On the surface, Wartales looks a lot like other games I like. I enjoy large-scale simulations, I like fiddly minigames with bonus rewards, I love RPGs, and I even sometimes play tactical games. But in the end I stopped playing Wartales before getting to the second town, waving the white flag of freedom after 15 hours.
There are a few different reasons for this. One is that it’s not possible to focus on just a single aspect of the game. While you have the freedom to, for example, forge weaponry for your squad using the blacksmith “profession”, the materials required to do it must either be purchased in limited quantity or mined from nodes that respawn at unpredictable intervals and are spread throughout the map. While traveling between those spots, you’ll be accosted by brigands or boars, forcing battles that are unavoidable and unskippable. So yes, you can forge equipment, and you should forge equipment since it’s so useful, but you can make maybe two or three pieces every few hours of gameplay before you need to spend more time traveling and fighting. This applies to many professions in the game, making them feel like an odd job you need to pick up when you happen to be in the right place rather than an actually engaging mechanic.
Difficulty is in an odd spot, and I wish I could have selected a hybrid between the two options offered. You can select either an adaptive or pre-set difficulty level. In adaptive mode, enemies levels and numbers are scaled to your party (from wandering wild boars to bandits). This makes for harder encounters that feel like a punishment for growing or leveling your mercenary company. Meanwhile, the pre-set difficulty felt a little tough early on but too easy by the end of the first region. This made me want an auto-resolve mechanic for battles at times, because some (particularly against wild animals) were over in just a few turns.
I enjoyed each individual part of Wartales on its own. The minigames for professions are fun for what they are (mostly simple rhythm games). Crafting equipment and getting new furniture for your camp feels rewarding. Fights offer a lot of tactical options and generally feel fair. Quest decisions are more nuanced than I expected, even if they seem to have little impact. While it becomes overwhelming for a large group, getting new equipment or skills for characters also feels good. Even the weird search-and-find bits, where you can find optional treasure in zones, is fun.
The problem is that you’re usually not choosing to engage in a particular one of those things. I’d start a day out thinking “I need wood for a thing.” On the way to gather wood I usually would get forced into combat, I’d notice a fishing spot available and since it’s on the way I would fish, then my crew would get exhausted so I’d need to camp which means cooking. Then since I’m in the camp menu anyway, I’d check the crafting list and notice that… I’m short on wood for that thing I want to build. Oh right, that’s what I meant to do originally. Now I’ve spent 40 minutes doing other things. It doesn’t feel good in a “plan for the long term” kind of way, it feels like I’m being railroaded into a specific play cadence because that is how Wartales is balanced. Rather than the sum of the parts making a game more fun, it’s actually a detriment – it feels like all these separate pieces were shoved together, and you’re forced to engage with them as they arise rather than because you’re choosing to. Sure, I could spend an hour on what is effectively an unmarked sidequest because I wanted to build a lookout post for my people, but does that sound fun? Battles, minigames, crafting, leveling, and managing your crew’s needs end up feeling like work, where you do them because you have to and not because you want to.
Performance became a major issue as well. For a mature game with multiple released DLCs, Wartales really struggles despite not being particularly flashy. In my experience, even on low settings, it needed to be restarted around every two hours, or else it would freeze my Steam Deck and require a hard reboot. Based on discussions online, this is an issue on other platforms as well.
Wartales was fun for a while, and maybe if I enjoyed the intended cadence of activities more I might have appreciated it for longer. As it is, though, it feels like progression is too gradual, a grind of various minigames and checkboxes that serves to unlock different minigames and more checkboxes. I’ve enjoyed games with this kind of progression before, but in Wartales I found little flexibility within its systems and didn’t enjoy the core loop enough to continue.