Wartales

The skeleton of the game is very good. The graphics and maps are good, the battles satisfying, and the general mechanics of the game are good. The problem is that everything is so limited that the game goes from 5star fun to 3star boredom. The story is limited The classes are limited The skill trees are limited The biomes are limited The equiptment is limited The crafting is limited' But worst of all is the enemies are limited. They added 3-4 different fighters, an Archer, a bear, boar and wolf (and some ghoul creature you can find ina tomb). And that is it - the only enemies you will face, and they just increace the stats of these same enemies as you progress. And they expect you to fight and refight these same limited enemies thousands of times just to get to level 10. It becomes sooo boooring, I got about three quarters of the way through the game, and could not bring myself to continue. They need to bring in a DLC with a vastly expanded amount of enemy types and character classes with new mechanics, abilities and fighting styles. I would suggest a high fanatasy, and add healers spell casters, monsters, an far wider range of loot Diablo-Style You do get value for money, the skeleton of the game is great, but this game desperately needs more flesh.

I felt like playing Baldur's Gate and Mount and Blade at same time. Nice combat rules (turn based, but very dexterous), microeconomy, interesting quests. Highly recomended!

I refunded the game, since I was getting stutters every 10 seconds while traveling the world map and crashes with framerates higher than 60fps. Maybe its a bit harsch, but at the time the game was out for more than a month and there hasn't been any updates to resolve this issue. I guess I'm just tired of the lackluster pc releases this year. There some smaller problems like the really bad pathfinding, where your group constantly gets stuck on the terrain, especially when traveling on top of a mountain. It seems like the ai always moves in a straight line, ignoring all obstaceles on the way, so you have to constantly adjust. Sometimes I was stuck on something in a forest and couldn't even see what was going on, sometimes on the edge of a lake... in short: traveling the world is a mess at this time. The graphics need some work too. The game suffers from a overall bad image stability at 1080p and the antialiasing method in the settings just blurs everything. The UI and especially the fonts are already quite blurry form the get go, which is highlighted when rendering the game in a higher resolution and downsample to screen resolution. Otherwise this would be an ideal solution, if your not playing on 1440p or UHD Monitor. For the first few hours the combat wasn't really engaging for me, since there wasn't much enemy variety and a lack of tactical options. But I'm sure this will get better over time, since the progression systems look promising and games like this often take some time to grow on me. As soon as the technical problems are resolved, I will give Wartales another shot and update this review.

I love tactical RPGs, and I really liked Battle Brothers, but to be honest it is now dead to me, since Wartales is a strict upgrade to the game. It has very good graphics, good music (though BB music was better :-), well-built open world, interesting quests with consequences, very good and rich crafting system along with a lot of good experience mechanics which grant you systems and unlock perks for just playing the game. Professions system is a nice add-on on top of normal levels, building and maintaining your camp I found super fun and legendary weapons are awesome. Different classes get distinct build among them, and none is superfluous, though some are clearly better than others. Combat system is very good, though battles only ever have one level, with no heights. Boss battles are pure fun. Economy and management systems are both well built. On the weaker side, game had its random slowdowns here and there and it was especially irritating during mini games, which all require precise timing. Enemies are repetitive and not very intelligent, always attacking the closest enemy, which makes them easy to manipulate. The game itself is very long, 60 hours at least, making it a little tiresome. It has an adaptive exploration option which makes the game 3 times more fun, but the game doesn't even suggest you turn it on. But the weakest part is how slow you gain exp in this game; it's almost unbearable. I was forced to use WeMod's x2 exp multiplier to even be able to reach the highest character level before the game was over. I rated Expeditions: Rome 8,5/10 and I feel like Wartales deserves the same score. It has its quirks, but is overall an excellent game.

The mechanics are good, the game feels polished with no bugs encountered, the mini quests and exploration are nice and ...that sums up the game. No main story just miniquests. You do get to unlock minor bonuses like 10% cheaper prices or 10% faster map movement to lessen the grind. You get to craft stuff like gear that is level gated, and learn many many food recipes, which I guess is what qualifies the game as "survival". For me the game feels like a free to play online game but without microtransactions. Mileage may vary for you of course and the possibly of lots of future incoming DLCs and co-op might make it more memorable for some. Personally, I played through three regions and I got bored.