Wartales Early Access Previews

Shiro Games’ mercenary RPG Wartales launched into early access a few days back, featuring a decent chunk of content already. And if you’d like to know what to expect from this game, you can now check out a number of early access previews below.

PC Gamer:

Following the death of my furry friends, I mixed things up a bit by capturing a bunch of boars. They don’t seem to be much more effective than wolves on their own, but now one of my humans has learned how to command beasts, designating targets for them. Things are starting to come together. Many bandits have been gored by boars. I don’t know if there’s a limit to how many animals you can keep—I’ve managed to capture five so far—but I ain’t stopping until I reach it.

The thing is, they aren’t even that great in a fight. Their tusks are nasty, but they’ve got nothing on a massive warhammer, and they mostly just rush at enemies and chip away at their health pool. But the sight of a bunch of dumb boars merrily attacking bandits, knights and wolves never fails to entertain me. Now I just need to learn how to keep them alive for longer—it turns out that not wearing any armour is a real issue.

Rock Paper Shotgun:

It’s for this reason I decided to start the game again after a good chunk. To try more thievery, to play a bit less cautiously. Promote a boar or two. And it’s here that I discovered just how excited I was to start again, to really clinch an optimal first few hours. Wartales nails the restart, and not all games can claim that. I could point to the depth of systems or an approach to design that trusts the player enough to let them discover things themselves. These are both true to some extent. But I think the most useful thing to impart about Wartales is that it just has, well, a certain special something. Maybe there’s some cool sounding French for that that I’m forgetting. The fact that it’s far from finished has me very interested indeed. Moar acorns, please.

GameReactor:

Talking about combat, Wartales uses a turn-based system, where players will have to move members of their party and strategically assault opponents based on the strengths and weaknesses of what each individual member brings to the table. As your party is pretty much randomly created at the beginning of the game, this will require a degree of ingenuity as you figure out how to treat combat, as one character could be great as a bruiser type, soaking up hits and dealing out attacks in a wide radius, whereas another could be an archer, who packs a punch at distance, but falls very quickly when under attack. The combat is pretty challenging, especially when the odds are against you, but the real difficulty comes in recovering after a battle, as gathering the resources and gear (or more likely failing to do so) to heal your party and repair armour can be, and often is, a game-ender.

Cultured Vultures:

The most intriguing facets of WarTales are definitely its character progression system and the combat. Instead of going for the completely open character development approach found in Skyrim or even Battle Brothers, where players have an unprecedented amount of control and flexibility in developing their characters, all recruitable companions are assigned to a distinct class, which can be further specialized into one of three subclasses. This may initially seem like more of a limiting approach to character progression and design, but there’s currently just enough depth and variety to class roles and abilities that there’s room for experimentation and effective theorycrafting.