Wartales

Great game, the only downside being no proper endgame - you don't get to see any kind of credit roll, and some simple slideshow showing you what you achieved. Sooner or later, as you have achieved everything you wanted, all that is left is to leave the game without any closure.

Excellent exploration / tactics RPG game. The game immerses you in an atmosphere of a medieval era where you're a nomadic mercenary group taking on morally grey tasks near and far.
I played on Extreme difficulty in 2 game clears, and am in the middle of an Ironman Extreme difficulty.
What I like:
- The profession system where crafting is rather simple / straight forward (could even be expanded upon) and facilitates a certain type of build.
- The combat is punishing, yet fun. It teaches you to be very confident in your moves. There's also a skill AoE / damage prediction tool that is useful and easily understood.
- The valor points system is great as a resource to use combat skills where your party shares a pool of points. You can regain temporary points by doing certain actions to let your greedy high-impact builds spend them later.
- You can respec your class so long as you save gold to do so, so nothing's really too permanent in that regard.
- You have "Talent trees" essentially that facilitate types of gameplay. For example, if you wanna commit tons of crime via theft and stealing from merchants, this gives you points towards a Talent tree that facilitates that. You wanna trade a lot? same deal. Fight a lot? Sure! Explore and craft? Got you covered.
- Random events in camp that lead to attribute point awarding for one of your members, or random encounters with wolves, as well as intuitive trait unlocks randomly based on what you do with a member - gives it a sort of "anything can happen today" kind of vibe.
- Dungeons can be explored and you can find legendary equipment doing so.
- Fight in Arenas for legendary equipment too.
- Expansions have decent content, like being a pirate steering a boat, creating a tavern to try to grow it as a business (that you can later funnel funds from to your troop :), or even fit in some grisly pits (I haven't done this yet!). Pretty gnarly.
- You eventually get the ability to remove headpiece passives as "stamps" that can be placed on any new headpiece, so the build facilitating passive skill you had on there can be passed on to the new headpiece without worry.
Things I don't like:
- The tavern menus can get encumbering, and sometimes it's hard to see the forecast of what specialties your employee has in some tabs (Like the staffing menu for Kitchen or Cellar employees making food or drink, respectively. Hard to choose which to keep on shift, send out to do dirty missions, or to fire, because you can't tell if it's the guy that has the "Versatility" specialty, which is super good)
- Some overglaring bugs happen like the trader by your built trading grounds. He (used to) softlock the game if you spoke to him and picked a certain message. These bugs get fixed though, but some are still present. A softer bug is sometimes you can't pick up a resource, or use one of your pitons, because the terrain is weird, but it looks like you can just simply access it.
- No information about how a unit scales, or a preview of what an upgraded skill will look like until you learn the first level of it.
- Rare item gives stats like Willpower, or critical hit chance, but the Legendary variants are simply plain Armor stats, even though they have higher values. Makes for less interesting build choices. I hope this changes in the future somehow.
I'll edit if I can think of more. It's a very fun game. Try it!

You play as a band of mercenaries making their way across a beautiful isometric overworld; moving from town to town, taking on quests, camping etc while managing resources for fighting and travelling. The battle system is decent turn based combat on a flexible grid system. Each class of mercenary has a skill tree, levels, attributes, traits & professions (which allow them to do things like tinker or cook, and give them combat bonuses). Line of sight also actually matters; I shot my own rogue in the back with my archer by mistake. And you can rename characters, which is always fun.

Pros
- In combat, instead of it going Ally 1, Ally 2, Enemy 1, Ally 3, it goes "any of your units", "Enemy 1", "any of your units", "Enemy 2" etc, so you get lots of control over things like focus fire or making the most of where an enemy is at that moment, rather than in some games where you can only delay your character's turn.
- You can customise your units' appearance and name them
- The engagement mechanic is really nice. If you attack a unit, you become engaged with it. This enables backstabbing, and opportunity attacks if one of you leaves. It also ties into other combat abilities.
- Units take more damage if they're surrounded
- Everyone can be inspected
- Sometimes you get finisher "cutscenes" where you see your character end an enemy
- Status effects like mud, poison, slow, burning
- Environmental effects: lightning, rock falls
- Everything is voice acted
- Your characters unlock more traits over time based on what happens in combat
- Each character can have one of 8 professions for crafting and gathering
- Occasionally when resting, small events happen with your companions, like getting sick or someone thinking a new companion doesn't fit in, then you have 3 choices of how to react, with different outcomes, sometimes needing items for special outcomes
- There's a system whereby every new thing you do earns you knowledge (like discovering places, or creating an item for the first time). Knowledge can be spent on perks or crafting recipes
In addition to knowledge, there are also 4 main paths. Each path has a set of challenges. Completing challenges fills the path progress bar, which unlocks new kinds of perks
- There are old ruins to explore. Fights in these ruins are pitch black, and it matters if your characters are holding torches. Fire also lights up the area and reveals nearby units

Cons
- After 10 hours in the first zone and doing some reading, it looks like the game doesn't change - new regions are just more of the same. Given that's the case, it's kind of entertaining, but way too long and repetitive
- Don't get me to make permanent game-changing decisions before telling me how the mechanics work. How am I supposed to know if -1 carrying capacity is a lot, or if -1 happiness when resting matters?
- Lacking in tutorials. Valour points unexplained. No idea when units get healed
- Lag between when you use abilities and when they happen. For example, using Encouragement - my warrior shouts, then 3 seconds later my allies gain the effect
- After a fight, you're given the option to repair one person's armour in exchange for one Raw Material. - Materials cost money, and it repairs 10 armour points. Id' like to maximise how much repair value I get, but the game doesn't show you how much armour you're missing on that screen, so it will eat up your materials
- People with first aid can't heal themselves
- If you accidentally sell something, you have to buy it back at full price
- You can give ranks to members of your party, like assigning a captain. That's great, but the game doesn't tell you what that does. I had to google the fact that it gives them a new ability to use.
- You can sort the inventory, but you can't filter it - which makes it difficult to see how much food you're carrying
- All the wikis are out of date. None of them mention the Pugilist class
- Although the game appears to be about adding more companions and growing your party... there's literally no upside to doing so. Having more people means more gold expenditure and more food consumption. Battles add more enemies if your party gets larger, and fewer if you don't, which means there's absolutely no point in it.

I think the game is a good 7.5/10.

+ character gameplay is fun, many ways to customize your party
+ graphics are neat
+ combat is really fun the first hours
+ it's fun to chase the professions and train every one of them
+ there's a way to cheat the stupid tomb riddles

- combat gets out of hand fast, it's super tedious to fight 20-25 guys (and my party has only 9 members for the professions)
- stealng mechanics are stupid and should have been implemented in any other way, especially how long it takes your group to lose the wanted status, like doing missions for the authorities to be pardoned etc
- prisoner mechanics are meh, it's just not worth to feed another mouth or walk 100km to the next prison (no not even for -20 wanted status)
- camping mechanics are okayish, but make the game really slow (even compared to games like Xcom)
- too much restriction on weapon / class types, I throw away half of my gear because a Warrior can't use 90% of the melee weapons
- inventory management is a joke, why the fuck is there no crafting inventory? Why is everything cluttered into one bag?
- story is basically non-existing

The game is too long. I now clocked 81 hours and I'm in area 3. I mean, I like the game but boiled down it's the same all over again for every region. Some rats, some bandits, some church guys, some farmers. It gets old after 81 hours. There's no real meaninful character development to make up for the non-existing story. There's no real progression. You are always looking for food and money. That's fine for the first 50 hours, but at some point you should be able to, idk, own a fortress and go for meaninful battles, not keep chasing rats after 80 hours.

Why recommended then? Because it's really fun for the first 70+ hours and that definitely justifies the price.

You guys should release a Mercenary Guild DLC next and let us run an adventure like guild where we can send extra party members off for side missions or to accept contracts to assist wars and protect villages from raiders and bandits. Or even better release a DLC that lets us build a Mercenary Outpost or Base of operations as a main hub or settlement for our crew.

Really good sandbox CRPG that you may grow bored of as time goes on. The major gripe I have is that battles can become incredibly long and boring, especially when it's something like 20 vs. 20.
I liked the game overall though, and the dark, gritty tone. Yes, unlike many mainstream RPGs, you can be make your band of mercenaries into really bad guys if you want, ambushing merchant wagons and keeping prisoners. Or you can be noble, chivalrous mercenaries. It's up to you.
The game is separated by regions, each with a mini-campaign and sidequests. The story is nothing to write home about, but exists. I 100%'d the campaigns and the majority of sidequests in 140 hours. I did not play the DLCs.

I bought the game in EA. I saw its potential but "parked" it until it was ready...
...and I forgot about it...
UNTIL the Tavern expansion came out. I bought the expansion and the game LITERALLY broke me as I simply cannot play any other game since (335 hours at the time of this review, with an average of 70 hours every 15 days).
It has everything:
- Solid turn-based combat
- Optimum party (troop as it is called) management
- Non-linear campaign adapted to the player playing style (you can be as bad, as good, as neutral you want)
- Character(s) bond with the player (and when someone is killed, you can have a funeral with a custom tombstone - ie. when my wild boar Hammy died, I wrote on his grave "More than bacon...")
- Secondary professions with fun mini games while gathering materials
- Cool prisoner management feature
- Fun Arena & rugby tournaments
In short, I am at the end-game and cannot simply wait until I restart my new campaign!!!
Highly recommended!