Wartales

The game itself is great, I really enjoy it playing in online Coop with a friend. Around 12 hours in currently. Coop mechanics are well integrated and thought out. The tactical planning during a battle is fun, deciding who acts first and how, which fits this game well. The game is still missing some minor QoL features for Coop, such as inventory stack splitting. But those are all things I assume can easily be fixed. Requires a stable internet connection on both sides or the game might desync in battle from time to time. This can be solved by restarting the battle. The GOG version is currently lacking Coop support, which is why I refunded the game here and bought it on another platform.

I've put a couple hundred hours into this game on Steam. The developers have really expanded the world in the last 2 years, so a lot of the older reviews are outdated. This game lets you develop a mercenary company with a ton of choice and complexity. Highlights: 1. The turn based combat is excellent and varied. They've added a bunch of classes too. You can have a bunch of different types of bands. You can have animals fighting alongside you. It is comparable to the top turn based combat games, 2. The world is well developed. There are now a lot of different regions to explore with engaging quests. Or you can ignore it all and be a bad guy. Lots of freedom. 3. Crafting has really grown. Now you can run a tavern, have a ship and be a privateer, own trade outposts, and your camp is an incredible place to take care of your mercenaries. There is just a tremendous amount of stuff you can do in this game. Just for an example, you can investigate mysterious tombs (using a scholar to solve mysteries. In those tombs you will sometimes fight creepers, which are weird eyeless creatures. You can capture them, then nurse them back to health and befriend them in your camp. Then you can teach them to be a bard, and have them perform in your tavern. So yeah, it's a crazy complex game that lets you do pretty much anything you want with a mercenary company.

As someone who greatly enjoyed Battle Brothers, I feel that this game is both easier and deeper. Even on higher diffuclty settings, it won't beat you up in combat once you grasp the mechanics, but it does a much better job than similar games of building a sense of place and letting you sink into it. It does a great job of allowing you to wander around a province, take on missions, and solve the local issues while your mercenary company grows. The only major shortcomings are: 1) that the combat / build options become limited (note I've probably sunk a clean 60 to 80 hours into this on a higher difficulty, so your mileage may vary); and 2) it does just a good enough job of the worldbuilding that the lack of reactivity becomes noticeable. For example, early in the game you can recruit a farmer who is dying of the plague and quickly cure him. Even once you cure him, however, if you go back to his wife she acts as if he's a dead man walking. A lot of the game is siloed like this, where you enter a location, complete the quest, and nothing matters after that point. I believe this is just a product of a limited budget / dev time, but it does stand out because the world is just engaging enough to make you notice. By way of a quick summary, this is good, not great, but I adore it and hope the developers get more money and more time to do the same thing better. It's clear there's real talent behind this game, and I want to see what the folks who made it can do next. Battle Brothers is a perfect, tight nugget of a game, this is sloppier and larger, but it also has more places to go. Also, it has a DLC that lets you run a tavern, and I'm the exact kind of goblin that eats that sort of stuff up!

There is still no information or map markers concerning quests, its a nightamre to find out anything. I play Mordheim: City of the Damnedand it has better info.

I really enjoy this game for its gameplay and varitations of play from the exploring tombs and crafting . The combat is not revoltionary however it is fun on the gameplay loop. I even like the writing where there is no good/bad players can make a decsision about how they wish to progress with out impact of a karma system. It will effect who they can interact with later and this can create diffrent gameplay loops. As i said i really enjoy it and I hope others do to.