PC Games

Published on July 24th, 2024 | by Nathan Misa

Wartales: Pirates of Belerion PC review – Tropical Troublemakers

You’ve scoured the kingdoms of contracts. You’ve raided all the tombs already. Or maybe you’re on the run from the law. Why not take to the seas for richer, more exciting shores?

That is the premise of Wartales’ first add-on, Pirates of Belerion, a substantial downloadable content (DLC) expansion that introduces a new region to explore, fresh gameplay mechanics, new enemies and equipment, and lots of intriguing lore and mystery.

With more content than the second-add on The Tavern Opens and priced at around $19 USD / $29 AUD, Pirates of Belerion is a relatively pricey bit of DLC. But in my 25+ hour experience exploring the entirety of the DLC region and its content, I’ve found it to be well worth the price.

The main Wartales package (read my review) is already filled with quality content and offers one of the most unique tactical role-playing game experiences out right now, with its addictive mix of simulation and troop management elements. Pirates of Belerion acts as a traditional DLC add-on, expanding upon the strong foundation with a new unique region to explore, questlines to complete, and unique gameplay mechanics that tie into its premise as a sea-faring adventure.

Like the Tavern Opens DLC (read my review), you can access Pirates of Belerion in Tiltren, via a dock on the south shore, where an enterprising shipwright offers to repair a mysterious ship left abandoned at port. After investing a small fee and some required materials, you’re quickly let loose to sail into the archipelago region of Belerion, using your ship as the means to explore new oceans and islands.

Sailing the open (world) waters isn’t as simple as clicking on a point in the map, however. Exploring requires you to battle wind direction, oars and the weather to get to your destination safely, while assigning certain members of your mercenary band to take important roles on-board (gunner, lookout, fisherman, etc). Finding blueprints can help upgrade the quality of your hull, sails, ballista and figurehead, which increases your ship’s overall sturdiness and speed. You’ll need both to successfully survive and weave past patrolling guards and aggressive pirates, who hunt with surprising tenacity.

Of course, you won’t always be able to avoid every greedy pirate and privateer in the open ocean, and that’s when the game shifts to the DLC’s newly added ship-to-ship combat encounters. In these special fights, your mercenaries can leverage ropes to board the enemy ship, use ballistas to shoot from afar, and even knock unlucky enemies into the water if your units’ positioning is right. These sea battles aren’t exactly transformative, but it’s a neatly executed idea that keeps in-line with the region’s pirate theme, and keeps the general combat loop from growing stale. A minor gripe of mine is that the ship battle map’s layout is reused in all instances, which gets stale.

In certain special ship battles, another new combat type called Captains’ Duel comes into play. Here, you can have your assigned captain face off against the enemy captain in an optional stand-off if their armor is depleted. The action zooms in for a paper-rock-scissors-esque minigame, where you can attack, parry or taunt to gain the upper-hand, and kill the enemy captain without an extended fight. I found duels to be fun for the first few encounters, but it’s definitely a mechanic that needed more time in the oven to integrate deeper into the DLC.

The other major new content addition of the Pirates of Belerion is the Pugilist unit class, which was added in a free patch alongside the DLC, but gets particular spotlight in Belerion. These deadly melee fighters get up-close-and-personal with foes, using katars and cestus’ (spiked fists) to deal debilitating single-target damage over time. Their three subclasses are very unique, each with an attack and defensive stance that applies different combat effects, and while they are a bit of a glass cannon, having a Pugilist in the team definitely makes a lot of fights easier to handle. My two pugilists, Kjod Ironfist and Aileach Plank (I know), easily became my biggest damage dealers, able to weave in and out of fights before the enemy knew what hit them.

Now, to say the Balerion Archipelago is vast would be an understatement. There are several islands of varying sizes to explore, each with their own unique settlements, resources, quests and secrets to uncover, with the central island of Per-Bast, ruled by the local Dihyas, acting as a hub of sorts for trading and new contracts. Like other regions, there is a Tomb of the Ancients to delve into, local recipes to cook, hide-outs to clear (pirates instead of bandits), rat infestations to purge and arena challenges to dominate. Even the Trackers’ Camp are present, asking for your help with a unique hunt (apparently the Ghost Pack can travel across water). The scale of side content available will easily keep casual players and hardcore fans busy, and that’s not even taking into account the new Lord of the Seas mechanic, which sees a leaderboard of pirates aiming to take you down as you earn reputation in the region and threaten their treasured mantle.

There’s a good amount of new enemies and challenges in Belerion, too. Aside from humanoid pirates and bandits, the Belerion region is home to the plague-ridden, deadly Saurians (think semi-sentient lizards) and Sirens (freaky blue and green-skinned and gilled people) that will test even the strongest mercenary bands. Playing on the adaptive difficulty setting, a group of eight Sirens almost overwhelmed my unit if it wasn’t for my two new hard-hitting Pugilists. Amusingly, I managed to take a Siren survivor as prisoner, eventually gaining her trust and befriending her with my two pack horses (Wartales is quietly a very comedic grimdark game). Given that the island nature of the region also makes hauling it back to a settlement a lot harder, general resource management is definitely more important in this DLC than the base game regions.

Another surprising but welcome part of the new DLC is the continued world-building and its quality. Wartales’ story isn’t exactly center-stage, but I found Belerion’s history and various discoverable lore (through NPC dialogue, books and quests) to be well written and appropriately crafted, evoking a mysterious, wild set of isles besieged by both man-made threats (the rise of pirates) and the supernatural (Mihr’s Curse). There are neat stories about how the people of Ihraa came to govern the area after the original Belerian leaders (descendents of Edoran) were forced to submit, and the lingering tension between the two cultures in their differing approaches to handling the pirate menace. Much of this flavour text ties into the region’s main quests, which see you do favours for the Dihya and the local people, and deal with nosy (or unlucky) Alazarian, Edoranian and Legion outsiders.

Admittedly, there is a lot more back-tracking in this DLC due to the nature of its islands being so spread out, and many contracts will lead to treasure maps that reveal marked locations of valuable loot and important story items that you will need to go out of your way to retrieve. Most of my 25+ hour playthrough has been me trying to survive stranded without fresh supplies on the latest island, and while having to sail back and forth multiple times did get frustrating, the tactical challenge presented, and overall breadth of content to engage with in Pirates of Belerion proved to be continuously engaging.

The Final Verdict

Pirates of Belerion is a fun and worthwhile DLC add-on that expands upon the strong foundation of the Wartales base game experience with a whole new unique region to explore, filled with interesting new factions, enemy types, quests, side content and mysterious threats, all wrapped up in a well-realized pirate and sea-faring adventure theme.

Highly recommended for Wartales players seeking more to conquer, and for new players interested in jumping in – especially now, following the release of the free and very substantial Community Update 3 content update, and the imminent release of the next DLC, The Pits.

Game Details

Primary Format – Games – PC, Xbox Series X | S, Nintendo Switch
Game Genre – Tactical role-playing game (RPG)
Rating – MA15+
Game Developer – Shiro Games
Game Publisher – Shiro Unlimited

About the Author

Nathan Misa A senior writer for ImpulseGamer.com and former writer for MMGN and Ninemsn, Nathan has been reviewing video games and interviewing talented developers since 2012. As a nostalgia tragic eternally tied to the glorious 1990s, he's always playing retro gaming classics whenever he's not entrenched in the latest RPG, or talking your ear off about why The First Law book series is better than Game of Thrones - to anyone who dares listen.

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