Let me start off by saying: I’m a sucker for fantasy games. Lore is the quickest way to my heart, the wackier the better… but there’s a point where games stop being “wacky,” and just become straight up confusing. The Waylanders, a project that indie developer Gato Salvaje Studio has been working on for the last five years, tries very hard to be charming. Very hard. Too hard, actually. Every line of dialogue feels like an attempt to land a joke (with limited success), and when there’s more dialogue than actual gameplay you know something is wrong. 

Story

The Waylanders is a fantasy RPG heavily inspired by Celtic mythology, but it borrows from other legends around the world as well. For example: almost as soon as the game begins, you’re introduced to a character who looks a lot like the Greek hero Hercules… because he straight up is. A lot is thrown at you right away, it’s better not to ask questions. Your character is conscripted by the King of Celts for a diplomatic mission to meet the Tuatha, who in this universe are the literal gods of the Celtic people. Unsurprisingly, things go very wrong very quickly when you arrive.  

Somehow, your party ends up unleashing the wolf god Lug, a being of pure malice and corruption. The Celtic King is killed in the battle, leaving his young and unqualified son in charge of the remaining troops. As your group attempts to flee the island, a trio of malicious spirits appears and vaporizes one of your companions. They almost get you too, but your character is somehow able to survive the magical blast. That plot armor is powerful stuff!

When you wake up, your few remaining companions are all too eager to tell you just how badly the world has gone to hell. The true prince has been usurped, the corruption that you saw on the island of the Tuatha has spread across the mortal world, and approximately half the population has been twisted into bloodthirsty monsters. And now that you’re awake, it’s your job to fix things.    

Gameplay

The Waylanders runs like a pretty standard real-time strategy game with the option to pause and give directions to each member of your party. You don’t need to use the pause mechanic, as you can switch between characters in your party in real-time, but it’s definitely helpful if you need the healer in your party to keep someone from dying in a pinch. You can guide characters to use multiple abilities one right after the other, that’s where the strategy comes in, or you can brute force your way through a fight by manually directing each character to perform actions one at a time. An AI will control the characters you aren’t using, and it has three different settings ranging from passive to aggressive. that you can change at any time.

Each character has their own class, and each class comes with their own set of abilities. You also get the option to assign attribute points to each character’s stats when you level up. Giving a Warrior companion a lot of points in the strength and constitution categories will get you a tank character who can take a hit and pack a mean punch. There are two different categories of ability you can learn as well: active and passive. Active abilities unlock special attacks, like the bramble bomb my rogue character was able to throw to lock enemies in place.

I don’t have a lot of experience with real-time strategy games, but despite that, I’m confident when I say that The Waylanders needs more work. New enemies will spawn directly on top of the ones you’ve just defeated. Your companions will freeze, which in a game like this can spell disaster for your team very quickly. The UI is so tightly packed it’s overwhelming when you first begin, and the game barely offers any kind of tutorial. A random NPC on the king’s ship teaches you how to equip a weapon, target an enemy, and that’s pretty much it. There’s a good collection of classes and the abilities you can learn have smooth animations, but they’re hard to enjoy when you’re scrambling to unfreeze your party’s only healer.

The game seems to want you to make use of the “Formations” mechanic it’s developed but doesn’t do a good job of explaining how it works. Ideally, Formations give you the opportunity to group multiple characters together to unlock special attacks. And when you can get it to work, charging through a horde of enemies is very satisfying. But you can’t unlock the ability to create custom Formations until you get your character to level three, which I still hadn’t managed even after three hours of playing. The one character who does have a built-in Formation when the game starts dies in the prologue!

Audio and Visuals

The development team seems to have put the most resources into the environments and the music. There’s an original soundtrack and a star-studded cast of voice actors. The game is also available in multiple languages. But even these aspects of the game, my favorite aspects, have issues. There’s a lack of consistency in the quality of the voice acting. Some lines seem to cut off mid-sentence, and you can hear ambient noise that hasn’t properly been filtered out when characters are speaking.

The character animations are a little too over the top, and the hair physics on one of the main female characters is wonky enough to be distracting. It almost seems like a game that would have been made a few console generations ago. The armor and weapons are well-designed though, and the environments are gorgeous. There’s one location-based around a molten forge, and I spent a good amount of time just admiring the way the light reflected off the gilded walls.   

Replayability

If you’re a big fan of real-time strategy games, it might be worth playing The Waylanders a few times so you can try out different character combinations. There are four different character races to choose from, each with their own backstory, and all the classic RPG combat styles at your disposal: Warrior, Guardian, Rogue, Ranger, etc. You can even choose to assign classes to the companions that join your party, so if you’re going to attempt multiple playthroughs you can switch up what companions get what abilities. The game also gives your character the power to affect the outcome of the story, so if you’re the kind of gamer that enjoys unlocking every potential ending then there’s something here for you.

What It Could Have Done Better

The game needs more polish in nearly every area. It desperately needs a more fleshed-out tutorial section, one that will take the time to walk you through the Formations mechanic beyond a single use. Typos need to be found and fixed, voice recordings need to be cleaned up, and there’s a big problem with the merchants not functioning properly unless you’re using a keyboard and mouse. I was playing this game with a controller, and I could not find a way to buy anything other than the first item in the merchant’s inventory. I had to switch over to my mouse just so I could scroll through their wares. I know that the developers are already working on the first update, so I hope that when I re-visit this game in the future it will feel more like a finished product.   

Verdict

I desperately want to like this game! It’s got charm, it’s got an evil wolf god, and I can play as a rogue werewolf who uses they/them pronouns! There’s the potential for a fun, magical story here that I genuinely think I would enjoy. And I don’t think the game is “bad,” per se. I’ve played bad games, and I can’t wait to put them down and never touch them again. But I want to come back to The Waylanders six months from now and find that it’s a much better game than when I first played it. It’s not good yet, but it has the potential to be. As things stand today, it’s trying too hard to be funny and not delivering on the core aspects of what makes a game a game. I sincerely hope the developers are able to tighten things up; I would hate for this to be the final sentence on a project they’ve clearly put a lot of heart and soul into.