izigame.me

You know what? This was initially a positive review. But the final couple of regions just broke me. The snowball of poor game design, atrocious balancing, bad UI and horrendous, Heavy Rain tier writing crushed my motivation and broke any ounce of hope for this game to stay good until the end.
So, initially, this game feels like it's great. Like your choices matter a lot, and the world is your oyster. Well, it's not. Let's do this "Gaming sins" style, by categories.
Story:
1. Choices are only binary and very superfluous. Writers tried to be cheeky and fiddle with grey morals, but ultimately you have only side A or side B to pick. No in-betweens and no alternatives. Oh, you hate both lords fighting over the throne? Well, too bad, you have to pick one of them.
2. Nothing changes after any of your choices. Heck, nothing changes even when you complete the region's storyline. Nobody acknowledges anything and keeps repeating the last dialogue option spoken. You've had to kill a wife's plague-ridden husband? Well, you'd better never come to her house again. But not because she's mad, oh no — she'll just keep crying until the end of eternity.
3. Atrocious writing. Nothing makes sense, and because the devs chose to have self-contained region storylines, they feel meaningless and laughable. But the worst offender is the Fate of Grinmeer quest, in the capital city. Without spoilers, this murder "mystery" has the stupidest option for a culprit, and they have the worst motivation possible.
4. Sorta tying into the previous point — the rewards are laughable. No, wait, they're actually offensive. You won't receive a single legendary item from the main quests (there is only one exception, somewhat. One of the ruins is locked behind the regional storyline) — you won't even get worthy rare items from these. Hell, you won't even recoup your gold losses from fighting, eating and paying your mercenaries.
So, ultimately, you don't even have any motivation for doing the "main" """storylines"""
Gameplay and balancing:
1. The difficulty is all over the place. Many other players mentioned here, that the problem ultimately lies in the difficulty settings. But that's only half of the story. If you play with region levels locked, you'll have "just right" beginnings, an insanely easy middle point, and a ball-busting end. If you pick adaptive levels, however — you'll never feel like your party is growing stronger.
2. The enemies always have more interesting skills than your party. You can get some of those through gear, but not even close to all of them. Instead, you're treated with the most situational perks in your skill tree imaginable, with the archer being the most daunting choice here.
3. Since the devs couldn't program a somewhat smart AI, they instead use insane team-wide buffs for the enemy team, to make them more of a threat. Enjoy such hits as "-30% damage taken", "+30% crit chance" and. my personal favorite, "+40% (yes, forty) damage for every buff on the target".
4. The boss fights are annoying puzzles to solve, and are not a battle of strength and wits. And you usually solve those in the deployment phase, without even engaging with the boss. Oh, and almost all bosses are just bigger versions of generic units! They couldn't even bother with a unique model. The one cool, gigantic boss you will stumble across, isn't even a boss — it's a goddamn decoration which spams mass AoE "Fear".
5. Food means nothing. Unless you're feeding a maximum amount of mercs — you'll just start piling up food just for its buffs, around the mid-point of the game. There is 0 management involved.
6. The contract system is absolutely busted. Once you get a perk allowing you to "negotiate" the prices and take more of those in one go, you'll be swimming in gold. And a batch won't take you even half your endurance bar to complete, given the right food (which is easy). You'll be swimming in gold. And since 90% of these are randomly generated, offering nothing but gold, you'll get tired of them, real fast.
7. The levelling experience is awful. For some bizarre reason, if a unit didn't hit\kill anyone he'll get less XP. And you get the training dummy rather late to remedy this even with its help. The damn ponies you desperately need to level up to get more carry capacity and gear slots will be out-levelled by your troops by 2 or 3 levels. Even if they've travelled with you the entire game.
8. Just four tiers of craftable armor with no bonuses. And the last tier requires an outrageous amount of resources to craft. And the fucking smithing mini-game — my bro almost lost his marbles, trying to forge the final tier. So, get this, it's a rhythm, mini-game where you have to hit the hot metal parts just as they "shine". However, you do this with your fucking mouse, and both the order and the time window are random — on top of the time window being already very tight. It's just rage-inducing and the most horrendous mini-game we've ever experienced. All for what? An armor piece with 0 useful stats?
BUGS:
1. The game will randomly decide that you're not reloading together with the host and will leave you in a previous session
2. Atrocious navigation, worthy of a bad 2D precision-platformer — but here's the kicker, you click with your mouse and play a strategy game. You will get stuck. You will struggle to reach and activate a climbing hook. You will stumble onto unreachable resources and fishing spots.
3. Sometimes player controls during your turn just bug out and you can't do anything, but restart the encounter or reload a save.
4. The game sometimes just outright refuses to connect and properly load. This is a known issue, persisting for quite some time. Nothing was done to remedy this or at least explain how to avoid it. It's just there.

All-in-all, I'm insanely disappointed by Wartales. And finding this out in the endgame just feels like a betrayal. Honestly, I'd probably be better off finding out the game was bad from the start.
BUY BATTLE BROTHERS INSTEAD. Wartales took a lot of stuff from BB anyway. And if you played BB already — just do it again, since it's much more engaging and replayable.
Cheers. Shower me with the "Jester" reward, I probably deserve that.