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.

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!

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 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.

DON'T SAVE IN A CAVE!
I chose the 'limited saves' option when I started my first playthrough. Thouroughly enjoying the game. Unfortunately, I finished a session in one of the ancient ruins, and now my saves won't load. Infinite loading screen. 50+ hours progress lost. Really don't feel like starting again. Maybe in a while.

There's way too many factors that peaked my enjoyment for Wartales that I find it difficult to pick the best topic to start off for this review. That being said, I can say I love every single aspect of the game so far EXCEPT for the Rhythm mini games for the bard profession but that's simply because I really really suck at it.
Now I found there's a bit of every aspects of games that I like in Wartales. From Runescape's movement, Fire Emblem's combat, Point and Click Indie game puzzle solving, Bannerlord's traversal, Progression systems of JRPGs, Conan Exile's capture system, Resource Management, Troop Management, Base Management, World Building management, Side stories and Exploration. There's probably many more that i've yet to discover since I've only 100%'d one area of the world so far. That still doesn't include the DLC's I can definitely see myself going over 500hrs in total in Wartales with this amount of replay-ability.
It's a tough game, for me at least. I'm playing on the Normal Difficulty and it's already been a challenge. You can basically play however you want like so far I only tried leading a team of 4-8 characters looks like we can definitely add more as there's no indication of any limit. You can be nice to everyone or be a dick it is completely up to you.
Story wise? there's stuff going on in the world sure but you and your team isn't in the center of it. Like you can participate in conflict and help each side on different battles and that's the beauty of wartales. My friend says the way I describe Wartales is that it's a sandbox game. Doesn't feel like it, but I understand why it comes across that way.
Will update once i try out the DLCs but for now this review is solely on the base game 100hours in.