The basic flow of Wartales goes thusly: Go to a nearby village, get some contracts, fight a turn-based battle, level up, kit out your troupe, buy some food, maybe go fishing or foraging or craft some armour or capture a bear with a rope and indoctrinate it into joining your mercenary troupe, maybe progress the overarching quest for the area of the map you’re currently in, go back to the village, get paid, repeat. The broad headline for this 1.0 release is, “Like that, but more of it”, although that doesn’t quite tell the whole story, since even the first area has been refined and deepened. Welcome to Wartales.Ī year and a bit ago, I wrote about the nuts, bolts, and beans of the experience in early access. I eventually foisted the half-eaten lump on a blacksmith whose face I didn’t like for a single gold piece which I then spent on wine. The boring explanation involves bugs, but I like to think my gang treated his decomposing remains as a sort of communion wafer, nibbling on his flesh with ascetic restraint.
I’d throw him in the pot along with some berries I’d brought at the market, and some fish I’d caught through a minigame fun enough to make me take a note that said “why is the fishing better than Dredge, a game about fishing?!?” My troupe would feast, sleep, and then I’d find The Tank’s corpse back in my inventory again. Now, here’s something you never want to say about someone you’ve eaten: this was not the last I saw of The Tank. You’ll have to manually drag them over, giving you just enough time to consciously make the decision to either bury or eat them. Ghoulishly, the ‘loot all’ option doesn’t add their cadavers to your inventory with the rest. Instead, you’ll find their tastefully dressed corpses in the loot menu afterwards. Slain friendlies don’t disappear after battle. With this in mind, I’d invested one of my early ‘Knowledge Points’ into a tech that let me repurpose my dearly departed as delicious drumsticks. “Waste not, want not”, said the Earl of Human Sandwich, the inventor of cannibalism (I’m told). You’ll also need to keep your troupe paid and fed, so when evening fell to find nought but a handful of foraged mushrooms and a single mouldy apple I’d pried from the fingertips of a disemboweled bandit, it was time to get creative. Questing endlessly in this grimy medieval world won’t cut it. ‘The Tank’, I’ll admit, is a monumentally uninspired name for the mace-wielding brick privy of a man I’d bestowed the dubious honour of soaking up hits in place of my squishier mercs, but when sandbox tactical RPG Wartales let me assemble a party of 12 mad lasses and tapped chaps, the stash of good nicknames was always going to be the first casualty. The trade off here is it can lack a bit of momentum, but if you stay curious, you’ll end up well rewarded by its layered and considered world and systems. This grungy medieval low fantasy tactical RPG isn’t just a sandbox, but a quick-sandbox, capable of sucking you right in with emergent stories and moments equally thrilling and silly.
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