We drag our mercenary company through the mud for dozens of hours. We survived the starvation and brutal low-fantasy grit of the base game. Then, we were brave enough to fight off privateers in the Pirates of Belerion expansion and we also poured cheap ale just to make payroll in The Tavern Opens! Finally reaching the capital city of Isandrin feels like we earned a break. Good gear, a warm bed, maybe a simple assassination job.
Wartales – Contract: Fires in the Capital has other plans.
Our squad gets drafted as riot police of all things. Shiro Games pitches political intrigue, but the reality is mostly just frustrating crowd control. We try to keep the local economy alive while our favorite axeman catches fire.
Riot Shields and Red Tape
If we could describe the whole Unrest system as clearly as possible, we’d probably say it’s like babysitting a city-wide anxiety meter that’s deeply irritating. Ignore the angry mobs, and Isandrin locks down. Merchants double their prices while contracts vanish into thin air. We have faced the financial noose in many similar games, but nowhere does it tighten as fast as here. Fixing it means doing literal grunt work like clicking nodes on the map to rip down posters or park your Bard in a tavern to sing songs, hoping that they might hate you less. Such is the life of a medieval janitor. You might not have sighned up for it but you’re doing it nevertheless.
Combat is what somewhat saves the expansion. The base game usually involved building a heavy shield wall and waiting, but that’s out the door now. The devs added escort missions to a turn-based RPG. So nowm we see targets sprint through narrow, burning alleys while enemy reinforcements flood the board. You have to tackle fleeing NPCs before they escape, or Unrest spikes again.
The holy trinity of combat here is fighting the clock, the fire, and your limited action points. It completely breaks the old defensive meta. We loved moving fast and making sloppy mistakes. It rules in the best way possible, and it manages to infuse the game with new life.
Stutters in the Smoke
On PC, the infamous micro-stutter is back
Navigating your inventory already required too many clicks
Using a controller feels like doing needlework in oven mitts.
The Final Ledger
Fires in the Capital can easily be seen as a buggy mess with a short fuse. It also aggressively changes the Wartales formula. The Unrest system feels like busywork where you do boring chores just to afford the simple pleasures of life (like bread). But the tactical combat somewhat saves the whole thing. The new fights force desperate, fast decisions that completely smash the tired old meta. Let’s just hope the devs can make the whole experience a bit more playable as time goes by.
ID Card
- Developer: Shiro Games
- Publisher: Shiro Unlimited
- Engine: Heaps (Proprietary Haxe Framework)
- Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
- Genre: Tactical RPG / Management Sim
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