Battle Brothers is an excellent game that I keep meaning to put more time into, and in hindsight I’d rather have spent 40 hours replaying that instead of ploughing more and more effort into Wartales to try and see if it was actually going anywhere - but we’ll get to that in due course. The problem Wartales has, though, is that this is also exactly what Battle Brothers did 6 years ago, almost to the letter, in almost exactly the same kind of setting. Now, this all sounds perfectly fine on the face of it, and is pretty much what I expect when I play a mercenary management game. Your mercenaries need to be paid regularly if they’re not paid, or you don’t feed them, they will get upset and leave. Your attack abilities are determined by the weapon you have equipped – so a one-handed mace can be used to bop a single target over the head, but a two-handed mace swings in a wide arc in front of you that can hit multiple people.
#Wartales game full#
Armour acts as an ablative extra layer of hitpoints that must be depleted in full before you can start chopping body parts off damaged armour needs to be repaired after every battle using tools you carry around in your party inventory. You equip them, you feed them, you level them up, you decide where to go next and what you’ll do when you get there. It’s a mercenary management game set in a low fantasy 2 world where you control a company of 5-20 mercenaries travelling around the land taking contracts and slaying bandits.
Unfortunately Wartales has a very immediate problem to overcome. Jagged Alliance 2, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries 1, Battle Brothers, BattleTech – no matter what the setting is, if you show me a mercenary management game the chances are that it’ll be a hit with me. I think they have a lot of really interesting gameplay decisions baked into the core concept in ways that other tactical strategy games struggle to justify, or which they omit entirely.
Yes, I suppose it’s fitting that it is, once again, the prospect of reviewing a mercenary management game that rouses me from my months-long torpor.
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