Wartales Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

For this Wartales Review, A century has passed since the fall of the Edoran Empire at the hands of an unprecedented plague that swept the nation. Now, the land is rife with mercenary work, banditry, and thievery, with honor having become an almost entirely forgotten virtue. Prepare to lead a group of unscrupulous characters in a massive open world where combat, death, and a thirst for riches will dictate your day-to-day life. You are not the hero of this story, destined to usher in a new era of peace. Your goal is solely to survive and thrive in this harsh and hostile world, by any means necessary…

Wartales Review Pros:

• Decent graphics.
• 9.3GB download size.
• Accessibility settings – text size, camera shake, colorblind, magnifier zoom multiplier, adjust outline thickness, change hovered outlines color, and change highlighted outlines to color.
• Controller settings – cursor, hover, and combat sensitivity slider, dad one slider, vibration, and Invert axis for both horizontal and vertical.
• Display tutorials – on/off.
• Combat settings – blood splatter/killing blow on/off, activate border scrolling, and animation speed.
• Display enemy turn order in battle option.
• Set if the plus button is always in the options menu or not.
• Multiplayer options – Co-op game, local multiplayer, and join using an invite system.
• The new game has you choosing your companion’s destiny – your complaints are – Bandits looking to escape the guard, young farmers looking for a better life, deserters fleeing an abusive captain, men escorting merchants who lost their employer, and apprentice friends looking for an adventure. Your choice determines what and who you start with.
• Further companion setup includes your companions being used to (multiple choice and effects stats), and if they had a flaw (again affects stats).
• Two exploration options for a new game – adaptive (the game always offers a challenge and changes the difficulty by your group’s power and size) and region which means every area has a set enemy difficulty level.
• Starting options – set what region to start in, combat difficulty (novice/experienced/expert), survival difficulty (same as before), and save mode (limited/free/iron-man).
• RPG gameplay.
• Hover text pop-ups.
• You can customize and name each starting troop member. You can edit and name your pony including it’s traits.
• Cool art loading screens.
• Open world game world.
• Turn-based combat.
• The combat lets you choose your troop’s starting position then it’s a turn order and you can do what you want within an action point limit.
• The end of combat breakdown shows a summary, loot gained, and lets you repair.
• You are free to travel around and do what you want.
• Save and load when you want.
• A great sense of adventure.
• Does good slow-motion final hit-kill sequences.
• When fighting enemies your troops will become engaged showing a constant loop of fighting animations.
• Location names pop up over them.
• Full 3D world and combat areas with full 360-degree camera control.
• You can steal from people.
• Buy and sell items and ponies with shops and vendors.
• Multiple choice encounters.
• Free cursor view so you can highlight anywhere on the screen.
• The map uncovers as you move around.
• Forge new weapons and armor with resources and materials.
• Assign professions to your troops.
• Fishing is a mini-game.
• A living world with vendors, thieves, and gangs roaming around.
• Earn knowledge points and use them in a skill tree-like system to unlock things like the ability to run or rationing.
• Take on optional side jobs and quests.
• Intertroop relationships can happen from friendship to romance.
• Each troop member can earn exp and level up to unlock new attacks and stay boosts.
• Camp when you want in the game world.
• Full inventory and troop management.
• A mobile workshop can be used at camp to do basic crafting. (well as long as you give the tinkerer profession to a troop member)
• Fatigue can kill and to remedy it you need to rest at camp. You need to assign food and time also advances.
• When resting you can be attacked, you do sometimes get a bit of a heads up that could happen.
• The troop management tasks involve food, fatigue, happiness, and everything in between.
• Camp report after resting.
• Day and night cycle with different weather types.
• Fishing gets you experience and the fish.
• Locations turn into an isometric view and almost like a point-and-click sequence looking for spare loot, chatting with people, or stealing.
• You can use the Woods to hide from enemy sight or get an ambush bonus in combat.
• Different biomes.
• Has a choose-your-own-adventure style approach to all the interactions and choices.
• A very ambitious game.
• The snow looks really good and can cause whiteouts.
• Animals can be captured! Get their health down and then use rope or chains to have them.
• The four-player mode is a fantastic idea and plays OK.

Wartales Review Cons:

• Cannot rebind controls.
• Does a bad job of welcoming new players.
• Long loading times.
• Starting a new game takes a lot of setting up.
• The performance is not great and found it worse when in docked mode.
• Combat is not explained well at all.
• Very daunting at first.
• A lot to take in.
• No way to look at the control layout.
• World traversal is not great with any sort of an incline being Insurmountable, you can’t tell it’s steep until you try going up it.
• Bad-looking textures in places.
• When interacting with resources or anything like that in the game world the game stutters and sometimes just freezes for a few seconds.
• Fishing doesn’t give you any control of the rod, it also uses up hooks quickly.
• The ui is not user-friendly or even very clear.
• Uses a lot of icons and stats that you don’t know what it is or what it does/means.
• It just constantly feels slow and clunky.
• The fatigue seems really bad.
• You cannot zoom the camera in.
• Had the game lock up a fair few times and crash back to the Switch interface.
• It feels like an early-access game.
• The performance and slowdown are a lot more prevalent in multiplayer.

Related Post: RoboDunk Review (Steam)

Official website.

Developer: Shiro Games

Publisher: Shiro Games

Store Links – 

Nintendo