Editor's Note: This is a supplemental Switch review to our overall Wartales Review published for the PC, focusing on how well the Switch port performs. Our original review gave the game a 6.5/10.
Wartales Switch Review: What is Wartales?
A grand adventure awaits mercenaries as they take on Wartales, a game about survival and carving your niche in a medieval world of war and fantasy. Players take on the role of a mercenary group as they take on quests from towns and investigate mysteries in a war-torn world. The game is a turn-based tactical strategy game, with the player exploring a large sprawling map composed of kingdoms, towns, and villages, as well as lost ruins and bandit camps.
In our original Wartales review, we praised the game for its fun gameplay loop and good gameplay systems, a game with good ingredients but the wrong recipe. It has fantastic game systems that sadly just don't stick together well, and end up not hitting the landing. Still, the game has great potential if the developers Shiro Games could only fix the long-term issues that hound the game's late game. Still, it packs dozens of hours of fun tactical combat and character progression, as well as stories for players to discover, unravel, and resolve.
Wartales Switch Port Analysis
We've said that Wartales is a good game with great potential, and we still mean it. In fact, the Wartales port is a welcome addition. The game controls perfectly on a gamepad, and I get to play it the way I would have wanted to play it when we played a part of our review process on the Steam Deck. You finally get to control your party's movement in the overworld with your joystick, for example, instead of using the joystick to move a cursor. The controls are also intuitive and easy to learn, with us not having any problems with how the control layout is made.
However, there are also a lot of porting steps that were missed that should have been a part of every Nintendo Switch port. For example, the game's horrendous text is still too small to read on the Switch's small screen. This also doesn't scale even when you put the Switch on the dock, with the text remaining too small to read – ironically even harder to read on a monitor or TV. This was a problem that we had also when playing the game on the Steam Deck before, but somehow the problem is worse on the Switch.
Lastly, the game also experiences the same problem that most Switch ports experience this year: games that were not specifically developed for the Nintendo Switch usually don't run well on the Switch. The 5-10 second loading screens are still forgivable, as it's already typical for a Switch game to have that long of a loading screen. However, the game's frequent crashes aren't. From the early game, we already experience a crash every hour, teaching us the value of keeping frequent saves. These crashes are extra frustrating when they happen after long battles, as autosaves happen before a battle, and crashing will just make us redo the battle all over again after we reload. The worst issue is how the game's already tedious late game gets exacerbated by these crashes as they become more frequent the bigger your save file becomes, and the deeper you get into the game. In the worst of times, we've experienced crashing almost every ten minutes, prompting us to just play a new game to continue our gameplay for our review.
Verdict: Should You Get Wartales on the Nintendo Switch?
Should you buy Wartales on the Nintendo Switch? It's an emphatic no for us. Even if the game was discounted hard and you find it in the discount bin, you're better off playing a different version of the game instead. It's on Steam, after all, and you should play that version instead.
For what it's worth, the frustrations we had with the Nintendo Switch port made us appreciate the game on PC a bit more, and had us replaying the game again and finding new joys with the game's campaigns. We still recommend you give Wartales an honest try because there are dozens of hours of fun you could get from it, just steer clear of its Switch port. Buy it on Steam instead.
Score: 3/10
(Original Score on PC: 6.5/10)
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