Paste some ambient music cheaply bought/ Copy-Paste some writing that's neither here nor there

Mechanically toothless 3D Battle Brothers in diet-WOKE Game of Thrones setting with zero art direction
If you HAVE to play this, instead of fucking bitch or playing original / making your own Battle Brothers => You're hopeless gaming crackhead

This game shows how much Western gaming devs are pathetic as programmers, artists and human beings
Perfect ca$h grab for current (de)genearation of zoomer&millenial Steam midwits. BattleBrothers for diet-woke White Midwits

Thanks, will pass this woke dull shit.

 

[ArchAngel]

It looks and tastes like WOKE Bud Light beer. Mandatory female soldiers with butch lesbian haircuts in every group. Female Inquisitors, female Jailors in MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE inspired World. Soldiers and Mercenaries with zoomer haircuts. Unity/Unreal assets cobbled together. Zero unique art style. Zero World simulation. Battles feel like bunch of marhsmellowmen are swinging swords at each other, using Unity/Unreal asset animations. Zero original or good old tactical or strategical features. Any feature marketed on front page that looks WOW! at least something new in wolrd of medieval mercenary company simulation games! Wrong. It's just some lazily put together event pack pop-up windows with few + and -, no real integration of that feature into game World. Like merchant outposts

Copy-Paste some skill trees that are safe and popular/ Copy-Paste some ambient music cheaply bought/ Copy-Paste some writing that's neither here nor there

Mechanically toothless 3D Battle Brothers in diet-WOKE Game of Thrones setting with zero art direction
If you HAVE to play this, instead of fucking bitch or playing original / making your own Battle Brothers => You're hopeless gaming crackhead

This game shows how much Western gaming devs are pathetic as programmers, artists and human beings
Perfect ca$h grab for current (de)genearation of zoomer&millenial Steam midwits. BattleBrothers for diet-woke White Midwits

Thanks, will pass this woke dull shit.

Calling it woke is about same as calling almost all RPGs back 20 years woke. It maybe dull to some but it is not woke.

 

[ArchAngel]

Lol I found a lvl 4 white bear in a jail and I can get him out and part of my group for 400 gold.. the thing has 300 HP LOL LOL LOL
For my lvl 4-5 party and kind of enemies I fight, this thing can probably solo most encounters :D

 

[Norfleet]

I am enjoying this game. A bit of exploration and a bit of not that complex but fun TB combat. And everyone has legs and graphics are pleasing enough.

Legs are overrated, I LIKED my team of potatoes.

 

[oasis789]

Hmm ok. What about the core of the game, the tactical combat? Is that part at least "crunchy" enough to carry everything else?

Not sure. BB is much involved since this game is very game:y when it comes to skill use. Setting fire with the bow is restricted to bow, and a low-level guy with that kind of bow will only have that ability. There is no way to fire a normal arrow. The same goes for other weapons. I found a nice two-handed sword, but it had no normal attack, only a "dash". Like running through enemies and slowing them, which made that guy useless in battle beyond that retarded attack. I liked the game more in EA, not that it has changed much, but maybe that is the problem. Find it hard to get immersed now, since there is nothing to get immersed about.

Another problem is that healing/bandaging is RNG, it depends on what your guy comes with. Compared to BB, where you just buy a bandage that everyone can use, but with the restriction it takes inventory space and costs money. Here only very special people know how to bandage. I have lost so many guys to bleed out and poison since everyone in my party seems to miss that skill. It just feels so game:y, but if you don't mind that kind of thing...

Could you say more about terrain, positioning, stuff like that? Are there different biomes, enemy types, so that you need different tactics? How is the tactical AI? You mention setting fire, is that just a status effect that does damage over time or does it affect anything else, panic, set terrain on fire etc.

 

[Alienman]

Hmm ok. What about the core of the game, the tactical combat? Is that part at least "crunchy" enough to carry everything else?

Not sure. BB is much involved since this game is very game:y when it comes to skill use. Setting fire with the bow is restricted to bow, and a low-level guy with that kind of bow will only have that ability. There is no way to fire a normal arrow. The same goes for other weapons. I found a nice two-handed sword, but it had no normal attack, only a "dash". Like running through enemies and slowing them, which made that guy useless in battle beyond that retarded attack. I liked the game more in EA, not that it has changed much, but maybe that is the problem. Find it hard to get immersed now, since there is nothing to get immersed about.

Another problem is that healing/bandaging is RNG, it depends on what your guy comes with. Compared to BB, where you just buy a bandage that everyone can use, but with the restriction it takes inventory space and costs money. Here only very special people know how to bandage. I have lost so many guys to bleed out and poison since everyone in my party seems to miss that skill. It just feels so game:y, but if you don't mind that kind of thing...

Could you say more about terrain, positioning, stuff like that? Are there different biomes, enemy types, so that you need different tactics? How is the tactical AI? You mention setting fire, is that just a status effect that does damage over time or does it affect anything else, panic, set terrain on fire etc.

There are different terrain/biomes, and they seem to affect the tactical combat. Like there is mud that slows you down. If it's raining there is a chance of lightning, which can kill both enemies and you. Fight in snow storms and parts of the map can be obscured. But I have not noticed any elevation difference so far, so the battles seem to always be on flat terrain. Setting fire is an overtime thing, just like poison. Fire can spread though, so if you engage someone on fire, you might catch fire yourself. And yes, you can set fire to the ground. Rain doesn't seem to affect it. The tactical AI, well, at times they seem to go for the weakest target, at least ranged guys. But most of the melee will make a bee-line for your nearest melee guys. This allows you for setting up traps rather easily like having overlapping overwatches and such.

It's not a bad game at all, it just feels a bit meh. Like people have pointed out. There are a lot of tactical options I think, I mean you can create an army of animals if you want by capturing them. It's just that the setting is a bit meandering. It's funny, I start to play, and think this is rather enjoyable, but gaming fatigue sets in fast. You will be killing a lot of groups of enemies...

 

[Reinhardt]

where are all big battles?

 

[ArchAngel]

where are all big battles?

What do you consider big?
I am only lvl 5 (out of 12) and I am already doing 30+ man battles.

 

[Reinhardt]

30+ man

sexist much

 

[Reinhardt]

btw how do you even can tell apart your peasants in those "30+ man battles"? everyone wearing same shit-smeared brown clothes. and no cool hats.

 

[ArchAngel]

Only complaints I have atm are different UI issues. Like during combat with a lot of units it is hard to see which are yours and which are theirs with a glance. You either need to look at tiny health bars that are red for their units and blue for yours or you need to mouse over each unit and their guys get a red square around the bottom. There is no way to have that square on at all times...

Another issue is no right click commands, you need to press buttons on ability cards all the time (or use shortcuts on keyboard)..

And on world map your camera is focused on your team, you cannot pause and move it to see where you need to do and then click there. You need to micromanage movement all the time which is made worse because your guys have pathfinding of Baldur's Gate 1 and get stuck all the time...

Edit: oh and there is a highlight key on world map (and on normal maps outside combat) but it barely highlights and you still do pixel hunting most of the time.. I do not understand which idiot in their team considered this a good idea.

 

[Shrimp]

where are all big battles?

I think the amount of combatants goes up by a lot if you play with the level scaling mode enabled from the start of the game. At least that's the impression I get from reading both reviews and complaints on Steam. It seems like aside from trying to match your party's level it will also try to match your party's size including non-combatants like pack animals. I'm not sure how severe the scaling is though.
I picked the region locked levelling option since the level scaling option sounded like what I played in one of the old early access builds and I didn't like how it felt like I never really made any progression since even random bandits and wild animals would level up alongside you.

I've only explored one region and ventured a little bit into two others so far and so far it doesn't seem like the enemies scale with you. It also seems like each region is divided into smaller sub-regions where enemies are weaker/stronger. For instance in the central parts of the first region enemy encounters consist of something like one to four enemies at level 1 or 2, while in the borders of the same region both numbers go up.
I ended up recruiting far too many goons and wild animals and so far I think the only type of encounter that has scaled with me (in the non-scaling mode) is the guard patrols, and I'm not even sure if they actually scale with my troop size or if it scales with my wanted/suspicion level since it's always pretty high as I keep stealing recipes and food to feed my enormous troop.

Aside from the aforementioned guard patrols the two other types of large scale battles I've encountered were bandits forts and rat infestations, both of which have certain gimmicks tied to them. The bandit forts can be thinned down by killing wandering bandits in the area and the rat infestations are a swarm type battle where the boss will continuously summon rats every turn until you kill it. To discourage you from just instantly rushing the boss there are some nests located around the arena that you can destroy for some alchemical components (I think)

Spoiler

 

[Alienman]

One UI complaint I have is why the inventory is so small and pressed into the right bottom corner. Gets annoying when you have ton of items to scroll through.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/wartales-review-the-mercenary-life-isnt-flashy-but-it-is-rewarding/

WARTALES REVIEW​

Turn a bunch of generic mercenaries into your absolute best buds.​

Like a battle-hardened mercenary roped into another foolish adventure, Wartales hides its colourful inner life behind a grim, inscrutable visage. This player-driven RPG presents with a muted aesthetic, lacks a typical central storyline, and isn't defined by any single feature. It's a game that rebuffs your initial advances with a grunt, because it knows you'll be feeding the crows before the week's out.

Survive long enough to penetrate that tough exterior, however, and you'll discover a game built from a thousand little ideas. These ideas accrue over time into a journey that feels unique to you. It isn't as strange as Kenshi or as spectacular as Mount & Blade, but it makes up for that in how personally attached you become to the party you create.

Wartales puts you in charge of a newly formed mercenary band in a low-fantasy realm ravaged by conflict. Your goal is simply to look after the band's interests, growing your troupe in power and prestige by exploiting the realm's turmoil to your advantage. How you do this is largely up to you. You choose where to go, who to recruit, how to make money, and where to camp at night.

Daily bled​

In fact, the decision-making process starts before the game kicks off, as Wartales lets you play in several ways. The game has two separate difficulty settings for its turn-based combat and its survival simulation, and it lets you decide how often you want to save your progress. The choice that will most define your experience, however, is whether to play with level-scaling, where the game tries to match its challenge with your capabilities, or keep levels region-locked, increasing the difficulty as you push toward the edges of the world.

In my opinion, region-locked is the way to go, as it provides a clearer sense of where you are along the power curve, and encourages you to explore every region you visit. Whichever way you tailor your experience, Wartales still operates on the same two layers. The highest layer is a Mount & Blade-style overworld where you travel between locations, visiting villages, farmsteads, ruined fortifications and many other landmarks. Your journey across the map is constrained by a stamina meter. When it runs out, you'll need to rest, else your companions will start keeling over from exhaustion.

If you so choose, you can just collapse around the campfire and wait until your stamina meter refills. But your companions won't be too pleased by this. They expect to be fed at every stop, and payment for their services every three stops. The more companions you have in camp, the more food and money you'll need to divvy out at these intervals.

In short, cakes and coin are the two key resources you need to keep your adventure rolling along. How you acquire these is down to you. The most straightforward approach is to head to the nearest inn and nab a few contracts from the bounty board. These pay a handful of coins for grunt work like killing local bandits or conveying messages to other villages. Alternatively, you could go hunting for animals in Wartales' many forests, keeping the meat to eat and selling the pelts for cash. Or you could commit to a life of crime, stealing food from under the noses of market vendors, and robbing other travellers that wander around the map.

Although your route through the world is open ended, certain experiences are universal. Inevitably, your chosen path will lead to a fight. When blades are drawn in Wartales, the game switches to a turn-based battle map. Like the game as a whole, combat seems unremarkable at first, but reveals itself to be impressively open ended. Before a battle starts, you're allowed to position your troops around the battlefield, pick which unit attacks first, then use the rest in any order you like. You can also deploy movement points, basic attacks, and special abilities in any combination, and continue to mix and match until they all run out.

This flexibility extends to how your units fight. A character's combat style is influenced by a wide range of factors such as their base class, the skills they've unlocked, even the specific weapon they're equipped with. You can even choose how your units regain Valour points used to deploy special abilities. They might regain these by killing an enemy, by engaging with an enemy (i.e locking into a fight so they're unable to withdraw without risking damage) or by ending their turn standing next to a friendly or enemy unit.

Despite this flexibility, combat is rarely easy. Your units can only take a few hits before they risk death, and the team's Valour points are pooled, so you need to think hard about when to use them. A basic tactic is to engage an enemy with a unit that has good defensive skills, then use a high DPS unit to ambush them from behind, which deals bonus damage. But after a few hours' play my best ranger (and the group's captain) unlocked an ability to drop a smoke cloud, which gave any friendly units in the area a free attack on an opponent they were engaged with. For the next few hours, my primary tactic was to try to engage enemies in a clump, then use Heldt's smoke ability to slice an extra chunk of health off as many enemies as possible.

Moonlighters​

As units become more proficient and new strategic avenues open up, your approach to combat will constantly evolve. But your mercenaries aren't solely defined by their fighting skills. Every character in your crew can choose a secondary profession that aids the camp in some way. Anglers, for example, can catch fish from set points around the map, increasing your food supply for free. Cooks, meanwhile, can take those fish and turn them into a more nourishing meal, stretching your rations further. Blacksmiths can forge new weapons and armour for your troops, while thieves can swipe goods from under merchant's noses, and pick locks on chests in abandoned ruins for extra loot.

Through this combination of combat class and character profession, your mercs will start to exhibit more specific personalities. My starting archer, named Ledric, was an absolute liability on the battlefield. Not only was he rarely involved in the fighting, but when he did his hands dirty, his arrows would often hit his companions rather than the enemy. On the other hand, he was also the camp's lead tinker, responsible for making basically everything that kept the camp running. This made it worth putting up with the occasional arrow in the arse.

As both your camp and your mercenaries grow, new opportunities unfold. You can capture and tame wild animals to fight alongside you, and each animal has its own skill tree. You can knock out and shackle enemies on the battlefield and exchange them at the nearest prison for a fee. Hidden around the world are elaborate tombs you can explore, using torches to push through the gloom for hidden treasures and strange artefacts that you'll need to recruit a scholar to decipher. And while there's no central storyline to pursue, each region has an optional story you can follow, which will ultimately shape the future of the people who live there.

I've spent a lot of this review explaining how Wartales works. But how it works is also why it's good. Shiro Games has created a rich and granular mechanical toybox, where every action you perform moves the needle slightly, resulting in either a reaction or a reward that gives you ideas about what to do next. The stories it tells aren't as generative as your Dwarf Fortresses or RimWorlds, but the way its rules work makes it easy for your imagination to fill in the narrative gaps. As you pootle around in your camp, your mercs will occasionally have moments of introspection leading to a minor narrative choice. In one example, Ledric resolved to be more social with the other mercs, presumably to improve his standing with them. His efforts did make him one friend in the camp. Unfortunately, it was the pony.

There are gaps in Wartales' well-worn chainmail. The game's structure necessitates a lot of backtracking, especially in the early stages. You'll frequently need to return to villages to hand in contracts, buy food and other equipment, or sell items to lighten your inventory. It's also possible to get bogged down in a loop of only earning enough money to cover your basic costs, making it hard to push farther out to new areas. While I wouldn't describe Wartales as a tedious game, there are times when it can move frustratingly slowly.

More broadly, compared to, say, Divinity, the world itself is not especially characterful. Once you've explored a couple of regions, the format according to which those regions are built pokes through, dampening some of the magic. And while the quests and dialogues are capably written, I'd struggle to tell you the names of any characters I interacted with outside of my own party.

That said, the mercs who you recruit, train, eat with, sleep with, explore with, and fight alongside will be burned into your brain forever. Wartales may not be the flashiest or most accessible game around, but persistence will enrich you with the most valuable currency any game can provide: memories.

THE VERDICT
83

WARTALES
Don't be fooled by its drab exterior, Wartales is a deep and richly rewarding exercise in party creation.

 

[razvedchiki]

it destroys my immershun that the party is spread out and not in a formation like in battle brothers.

 

[Mortmal]

Lol I found a lvl 4 white bear in a jail and I can get him out and part of my group for 400 gold.. the thing has 300 HP LOL LOL LOL
For my lvl 4-5 party and kind of enemies I fight, this thing can probably solo most encounters :D

Thats a problem if you pick non scaling mode, animals gets too good early , if you have a pack a wolves their pack bonus will shred them, overpowering anything with quantities since the numbers dont scale. But if you pick scaling exploration, they are not so good , bear really arent op, and the enemies party scale to the number you bring, in this case you better have small party optimized.Animals arent so good compare to a fully geared human.

 

[Shrimp]

The drawback to using animal companions is they will eat you out of the house.
My regular human companions eat 3 pieces of food per rest. Basic wolves eat 4, alpha wolves eat 8 and bears eat 12. It adds up pretty fast.

 

[vazha]

Somebody said in this thread that this was half as fun as Battle Brothers. Pretty apt, but would trim that down to one third as fun, that would be more accurate. Battle Broths has atmosphere & character in spades, this one is like the dimwitted younger sibling.

 

[Jrpgfan]

It looks and tastes like WOKE Bud Light beer. Mandatory female soldiers with butch lesbian haircuts in every group. Female Inquisitors, female Jailors in MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE inspired World. Soldiers and Mercenaries with zoomer haircuts. Unity/Unreal assets cobbled together. Zero unique art style. Zero World simulation. Battles feel like bunch of marhsmellowmen are swinging swords at each other, using Unity/Unreal asset animations. Zero original or good old tactical or strategical features. Any feature marketed on front page that looks WOW! at least something new in wolrd of medieval mercenary company simulation games! Wrong. It's just some lazily put together event pack pop-up windows with few + and -, no real integration of that feature into game World. Like merchant outposts

Copy-Paste some skill trees that are safe and popular/ Copy-Paste some ambient music cheaply bought/ Copy-Paste some writing that's neither here nor there

Mechanically toothless 3D Battle Brothers in diet-WOKE Game of Thrones setting with zero art direction
If you HAVE to play this, instead of fucking bitch or playing original / making your own Battle Brothers => You're hopeless gaming crackhead

This game shows how much Western gaming devs are pathetic as programmers, artists and human beings
Perfect ca$h grab for current (de)genearation of zoomer&millenial Steam midwits. BattleBrothers for diet-woke White Midwits

You must be fun at parties..

Hard to know when he never went to one.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Somebody said in this thread that this was half as fun as Battle Brothers. Pretty apt, but would trim that down to one third as fun, that would be more accurate. Battle Broths has atmosphere & character in spades, this one is like the dimwitted younger sibling.

BB is no doubt the better game.

This is like a poor man's BB with legs. Still ok(gets boring pretty quick imo) but nowhere near as good.