Wartales: Life is like a hurricane, here in Gosenberg

I picked up Wartales on Steam a week or so ago and have thoroughly enjoyed it. At it’s heart it’s a turn-based isometric-grid team-battle, but considerably different from XCOM which didn’t invent the concept but did it really well and now these games are all called XCOMs.

You play a band of mercenaries. Mercenaries who can become bounty hunters or bandits or cannibals or political movers and shakers or merchant princes or friends or enemies or maybe all of these all at the same time. You start off with 4 or 5 dudes of different skill types and then you can add people you meet, people you capture or animals you buy/capture to your group. Once you understand that – that you can just keep adding dudes, unlike XCOM – and start rolling bandit bands with your twenty-strong merc gang… it becomes real fun. I currently have the 5 dudes I started with, 5 ponies to cart all our gear around, 7 or 8 more fighters that I hired/rescued, 5 wolves and 4 bears. Those little bands of robbers and deserters don’t stand a chance. But there’s a price.

In fact, it’s the Human Resources/man management part that is the most fun for me. You have to keep your band paid (humans) and fed (humans and animals), the armour maintained and the gear up to date. Each character can have a profession too, so you keep them smithing the iron you find, or alchemying the weird substances you insist on walking away from fights with. You need to camp to recover fatigue and as you progress your camp tinkerer can build tents, cooking pots, workbenches… you go from a bunch of hobos squatting around a simple fire to a small traveling village. My current setup (above) has a beehive that produces honey that I then stick in my brewing equipment that makes mead that I give to my cook to make fancy Mead Pike with the fish my fisherman catches. I have stocks to keep prisoners. I have an impaling spike for former prisoners, I have a tent, so my spearwoman and axewoman can continue their sapphic courtship in peace. The mercs can love, like or take a real scunner to each other (archers are particularly prone to shooting their buds in the back and hearing about it for daaaaays afterwards).

The game’s early access had six roughly level-appropriate zones but since its official launch a week or so ago it added two more (?). Each zone has a commercial hub in the form of a market as well as a few settlements with other amenities. You pick up merc contracts at pubs, go out and murder/capture your targets and then return to get paid. You build up cash currency for buying gear and paying your dudes every four rests and/or influence (currency) letting you talk your way into or out of things, and convince people of things.

Around the rest of the zones there are usually farms, ruins and always one spooky tomb. Each zone has its own story, interconnecting with each other to some degree, but distinct enough that they form a story for each zone that you can finish. The first zone is swamped with caravans of refugees from a nearby war zone and every time you run into them you’ll have the option to feed/slaughter them. The quests in the zone will have you either help or hinder the natives attempts to fend of the waves of refugees.

Since launch the game is fully voiced, which is nice. There isn’t a ton of dialogue, but enough that it makes a difference to have them voiced. There are a few quality of life improvements that could be useful to the game: the animated map that you travel across doesn’t scroll, so the main map gets over used to find even close-ish things; there is no “highlight object” button as found in Icewind Dale or the like… you have to waggle your mouse over everything to see if an object is interactive.

There are some things that are a delight when you discover them though. When you take a bandit prisoner, but like the cut of their jib, you can win them over to your cause by healing them, feeding them, giving them their own cup to drink from, not chaining them up and also letting them shave while captives. Might they still run away in the night? Yes. But they might also ask if they can join you and like that you’ve got a new employee… and dare I hope, friend?

It’s been a fun ride so far and I’d recommend it if the logistics side of murder-hobo-ing has ever appealed to you.