Wartales

I owned this game on steam within 2-4 months of its initial release into early access out there. As appreciative of the game I was at the time, I was excited to see a reasonably well made game be fleshed out, balanced, grow, and flourish. It has not. Balance on almost all aspects of this game has both an unfortunate level of scripting similar to what the new series of X:COM games have coded in, i.e., forced instances of losing characters, taking damage, or overwhelmingly negative attributes to any number of scenarios. Weapon balancing in this game was never well addressed, whereas most of your forged weapons are acceptable tools/income, and 70% of all of the remaining items live in a degree of obsolescence. Combat encounters are horribly lopsided still, as they were in the beginning, and continue to be. Regardless of the number of people you have in your party, even playing on region locked, enemy troop sizes match yours consistently, and unerringly, for little to no change in income, whilst things with the challenge rating hard leave you outnumbered, facing enemies with numerically superior damage and health. Worse yet, despite whatever number of enemies you fight, the developers chose instead to opt to provide you a pool of items, meaning that even if you fought an enemy with interesting gear or tools, there was a high chance you weren't going to get it. Finally, most embarassingly, in early updates and iterations of the game, it was set to boast more regions than it does now, with more intrigue and variety. As of the full release now, I believe it boasts 6, as compared to its originally touted 9 or 11. At least half the DLC's were supposed to be added content, with the most egregious examples being the tavern opens, where you are allowed to establish a base. This was one of the core mechanics they wanted. It was implemented directly into your save files on steam. pre-downloaded, yet to have access you paid. It's cool, it's pretty they failed to keep promises

But then everything became more and more irksome and just simply annoying. I'll probably never finish this game. The annoying things are deep. Leveling doesn't feel fun or cool. You never get to feel good. No explanation why my angler couldn't fish. Maybe because of the last fight gave him an injury. I will give the game some slack. Didn't play it for a while so I forgot a lot. I just didn't want to start from the beginning. Probably will be a game like so many other by this developer, that will be abandoned. I saw they've released a DLC for the same price as the base game. Yeah, not going to buy that.

PROS 1) Interesting, variable and unique missions, especially in tombs 2) Huge map with lots of POS 3) Turn-based battles 4) Survival system is logical and not annoying 5) Decent variaty of companions, skill set and fighting styles, nice idea of having occupations for each member 6) Unlike some others I liked the absence of magic and stuff like that CONS mostly minor like bugs and so on, there's only one worth mentioning: 1) It's maybe kind of my fail, but I missed one 7 lvl-ish area to upgrade my team to 8th level and went straight to 8-9 ish area where I got totally jammed, so I had to use a trainer to add some 3K HP to keep up. If the landscape had more info about areas around I would have been more consistent in development and didn't feel upset afterwards when I finally found this 7 level area being 8-9. Maybe if I chose another type of gameplay in the beginning (adaptive vs areas with different level of enemies), this would not have happened. So more info about neighborhoods would be great, like having a whole map revealed with fog of war and without POS where you can navigate from the beginning. Game is really fascinating, I will come back in about a year and play it again when it's polished

A bit tedious in solo, but a very nice co-op game - IF it works. Currently it does not (since the March patches).

What can I say... the art style and atmosphere of the game are simply awesome! There are a lot of games I wish had this type of both immersive and yet slightly fantasy inspired design. Also the management aspect of the group with the small camp building is an interesting touch yet a bit finicky. One can be divided about the "arena-like" battlefields... but omg... when it comes to interface/menu and the class/combat gameplay. Menus are as inconvenient as possible, and abilities way to limited to be of use for any real interesting gameplay. Don't expect any Xcom like tactics or real RPG goodness. Goes on with classes. Animals (except for carry ponys) are pretty useless, as they add way too much party slots for their minor benefit. Makes beastmaster classes horribly bad. They should change animals to a DnD like System, making them a part of the beastmaster instead of full partymembers. For me that creates a love-hate relationship with the game. At least they added drop in/out MP.