Wartales by developer Shiro Games
and publisher Shiro
Unlimited—PC (Steam) review written by Hayden
with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Wartales by Shiro Games and Shiro
Unlimited is an evolution of classic isometric RPGs. Billed by the developer as
“an open world RPG in which you lead a group of mercenaries in their search for
wealth across a massive medieval universe”, this is one early access game where
that is exactly what the player will get. From the zoomed in isometric combat
view where players can micro-manage every character and action to the zoomed
out party-as-tiny-sprites worldview, anyone who has played other isometric RPGs
(Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Icewind Dale, etc.) will quickly
feel right with the way Wartales presents its world.
Taking on the role of a band of
mercenaries, players are challenged to survive, grow their group and explore
the world. From collecting harvestable resources on the world map for sale to
fulfilling combat contracts to theft or raiding merchants, the player needs to
choose (and keep) a steady income stream in order to pay their troops. Failure
to pay or provide other necessities and comforts will create unhappiness in the
band, eventually leading to troops leaving. The game provides a bit of pushback
against large parties by having each member of the troop provide a small
happiness malus, leading to a cap of around 10 troops unless the player goes
hunting for specific traits that sidestep this in their recruiting. Given the
need to micromanage every character’s movement and actions during combat, this
is really quite sufficient, as larger groups take ever longer to get through
each combat round.
Wartales nails quite a few elements of
the classic isometric RPG in its core design, and the core game feels quite
polished for an Early Access title. Movement, iconography and actions on the
world map are clear and intuitive, and there is a sense the world is inhabited
with merchant caravans, bandit groups and others moving about. Towns are
handled as a halfway level between world movement and combat - zoomed in enough
that you can see the buildings and select specific locations, but clear of
sprite movement and character micromanagement.
Selecting particular locations (either in
a town or finding them out in the world) brings the player into a third level
of detail - a fairly static, 3d-like tableau where individual characters or
crates and objects can be interacted with. This is what you’ll see when you
find a marketplace, forge, or enter a mine - mousing around to see what
highlights as interactable and what is just window dressing. Many of these
locations contain mini-games for the player - mining and forging are two that
are introduced early in the game, and give the player a measure of control over
the quality of their output.
Combat in Wartales follows tried-and-true
recipes that have worked before, and they still work here without feeling
dated. Every character is individually controlled by the player, with available
actions and abilities determined by a combination of their equipment and base
class. Turn order is represented by a series of icons always visible in the
bottom left of the combat UI, showing how many characters the player can use
before the next enemy (or NPC Ally in some cases) acts.
A nice extra that Wartales uses here is
that the icon for the enemies shows either the specific portrait of who is
going to act and highlights them on the map for the player to see on selection
ahead of time, or in the case of special “champion” (aka boss) units will show
what ability will be used and gives a tooltip description of the effect. These
allow for attentive players to plan their own actions around predictions of
enemy actions - killing/disabling/debuffing enemies before their turn, using
terrain to block LOS, avoiding upcoming charge-up attacks and similar tactics.
Combat maps in Wartales use a variety of palettes to illustrate biome, and
include both terrain that affects pathing/LOS as well as hazards like
ground-based traps and benefits like old spears that can be scooped up for a
one-off free ranged attack.
If there is an area that Wartales is weak
in right now, it is how it handles pathing on the zoomed out world map. Pathing
on this map is very much clicking a point and the party sprite will try to move
in a straight line towards it - which means that it can get caught on terrain
and the player will then have to point-by-point guide them around to a safe
path. Similarly, there are skills that the party can learn that increase
movement speeds on roads, but no way lock the party to actually use these, so
it's back to point-by-point clicking to keep the group following the curving
roads through the world.
Finally, there isn’t any way (or if there
is, it isn’t clearly presented to the player) to set up waypoints or similar
routing, so you can’t just set up multiple points to approximate the road and
let it go - you have to click each point in turn in front of the party, as they
get close. A bit tiresome if you really want to take advantage of the ability
you spent time to learn, but really quite a minor irritant in terms of the
overall gameplay. I should note that the in-combat pathing doesn’t seem to
suffer from this weakness, with the game able to automatically handle movement
paths that curve around objects and enemies without trouble.
Summary
Overall, Wartales is an enjoyable take
on a medieval setting, presented in a hybrid isometric RPG form. Clean,
easy-to-understand icons and visuals make jumping into the game fairly quick
and intuitive if you have done any gaming previously, and a short-term official
roadmap (released on Reddit) gives clarity on where the developers
are going to be further fleshing out the game. Overall quite polished for just
having entered Early Access, the only fault I can find with this title is a bit
of weakness in pathing on its world map - a very minor complaint for a game at
this stage of the development cycle.
Score: N/A
In a world of games
that get 70-80% review scores due to unfinished or buggy content at release,
Wartales is headed solidly for the 90’s if developer Shiro Games can maintain
the level of quality they have shown so far.
