My enthusiasm for gaming has been wanning for the past month or so. Cyberpunk’s expansion has been fantastic, but even at its height, I “only” played for about two hours at a time, maximum. For some reason, I would complete a mission, sit there for a second, and then turn it off and go watch Hearthstone clips on Youtube and/or scroll vids. Nothing was really grabbing me, you feel?

Then I downloaded Wartales off of Game Pass and… goddamn. Four hours a night has never evaporated so fast.

Wartales is medieval, low-fantasy mercenary RPG in the same vein as Battle Brothers. You control a small squad of mercs and endeavor to complete jobs to earn money to feed, pay, and outfit your crew. Combat is turn-based, but everything else takes place in real-time, with merchant caravans, bandits, and packs of hostile wildlife roaming the overland map (or hiding in the woods). A stamina meter acts as a clock to your escapades – requiring your team to camp and eat – but there is no other world-ending deadline like in Battle Brothers. As long as you can keep up with your food and salary, you can take as long as you want to do anything.

I started to type up explanations of the game’s various features, but let me just hit the highlights:

• Granular difficulty – You can toggle the combat and “upkeep” difficulties independently. Additionally, you choose between Free-Roam (scaling enemies) or Region-Locked. The latter mode allows you to over-level an area if you’re having trouble, and makes more sense overall (no max-level peasants afoot).
• Multiple Progression Systems – Gain Knowledge Points to unlock craftable items, learn recipes, gain permanent camp upgrades, and complete repeatable Path “achievements” to unlock more stuff.
• Optimization Galore – Choose talent specializations based on “class,” equip Legendary/unique items with powerful abilities, apply 1-2 of dozens of weapon enhancements, build your perfect merc band.
• Armored HP – Armor gives you an extra HP bar. Simple, grokkable, and you can cheese it in a few ways.
• Play As Bandits – Ambush Merchant caravans and loot all their wares. Run from the fuzz. Or play everything straight… only stealing items otherwise locked behind special currency.

Downsides? There are quite a few:

• Death Spirals – Characters get wounds when reduced to 50% HP, and require expensive medicine to cure. Armor damage also needs purchasable items to repair. Early game is rough going.
• Noob Traps Galore – Choices are everywhere, but some of them are objectively bad (or bugged!). Descriptions alone can be misleading, and there’s no good Wiki info.
• Alpha Strike Focus – inevitable with turn-based combat, but the game seems (im)balanced around killing everyone within 1-2 rounds (if not the first few character turns).
• SAVED GAME BUG – Unpatched as of this post, there’s a bug that can remove a full day’s progress.

The last item in particular is unfortunate, and happened to me. Basically, you save the game as normal, everything seems fine, but next time you open the game it’s like whatever saves you made the previous day do not exist. There is an apparent workaround of making a copy of your saved game folder, but I haven’t confirmed whether it makes a difference (bug hasn’t struck again).

Looking at my /played number though… 60+ hours. Wow. Does this mean Wartales is better than any of the other games that deserved to be playing? No. But it is the game I apparently needed right now.