Wartales – -apkrig
In the case of Wartales, there is beauty in simplicity. Despite the absence of any tutorial, you can very easily get the game under your skin, or maybe it will get you. In fact, it is not even a bit complicated, on the contrary, it is completely intuitive and you immediately know what to do in it – to survive, earn, experience something, become famous.
You are a group of homeless mercenaries roaming the harsh Middle Ages, where danger, and therefore the opportunity to earn a little, lurks at every turn. You don’t get a lined story. No one will trust you to save the world. You just exist, so do what you see fit. Just like in the great Mount & Blade series.
It’s partly a kind of sandbox, but as I said, the game is not complicated, so the possibilities here (at least according to the demo) are limited to fights, shops and occasional help to a farmer in need. You can take on several tasks in the city purely in order to eliminate the bandits afflicting the local townspeople and villagers, which is a very lucrative job. After all, without money, your party will not work for a long time. The boys you hire will demand a salary from time to time, and the easiest way to feed their hungry necks is a city market or a caravan.
Money can also be spent on equipment for your species, or raw materials from which you can forge it yourself, if you do not want to run through forests and mountains in search of wood and iron. Not to mention the people in need who will be made a holiday like ten gold coins, while your purse approaching one thousand will not even notice.
Wandering around the world and taking care of your gang of adventurers make up most of the game. You even deal with their fatigue, which from time to time will drive you to build a camp. Camping is such a nice mini-game similar to, for example, that in Expeditions: Viking. You can assign various functions to the members of your party – the handyman will make a key for your poncho, but also new objects for the camp, such as a cauldron where the cook bakes bread if you have flour and salt with you.
You give these features to your recruits yourself, and anyone can be anything. Do you want to mine some ore in the mines? Then you need a mercenary appointed as a miner. Do you want to forge your armor? Establish a blacksmith. That you would like to mix healing potions yourself? You need an alchemist.
But if you don’t take care of your camp and wander the vast landscape purposefully or aimlessly, you will probably fight. And I’m really glad that turn-based battles in Wartales are a lot of fun. While the journey takes place from a distant view on a large map of the world, the battles take place on a regular scale in nice random locations.
Before the battle itself, you determine in which positions the individual mercenaries will start, and you can boldly embark on a tactical cut. In Wartales, he managed to perfectly connect the player’s freedom with a fixed order of characters on the turn. You know exactly how many times it will be the bandit or hungry wolf, as well as you know how many of your characters will play by then. But it’s entirely up to you whether you’re pulling an ax or an archer at the moment.
All your characters must take turns in one round, but you decide their order yourself. And this is a really great element that brings a new level of tactics to the otherwise quite ordinary turn-based duel.
The fun of the fights is aided by the diversity of your mercenaries, their weapons and special abilities, as well as the various effects of injuries that they carry with them until you heal them. It is also interesting in the fights that they do not take place on strict hexagons or squares, but you have a lot of freedom in positioning your units thanks to the fine network of squares.
Although the demo didn’t offer that much as a result, I felt like I was playing a big full game. It wasn’t until I finished that I realized that I hadn’t found any new drawings to forge better equipment, recipes for new foods and potions, or that I hadn’t found a second city where I could ship products made exclusively in the first city to make money on imports. .
I am convinced that I saw only a small fraction of Wartales, but it was enough for the game to completely captivate me. From the beginning, I trembled with fear that I would lose my trained whip. Death is permanent here, and since your mercenaries are not only soldiers, but also cooks, do-it-yourselfers, alchemists, blacksmiths or even thieves, with their death you will lose a profession that you will sooner or later miss.
Fortunately, deaths can be prevented. Once a mercenary loses all his life in battle, he does not die. However, he is not combat-ready and really dies when he receives one more blow in this state. So you hide him in seclusion and hope the enemy doesn’t notice him. When he dies, he is quickly forgotten. In the local world, ode to the dead is not feared …
In the end, I didn’t mind at all that no one was telling me a heroic medieval story. A feeling of control over your small but growing rental company, which is more capable with each new hunt, is enough.
When I wrote about my belief that I saw only a fraction of the final Wartales in the demo, it was such a small wish. Already during the two hours after which the demo version let me play, the content began to repeat – the enemies were still the same, the orders were identical, the loot was scarce and soon the challenge disappeared. So if I have to worry about anything, then it is too repetitive sandbox filling.
But the world of the game is really big, full of cities, villages, buildings, ruins, mines and other areas that will always arouse curiosity and perhaps provide some small side story so that, like old mercenaries, you have something to tell by the fire. After all, why should the creators shoot their trumps in some early demo version?
The demo fulfilled its purpose perfectly. At the moment, I’m looking forward to the full game surprisingly intensely, and I’m even more sorry that we won’t see it right away. Wartales will first move to a preliminary approach sometime this year.
