Wartales - Contract: The Fief (DLC)

Wartales is an open-world tactical RPG that puts you in charge of a small mercenary company scraping for survival in a post-plague medieval setting. There is no prophesied hero here, no world-ending MacGuffin demanding your attention by hour two. Instead, you hire fighters, assign them classes from a solid roster (Warrior, Ranger, Spearman, Brute, Archer, and others), level them through a skill-tree system with genuine branching decisions, and then send them into turn-based grid combat that rewards positioning and unit synergy over button-mashing. If you are the type who reads every item tooltip and loses sleep over party composition, this game was made for you. The worldbuilding leans on atmosphere rather than lore-dumps. The regions feel distinct, the factions have coherent political logic, and the tomb-exploration side content delivers the closest thing to dungeon crawling in an otherwise open-field experience. Companion relationships are handled through a morale and loyalty system rather than voiced romance arcs, which feels honest to the setting. You will not find Baldur's Gate 3 levels of character writing here, but your mercenaries do develop personalities through the profession system, where each unit takes on a secondary role like cook, blacksmith, or scholar. It is light roleplay scaffolding, but it works. The economic loop is where Wartales earns its reputation and also where it tests your patience. Feeding your company, paying wages, managing equipment weight, and balancing contracts creates a genuine survival tension that most RPGs hand-wave away. Early game is punishing in the best way: you will absolutely make bad hires, blow your coin on the wrong gear, and get humiliated by a bandit camp that outlevels you by four tiers. The game does not apologize for this. Later, once the loop clicks, watching your band grow from desperate wanderers into a well-oiled mercenary operation is quietly satisfying in a way that feels earned. On the downside, the open-world structure can expose some padding. Certain regions overstay their welcome, bounty contracts start to blur together after dozens of hours, and the lack of a strong central narrative means momentum depends almost entirely on self-motivation. If you need a story pulling you forward by the collar, Wartales will occasionally feel like it is just asking you to do odd jobs indefinitely. The writing in quests is competent but rarely memorable. Combat, while mechanically sound, can become repetitive against the mid-game enemy variety unless you are constantly experimenting with new builds and party compositions, which the game does reward if you lean into it. For players who love the companionship of Darkest Hamlet-style management layered over tactical XCOM-adjacent combat, with a medieval setting that respects your intelligence, Wartales hits a very specific sweet spot. It released to Very Positive Steam reception for good reason. It is not a game that holds your hand, it is not a game that wastes your time on cutscenes, and it does not pretend mercenary life is glamorous. That honesty is its best quality.

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