izigame.me

I think I'm in love with this game, but it's taken 100 hours of binge playing to figure out why. The cheap and easy thing to say is that 'if you love XCom, but wanted a more medieval/ fantasy setting, you'll love Wartales', but there's so much more here.
The first/ biggest thing I actually love about Wartales is that it's actually got more in common with tabletop war gaming, than it does XCom (in particular kill team, bolt action, and Legion). When you enter combat, you arrange your soldiers and take turns pushing them into your opponents, hopefully taking units off the board before they take yours. Like some of the more recent entries on the tabletop scene for skirmish scale fights, you and your opponent will bounce activating different units on the board. To help, you'll be able to see which units they'll activate, while you'll have the freedom of being able to activate anyone once a round; so there's something to be said about removing earlier units before removing those that will activate later, etc...
Like table top wargaming, fights generally come down to the weaponized trigonometry of figuring out distances. Maybe your opponent will be activating that swordsman early, but you can measure out how far they can move and strike, and realise you can just deploy so you're out of their range to negate the activation. To help add colour and depth, your weapons and units all have different skills which take advantage of things like range, status effects, and positioning. I was delighted to see that some of the tricks/ strategies from tabletop war games also applied here, like denied flanks or last-first activation's. Adding more colour to this are the 'champion' mobs which mirror XCom's 'Alien rulers' who can act several times a turn, letting them be immensely powerful without necessarily letting them get killed through sheer activation economy.
For those who played Warhammer and enjoyed the customising the loadouts of your army, there's plenty of that here. Rangers (rogues) can be built to be grenadiers with poison and PBAOE dagger attacks, or straight up chain killing murderers who play completely differently. Archers and spearmen can just be ranged dps, or area denial units. Depending on traits, gear, and synergies, you can build a really interesting army that hums just the way you want.
Beyond the table top comparisons, Wartales also delivers a continuity of gameplay. It's really neat to have your soldiers level up, and grow relationships with one another while also being these incredibly fragile pieces of art. In games like Fire Emblem or Triangle Strategy, you can lose characters but the nature of the story means there are some characters you need to keep seeing in cut scenes so their deaths lack a lot of weight. Here, your mercenaries are just... people you dragged out of a tavern with the promise of riches and prestige (or perhaps, dreams of not-starving-to-death). Which means they're all expendable, which keeps the stakes tense when you're choosing to commit your best tank to the front line, or risk plunging your rogue behind enemy lines.
With that said, there are some (minor) negatives. Character design is pretty bland, with most of your soldiers and civilians looking like the same stock images that you'd expect to find in crude visual novels. Some of the skill descriptions need to be clarified as some are woefully poor compared to others, and sometimes I find the camera doesn't let you put your units precisely where they're allowed to go, which can be frustrating. It's like there's a language to the game about precisely where you can stand to cleave, or when you can expect certain things to work or not work which only comes out by playing the game. On the one hand, maybe we can call this a means of developing mastery, but in the early hours it can sometimes feel like you just wasted your turn because you didn't quite understand how that ability works (not terribly unlike miniature war games).
Story wise, I think the game is kinda thin. Because it's so open world, and all of your characters are basically interchangeable, it doesn't ever feel like you're part of the story as much as you're the person flipping the pages in the book. This isn't to say there aren't choices in the game (do you save these plague victims, or do you let the mob lynch them?), but your involvement in these choices always feels like you were just the person who walked in at the moment they were making the choice, as opposed to you being on some gritty mission of revenge/ love/ patriotism, etc...
My next gripe isn't particularly fair in that I think most games suffer the same issue, but Wartales does take a stab at solving for it which is very commendable. The gripe is that as your heroes get stronger; what do you do? You can certainly have mobs get stronger, but then you're not actually any stronger for it? What's the point of getting stronger, if it just means all my enemies get tougher? Inversely, Wartales has an option for battles not to dynamically scale, in which case you can absolutely outnumber/ outclass your opponents, but inevitably this means that end game content will require a full roster of titans; which may clash with the initial small unit skirmish mode that you spent most of the game playing. As someone who really enjoys having smaller parties (preferrably the 6 - 8 range); I think running a campaign with 16 soldiers and 4 pack animals (and all the logistics behind having to feed and pay that many units) would become complicated. However; while I don't think the core question is answered with dynamic content, I do really appreciate that an attempt was made.
My final gripe is that there isn't a lot of variance in the fights themselves. Every fight I've been in has been some variant of 'kill all their people' which gets bland. Occasionally you may want to capture someone, or to protect one friendly npc because their death will lose the mission; but 99% percent of everything you do will be 'kill all bad guys'. I've found one mission that involved holding a position until your characters could find a way to escape, and one more trying to flee from overwhelming odds; and I'd really like to see a lot more of this sort of content.
If you're put out by the same-ness of character designs, that all battles are just permutations on the same battle objective (with very few exceptions), or that you will be responsible for the story of the game; this may not be the right game for you.
Inversely, I think Wartales is a great game if you're into tabletop war games and are looking for something that simulates the intricacies of building a list and carefully pushing and pulling miniatures across the board. With the option of dynamic combat, I think this game also shines for those who want to slowly build up a small army, or those who'd prefer having a small squad of heroes; which is also really cool. If you also enjoy the more administrative portions of an open world game (like making sure you have enough food for a long trip, or making decisions about whether your party will help refugees or rob them), I think this game becomes a must buy.