Wartales offers a choice-heavy campaign with surprisingly good co-op

polygon.com:

Wartales is an open-world role-playing game set in a medieval world, where I control a band of mercenaries as they get on that grindset mindset and make some tough moral choices. That pitch sounds pretty good in and of itself – I’ve rarely found a big fantasy world full of treasure that I haven’t wanted to loot. But the real draw of Wartales is its excellent co-op play, scratching an itch I haven’t had scratched since Divinity: Original Sin 2.

In Wartales, I pick a humble origin for my party. Perhaps we’re a bunch of farmers trying to find a better life, or some deserters fleeing an abusive captain’s lash. Luckily, we’re in a war-torn land full of refugees, property disputes, roving gangs of bandits, and nests packed to the brim with plague-ridden rats. Someone has to take care of all these problems, and I’m happy to do so in exchange for cash, reputation bonuses, and better equipment.

In a single-player game, I control every member of my party. In a co-op game, we split the load. In a game with my husband, we divvy things up half and half; in another game with three other pals, we each take control over one mercenary to start. It’s easy to start a game of WarTales, which is generous about saving progress and making restarts simple.

While things have occasionally bugged or the host dropped, it would only take seconds to get the group back together. It’s not exactly a drop-in and drop-out kind of game; we gotta get the whole crew together before we can start. But that’s OK. It gives Wartales the feel of a regular tabletop campaign without the stress of having to rustle up a DM. We can set out on the roads with some new quests in hand, ready to kick ass and cook boar… and we’re all out of salt.

From there, we chat amongst