Did they pull it off?

I don't quite know what I was expecting when I first backed the Kickstarter. Wasteland was a beloved classic, my first proper PC game, and it showed me just what games were really capable of. Problems with more than one solution, missions that could be failed without forcing a game over, the player's responsibility to build a balanced team, the combination of descriptive paragraphs with the limited graphics to paint a more vivid picture; the experience blew my fragile little mind at the time. A contemporary title can do many or even all of those things, but whether they can match that feeling - the impression that I'm playing something truly groundbreaking - is a much more loaded question.

Many positive reviews of Wasteland 2 frontload the criticism, ending with some variant of "but I liked the game anyway because etc." It's easy to see why: bugs still being ironed out, a rather clunky interface, widespread locks and traps with long skill use animations, overuse of a limited pool of music, some weak story elements, large chunks of wasted space... you don't have to look too hard to see some serious flaws. The enjoyable aspects are likely to be subjective: how well the combat clicks for the player, whether they like the setting and overall fiction, the extent to which building a proper team is enjoyable, and so on. Indeed, in their bid to create a classic-sized PC RPG, it seems inXile could have made the game play better without sacrificing its hardcore appeal.

For instance, the locks and traps thing: consider the Baldur's Gate games, which also made use of frequent locks and traps on obstacles. Where BG has the advantage is that skill usage is practically instantaneous; the character moves to the trapped item and, if successful, the trap field simply disappears. WL2 added some needless visual flair to the process - your ranger rubbing their hands before working on the object, or kicking it repeatedly as a meter fills, or whatever - which adds a few seconds to each skillcheck. In a game with hundreds of them, those seconds start to add up. Little changes to things like that could have smoothed out a lot of reviewer complaints, with few if any adjustments to the core mechanics. No doubt patches will address this and other issues over time, but the impression has set in nonetheless.

I'll be blunt: I put a fair chunk of change into the Kickstarter, and I can feel the little nagging doubts in the back of my head. Would I be fair if I saw something that bugged me, or read criticism? Would I go easy on the game, knowing that some of my own money was somewhere inside? Would my opinion be more biased than others? It's a reasonable question, and I never did come up with a good answer. Even putting that aside, I'm not gonna deny I was a little nervous when this came out. It's been a long time since the Infinity engine was king of the hill. Did I still have the stomach for a big PC game? What if my appetites had simply moved on? Doubts upon doubts upon doubts.

Did they pull it off?

Like putting up with the wizard fight at the Friendly Arm Inn while you're still level 1, the appeal persists: a game that won't pull its punches, that will try its best to bring me down. WL2 definitely has the spark of those classic RPGs, that hard-to-define something that makes them hard to put down once I start. Fights were tactical, kinetic affairs: cover got destroyed, enemies repositioned, backup weapons were handy, well-timed explosives turned the tide, and even a difficult encounter could be mitigated with the right preparation. Environments presented their own challenges, and with several ways through a given obstacle I was more often than not encouraged to work around a failed skillcheck rather than savescum. Uncooperative plot elements or even bugged out triggers could be answered by force-firing, and there was no problem that the right size bomb could not solve.

Arizona did drag and suffer from design problems - the Prison being chief among them - but it held its own curious charms, and it presents a neat contrast with California. At the start, you control a bunch of customizable scrubs whose mission rapidly spirals out of control. Echo Team starts in known territory and gradually pushes the boundaries, earning their stripes in the process. Water is precious, communities are scarce, and civilization is on the knife's edge atop a pile of late 80s-early 90s rubble. By the time I did get to California, Echo felt every bit the veteran ranger squad, doing what rangers do best: venture into wild territory and bring order to chaos. There, the script is flipped: water is everywhere, settlements are common, and it's on us to put our best foot forward. Every arrival the base, every interaction with the public, every time we stepped in to right some wrong felt like it mattered somehow, like it could have gone differently - and like everything we'd done before had shaped us for that encounter.

That's a key spice to those old titles: variety. What happens if I do this instead of that? What does this guy say or do if I mention this? What if I didn't have that skill, item, or party member? What are the consequences if we just kill everyone? Is there a way to get what I want peacefully, and if so how bad do I want it? I was constantly asking myself those questions during Wasteland 2, and it's for those reasons that I know I'll be back. There's more to see, even if I think I've seen it all; there's more to try, even if I've already sunk some 80 hours into the campaign. Old PC RPGs sometimes get a shot of life from modding communities, but even before I had heard thing one about mods, there were some games where I knew - just knew - that I'd be back, just to see what happened this time.

And god help me if I didn't get drawn in at times, just a little. I searched frantically during a hostage situation, wondering if there even was a third option between 'take down the enemy' and 'save the hostage.' I debated whether to intervene in a loophole-ridden religious dispute, and if so how. I paid attention to the radio broadcasts in LA, making mental notes of who's who in the neighborhood. The villain was something of a one-note antagonist - there were moments of good writing, but his was a stock grand scheme - but there was a respectable sense that something was tracking Echo and the Rangers. There's a strange appeal to being stuck in uncharted territory, surrounded by potential enemies, with friends well out of reach and one hell of a longshot goal ahead of us. It's predictable in the end, but not without its highs; the trick of bringing back everyone you've made friends with for the final battle is an old one, but no less effective.

Sometimes it's not the game I'm after, but the adventure, the challenge. Sometimes it's the sense that I am probably going to lose if I play this game like I play every other game. So it was with games like Arcanum: flawed to hell and back, difficult to recommend, but special in a way that most games simply aren't for me. So it is with Wasteland 2.

Did they pull it off?

In my humble, flawed, biased opinion: yeah, I think they pulled it off.

Wasteland 2 is finally here, courtesy of Kickstater, and for all the good it does to the genre, it's still a mixed bag.

//Contains spoilers//

It opens up really nice, with a live-action intro, thrusting you into the unforgiving, post-apocaliptic setting as you bury a fellow ranger. A scene later and you notice a unique shotgun straped to the hip of a nearby guard, all thanks to your perception skill, and with a little bit of convincing (another skill) you can make it yours. Across the bridge you can charm yourself a butt-kicking goat companion, which raises one of your ability scores by 1. And all that's in the very first, small area.

It's a great start, I found myself thinking, and if this reflects the rest of the game, I'm sold. Love me some world that actually reacts to my character build.

Unfortunately it isn't so. Perception soon becomes mainly a mine/trap finding tool, and truth be told, at some point it's simply better to detonate the explosives and accept the blast directly, then to try disarming any of them. There goes role-playing. Try watching the same disarming animation over and over and over again, and you will know what I mean. You are better off using a healing skill every once in a while. You can still find some buried junk using it, but it gets somewhat underwhelming after the initial shotgun surprize.

Taking about junk, You will easily find yourself at weight capacity carrying around all the junk you just found, hoping that someone somewhere may want it. And they do, but the game gives no hints as to just who may be interested in baby wipes. You may just as well gather all you can before you leave Arizona, and re-visit every single npc in the world looking for dialogue cues. And did I mention there are regular junk tems, and shiny junk items? Yeah. And when you use the Sell All Junk button at stores, the UI is hell-bent on selling the shiny ones too, even after you specifically flag them as not junk.

Item management in Wasteland 2 is a game on its own. You can't see your character's weight capacity on the merchant screen, you can't compare weapons with the ones you have in second hand slot, and you can't compare trinkets. All the clothing items look the same in the inventory screen, so unless you want to spend additional time trying them on and seeing what they actually look like, you will just sell them, like me. Armor does nothing to change the way you look, and the merchants screen gets really laggy when there are a lot of items.

The game has its moments, but they seem very few and far between. There is one giant robot fight, well three if you count fighting the same robot model again, and then its flame-throwing cousin. Yep, no huge mutant creatures, and no big ♥♥♥ bosses for you. The combat works at the bare minimum, and may get stale pretty quick. There is little excitement to be had on that front, and 95% percent of enemies can be taken out by a single shot from an RPG-7 if you get the enemies to clump together. Imagine my dissapointment when I finally got to fight Dugan, one of the few uniques bosses, and he went down in a single rocket blast. True, you can tune up difficulty, but as far as I know it only decreases your damage and incresases enemy's. And the last thing I wanted was to have weapons which don't do the damage they have in their description. How about more enemies? Or more hp for them at the very least. Ehh.

Random encounters have all the same flavour. Fight enemies, fight enemies. I got some barbecuing cannibals once, which seemed like a unique encounter, but the excitement was gone as soon as they attacked. In the end I just raised my outdoorsman skill, and tried to skip them alltogether. Had enough of the simplistic combat in other areas.

I found two different merchants braving the wastes, but they didn't even seem to re-stock. Curiously enough, one of them actually attacked me when I refused to buy anything, and it was a nice little way to spice things up. But still – Fallout 2 had it in spades and done better.

Then there are...bugs. Visual bugs, dialogue bugs, and of course quest-breaking bugs. Take your pick. There are whole forum threads on how to complete the Hollywood questline. There are people who spent hours on end, saving and reloading, trying to finish up quests in the correct order just to get the quest log cleaned up. Hats off to them. Personally, I could not get to finish the quest where Heidi asks my rangers to help her take over the Bastion of Faith. Hell, I could not even talk to her anymore. Her dialogue screen went blank. No “Hello”, no nothing. At this point I just said ♥♥♥♥ it and rushed to the ending. I don't know perhaps I talked to someone I should not have.

If that's all that could be achieved with nearly 3 million dollars, I shiver to think what the game would feel like if the devs got only what they asked for - a mere 900k. The games gets patches regularly, so there's hope. But for any potential buyer, I would suggest to wait a few months (and I thought I did that...) and try it then. Hopefully your experience will be better than mine.

Do I regret buying it? No. Am I planning on re-playing it? No.

The game's a good effort, and has some heart, but the brain is just not there yet. And just because it's a long-awaited sequel, it should not get a free pass.

Not recommended at this patch stage.

6/10

This game is not Fallout by any means, but true sequel to the original Wasteland. Familiar places and characters, tons of references to the original game and even plot continues W1 storyline almost directly. Graphics is functional and personally I like the style and design. Combat is pretty fun and satisfying, death animations are gorgeous, but most of the time it is very straightforward and tactical depth is lacking. I think it is not a huge problem because it is not a pack of "clear the map" missions unlike Fallout Tactics (don't get any ideas, I love it) but true big CRPG with choices and consequences and you don't need to fight anything on your way. And there is so much things to do here! So many non-obvious ways to deal with problems, that you hardly see 65% of the game content in one playthrough. Beating this game once took me about 80 hours. Pretty lengthy for the nowadays non-sandbox RPG's, I should say.

Absolutely recommend this. Truly immersive, packed with amazing dark humour, tons of skills and stats and exceptional replayability potential. Post-apocalyptic RPG's fan heaven.

Wasteland 2 hearkens back to the day when a 7% chance to fail meant failing 3 out of 4 times, and a game would beat your ♥♥♥ into the ground for the first hour or two, and then dramatically ease up after you get to sink a few skill points into your characters.

I'm not sure whether it's more appropriate to say that this game is Wasteland 2 or Fallout 3D, given it owes so much to the original Fallout, which in turn owes a lot to the original Wasteland. In any case, if you've played any of the original isometric Fallout games, then you will be right at home playing Wasteland 2 as the locations, world map, sound track, random encounters, combat, sense of humour, and missions all hold strong comparisons. Also, interestingly, there are positive aspects of the combat that are borrowed from XCOM: Enemy Unknown as well.

But that's not to say that this is just knock off - Wasteland 2 is deeply linked to the original Wasteland in its lore and the developers have learnt from the long gap between releases and taken the best of the old and the new and combined them to create a well-designed and deeply entertaining product.

Speaking of well-designed, as much as I generally dislike what Early Access has done to Steam, this is one of the games that has clearly benefitted from the system as you can spot numerous little features that have been implimented to improve the game's basic playability and fun-factor. Things like a button to sell all your junk at once, comparisons between the weapon you want to buy and the weapon you have, a solid log book that displays your missions, a button that reveals all objects that you can interact with, and the choice to automatically distribute your loot intelligently to the people who would use it best. All these things and more save the player time, eliminate clunky inventory management or frustrating moments when you don't know where to go or what to click - issues that were all too common in the heyday of isometric games.

Wasteland 2 is a loving heir to the original, and exists as a well-designed gem in a genre that typically suffers from over-complexity, suffering little of the clunkiness that one might expect from what one could call a 'throwback'. Its world is real and believable, the combat is fun (even if, at times, the hit chance feels skewed) and its characters are numerous, colourful and well-acted.

I highly recommend this to anyone who loved the original Wasteland, any of the Fallout games, or indeed anyone who likes a well-optimised RPG.

Your perception has caused you to notice a faint glint amongst the background.

You resolve it to be a small ornate container, shining with the brightness of its creators.

Inspection may yield its contents of the finest quality; with a present, if arbitrary, chance to critically fail, transporting you the middle an inky void, atop a bridge whose traversal you may be compelled to defend from the faint silhouette at its entry...but its probably just your imagination.

Fallout, my old friend, it is good to see you again.

Wasteland 2 is an amazing game and instant classic. It's very much like Fallout 1 and 2 (which were based off the first wasteland game), with lots of differences.

First of all, you start by creating a party of up to 4 people (and can have a party up to 7 from npcs recruited in game), there a tons of different skill to choose from for each character, ranging from mechanical repair, to computer science to assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, outdoorsman, smart ♥♥♥/hard ♥♥♥/kiss ♥♥♥ (3 dialogue skills that vary on attitude), etc.
There is also a decent attribute system, much like the SPECIAL from fallout, except this one is called CLASSIC (coordination, luck, Awareness, Strength, Speed, Intelligence and Charisma), and the attributes have a huge impact on characters and what they can do.

The battle system is much like DnD or any D20 system, grid turn based combat, using initiative to choose when people act. If you've played X Com then it's much like that, except more in depth (then the newest x com) in terms of mechanics and what you can do. As opposed to the two move system from x com or D20, this one is based off action points (like the original fallout games), you have so many action points (depending on your speed, strength, awareness and many more) that you can do in a turn. Walking 1 square requires 1 action point, shooting different weapons require more as well as other various actions.

Travelling the world map, again is very much like the original fallout games. You have the map, and your icon traverses across it as you may run into random encounters, there are oasises everywhere that give you water (as you gotta refill water to keep traversing the map), and you can run across various settlements this way. There are also radiation clouds that you must watch out for, you can go through them but you need radiation gear otherwise your party will get killed while walking through it.

On top of the game mechanics and battle systems, the quests themselves are very intriguing, lots of side content and missions to do, and A LOT of choices to do in those missions. You can do missions so many different ways, from sneaking into a fort and killing some dudes to negotiating with them and allying them with you, to poisoning their food and killing them off.
The main big missions usually have various different outcomes in the missions, each giving you a drastically different faction running an area, or having you liked or hated by another faction, and even unlocking different potential companions depending on how you finished the mission.

The game itself sort of gears you to be a "good guy", in that you are a team of rangers that are supposed to be a police force in a post apocalyptic wasteland - but you don't have to be. Though the game would be MUCH harder being a bad guy, there's nothing stopping you and you can kill anyone you feel like for any reason. Though your NPC characters (that arent created by the PC) usually dont like when you go around double dealing guys, killing innocents and just failing to protect people (though there are other NPCs that don't mind you doing so, just dont expect the philantropist doctor girl to stay with your team when you betray a settlement or start murdering people indiscriminately).

Hell, you can even roleplay the morally gray ranger that is willing to sacrifice people and lives for the greater good if you so desired.

So far, i'm about over 100 hours in game (right now steam says im at 88, but after an update when i was about 20 some hours in, it reset my hours played for some reason), and I'm only about half way done the main game (though ive been doing any side stuff that i come across).

So far the game is amazing to me and im having a blast with it. Been waiting for a game like this for a long time, and definitely having a lot of fun with it and to me, this game will be a classic that i go back and play multiple times over the years, much like other classic RPGS such as Fallout 1 and 2, Knights of the old republic, Bauldur's gate, Neverwinter nights and Morrowind and so on.

I would recommend this game to any RPG fan, specifically hard core RPG fans, and this game is definitely worth the 40 dollars for the base game. Such an awesome game!

I was looking forward to the game and have waited with playing it until full release. Sadly to me it is a big disappointment and I really tried to like it.
I've caught myself trying to find reasons to keep playing the game and just couldn't find any better argument than "you've paid money for it, now you have to play it".
Everything seems uninteresting, uninspired or plain weird. The characters are boring, the dialogue is lame, the quests feel like a chore. I didn't get any sense of adventure or exploration out of the game - whenever I found something on the map it didn't feel like I've discovered something special, it doesn't feel like it belongs in the game world, it feels like a set piece that's there because later in the game you'll have to do boring quests in it. This makes exploration even more tedious since I can't shake the feeling that I might break the game or quests if I start going where the story didn't tell me to go yet.

Do not compare this game with orig wastelands or fallout.
Just enjoy well-made tactical rpg in post-nuclkear setting.

If you seek a short “one sentence” resume for this game: It is just damn amazing, incredible, fantastic, I am completely shocked by this game in the best possible way. Must have for everyone. Score 10 of 10. So get it right now, install and play.
This game is a fine, impeccable reincarnation of Fallout 2 (God save eternal games). It is not the same series, but it brings the same fillings, same atmosphere, same unbelievable gameplay. If you like fallout, you should definitely start playing it right now. There is no other game, which would awake memories back in such a bright way.
The plot – score 10, dialogs – 10, mechanics – 10, graphics (it does not matter at all) -10. I thought this game would be cool, but didn’t imagine the scale.
It is something outstanding! I’ve got pretty sick of all this overwhelming stuff about zombies. This game like a breath of truly fresh air!
Many thanks for developers, thank you, thank you, thank you! I am going to have an eye on every following product. Maybe there will be wasteland 3, who knows. I hope very much!

I backed this one on Kickstarter, mainly because there was a goal set to fund a
Linux version and there was only a few games for Linux then. The idea sounded
good – reviving an old classic, something like Fallout, multiple skills and
ways to solve quests, etc.

After over two years of waiting it came. Playing it was tricky at first, due to
a 'fog of war bug' on my integrated Intel GPU. It seems the problem was known
from early beta but all the developers could say was 'Intel GPUs are not
supported'. Oh… and I thought the game was supposed to be about story,
playability and reviving classic. Nothing that should require a dedicated
gaming hardware. Current laptop should be enough. And is enough when the
workaround for the bug is known. But creators would not acknowledge that – buy
a gaming computer or don't bother us.

OK, so with the workaround for the GPU bug the game was fun to play. There were
some game bugs, sometime ruining some quests, but nothing making the game
unplayable. I have played 60 hours… and got bored. 'Dozens of skills' really
means 'many different ways to open containers' all the same containers all the
time. It is a game of opening chests and safes. And digging holes.

Yes, there is also the combat and combat skills. You need good hand gun or
sniper skills not to kill your own people by mistake… But there are also high
explosives, which you need not skill to use at all. Always 100% hit chance,
always 100% deterministic effects. How can it be? If not the price and
availability explosives would be the most effecting and safest method of fight.

Then come the patches. Some bugs were fixed, often for parts I have already
played and do not wish to come back. Some features were implemented. And you
know what? Linux is not an equal platform now. Steam achievements were
introduced two patches ago and they are 'Windows only'. Steam achievements!
I could understand, that some advanced graphics or sound effects could be
tricky to do in Linux, or that handling some exotic controller could be
impossible. But the achievements?!

It is not that Wasteland 2 is a bad game or that my contribution was waste of
money, but I am a bit disappointed and the game is not worth the 'user reviews'
rating it has now.

BTW I got bored by Fallout 2 too, so if you really love this type of games you could probably ignore my opinion.

In short, Wasteland 2 tells a story about what you cannot do - open doors, chests or safes, hit enemies or talk cunningly. Mostly at the beginning of the game to be fair, but even later on there are several objects to interact with that often cause you to fail critically when using a maxed out skill on them. You then either have to accept this and carry on or load a previous save game and try again.

Given the fact that the loot often is not worth the trouble, option 1 should be the way to go (or ignore the possible loot in the fist place), but that's not what I expect of a game. Reloading (and again and again sometimes) is a slow and tedious process. May be I'm not getting the point and Wasteland 2 then is not the game for me, but on the other hand this is a personal review and all about how I like it.

There's more boring stuff in it, like quests which have you to visit the same places a few times over without the possibility to quick travel. Given the size and layout of some areas and the way they are connected to other areas sometimes causes you to sit there for minutes and tell your team to go back and forth. That's a way of extending the play time. One I don't like at all. Especially if the quest giver sends you more often than needed to the same place when all that has to be done could have easily been accomplished on the first visit.

Personally I didn't care much for the story. Cannot really identify the cause though. I found myself mostly rushing through the dialog options, only scanning for relevant key words to get through quickly - which is a shame because I think the writing itself seems to be fine. But I couldn't connect the the world like I did when playing Fallout 1 and 2 for example. In the end I tried to solve all open quests and finish the story so I could mark this game as completed.

Technically I had severe performance issues in some (mostly indoor) areas on my Linux machine and encountered several bugs. The Linux version of Borderlands 2 for example runs much better here.

I'm not saying Wasteland 2 is a bad game. Most people seem to like it. But you have to tolerate a couple of things which just annoy me to the point the fun gets significantly spoiled. All in all I'm too disappointed to recommend this game.

I've decided not to write a giant review that will just turn into a book (I'm not kidding) and just say if you like post apocalypse anything this game is probably for you. Just don't expect it to be super tactical, this game has pretty straight forward keep shootin til they're dead kind of combat.

Aside from a linear story and more skills than i think there should be, such as kiss ♥♥♥ etc.. This game is very fun and with no other decent RPG's having come out for a while (in my opinion) it was very refreshing to see this.

There are some annoying bugs that put me off a little bit. Such as in a place called The Canyon of Titan I had a few issues with combat suddenly becoming very laggy and then when i finally killed all enemies combat kept going with no way to stop it. That is the most game breaking bug i have come across and it isn't that big of a deal since you can just reload a save from five minutes back. As I said earlier some skills are just tedious. The eplosives skill can be very time consuming end game as it seems every chest, safe, door, and random garbage has a bomb attached to it. Barter is completely useless.

Play This Game 8/10

Good game, but there is still many bugs (according my playthrough with patch 3), so my mark is 8/10.
BEWARE SPOILERS ! >.<

pros:
- your desicions usually will affect world around u in one or another way
- well balanced attributes
- plenty of easter eggs
- different ways of solving problems
- well thought out game world
- hardcore top difficulty (but honestly not in the way i usually like it)
- well sized game world
- awesome ability to create your own team of 4
- customizable guns (throu attachable mods)
- unique ability to say different senseless s**t to almost anyone in the game
- followers able to say some funny things to other npc
- usually no way to make pure good/evil decisions
- high enough grafics level
and more nice features

cons
- unbalanced weapons/weapons skills (with top grade sniper rifle i was able to deal max of 210 hp dmg, with assault rifle 360.. (280 to armored) with energy 267, with pistols 140 ect..)
- enemy is cheating (critical shots with energy weapons <.< )
- not many explorable places with no plot ( such as abandoned railway )
- bugs (had to use some guides to finish some quests properly mostly in hollywood/bastion )
- followers have nothing to say to us, no way to speak with them
- charisma/leadership does not affect any dialogs (except will possible follower follow u or not)
- can't use computer science/outdoorsman to recive any information from relevant sources
- low AI of all enemies
- stupid ai of follower animals ( my opossum commitmed suicide by rushing at synth )
following animals such as general Vargas.... he has same ai
- no use for antibiotics (never used in this playthrough, mb i missed some diseases)
- no way to kill anyone without making hostile everyone from relevant faction (cya stels, supressors have no use)
- can't start combat with shooting multiple enemies (sometimes i could kill 4+ enemies at the start of battle)
- can't start combat with some of party members in ambush mod
- can't bury dead party members, or take their bodies to citadel T^T
- can't gain control over nuke in sylo 7 >:(
- no cute girls T^T, only tons of "Big black dildo"
- no diversity portraits
- No minimap (big maps are maze)
- not every enter is pointed on local map, and even if pointed u have no idea what this place is
- important npc are not pointed on local map
- important places are not pointed on local map
- no way to shoot arms/legs to disarm/slow enemy
- no visualization for armor
mb i missed some cons

but anyway i enjoyed almost every minute of gameplay ^____^

An excellent return to the formula of the original isometric CRPGs of the past, Wasteland 2 is a worthy successor to its fargone original. Mostly.

There are a few moments of derp-dome come again with characters that simply don't fit in the game, but overall it has a good story and excellent gameplay. Bugs do occur, but the developers have released fixes promptly enough to satisfy my needs.

Overall, I enjoyed the playthrough and the challenge of its "Supereme Jerk" difficulty. While there are issues with the balance of the game (namely, assault rifle weapons are god-like, while pistols are mostly useless) and the game does use a simplistic toughening/weakening of the enemies and player respectively for its 'difficulty' scaling, it was certainly a well executed, if not perfect, recall to the early years of RPGs.

Overall good game. Just a few issues that make it feel like it could be so much more.

I funded this game at Kickstarter but the result, as much as I try to like it, does not impress me despite the positives:



o World: Large world, much to explore, however the random encounters suck (basically the same fighters on the same map everytime, unless you change zone)

- No real freedom. No sandbox. No open world. The game is basically linear because you are always locked out of new places unless you progress in the story, a story which is very linear unless you take the "bad path" leading to an early-on bad ending. On the normal storyline you just do what the Ranger HQ tells you to do, at least when it comes to the main quest line. You got more freedom to do whatever you want aside from it.

+ Lots of different, quite large (larger than in Fo1) cities/places. Often they have some politics with each other but usually most quests are done right at the location you are, and the rest is just "get/do and return" type of quests.

o NPCs: a good selection of followers but practically no interaction possible with them or between them. They are just a fighting addition to your team. Disappointing...

- BUGS: The game is definitely playable, but after Patch 4 there are still bugs, bugs, bugs, everywhere! Especially in the California half of the game, but not only. This game was released too early and clearly had obvious bugs on release that everybody could notice in a second. Nobody can tell me the developers were unaware of this. Releasing a game as "finished" when it in reality is riddled with bugs, that's a BIG no-no for me! This game would have been way better with another, lets say, year of development. I would have even paid twice as much for that if it was really polished by then in all aspects.

o Story: While the story is overall interesting, the dialogs are riddled with repetition, are hardly ever really interesting, and the writing is by far not as good as in Fallout. Vargas is annoying as hell.

- Gameplay I: Very weak attributes and skills system. No one ever thought this design through properly. Some skills were dropped in the last second (sneaking). Skills are not tied to attributes at all (brute force skill 10 but strength 1 ? charisma and intelligence dont affect speech or dialogue options and dont affect the 3 speech skills (smartass,kissass,kickass) etc. ...) . Some skills should be combined. Over all they tried to reinvent the wheel with their system and the wheel turned out to bet cubic. Also why the heck do I need a ton of skill points to hit with some weapon but then a grenade or rocket launcher has 100% accuracy on no matter what character? The heck? And why the hell are there still two skills written as "???" and without description in the character window after 4 patches? Still a beta huh?

- Exploding boxes, safes, and even poop everywhere, literally. On top of that: defusing and Safecracking etc is annoying and extremely time-consuming even if skilled at maximum. So is healing. It is not fun and I feel like wasting my time waiting for the bar to fill up, for roughly 30% of my playtime.

o Gameplay II: The fights are not very tactical. Formations are not supported. You often have to manually position each character 1 by 1 without being able to utilise the actual grid used in fights so they will move when you start the fight. Move unpredictably. Taking cover is practically useless, you end up better getting a good weapon and just shooting the enemy with your APs then running around looking for cover. Fights are overall fun though. Just don't expect a Jagged Alliance here.

+ Gameplay III: Lots of weapons in this game and weaponsmothing is quite cool.

o Dialogs: while you get different options in dialogs, most are just informational, repeating the same old batches of text. When it comes down to actual choice, I often felt a bit limited despite having skilled all 3 speech skills to the necessary levels to gain all options. The skills are pretty useless because you only get to use each of them maybe 5 times in the entire game, often they do not even lead to better results but to worse results which really sucks. You invest all this valuable points for really low feedback.

+ Lots of quests and lots of things to do in this world. Often you have choices to solve quests differently, but ...

- ...the quests do however still converge to the same ending in a lot of cases no matter how you approach it. Often places cannot be saved no matter what you do (quite linear) which bothers me.
- Graphics: Too many bright yellow/green/brown colours, bad shading (where is the specular??), terrible AA, weird random blobs of colours. It looks ugly to me. The low-poly modeling is generally fine with me, but unfortunately they made mistakes like letting the character portraits zoom in close to the faces making the low-polyness clearly visible in all its awfulness. They should have not allowed us to zoom in that much ever, not even in the game, it ruins the experience a bit when you know how ugly things look close-up. And this is not the game where you ever are supposed to be close-up anyway.

- Character portraits: A lot of characters (entirely different ones) share the exact same portraits, often the portraits do not even match the 3D model equivalent, the character portraits repeat even on important characters creating great confusion for anyone who would want to remember them by "looks". The descriptions in text often conflict, the 3d representation which further conflicts the 2D portrait. So you got 3 impressions which all heavily conflict with each other. Very, very poor choice of design. Could they really not come up with something better? I mean, seriously? After so many years of development?

- Many quests have to be solved in a very unintuitive and sometimes unsatisfactory way, a lot of places on the maps are hidden in a strange way (highpool, anyone?) which prevents you from being able to solve the quest unless you find this place. I often encountered situations where I had to look something up on the internet because I was lost on how to do it, like, seriously I tried everything for hours. In one case this was due to a bug that has since been solved. Regarding the non-bug-related cases I have to say that I did not experience such a thing in Planescape or Fallout. I blame this on bad design.




All in all I feel like this game didn't get as much love from the developers as it should have, and was released prematurely with unfinished game design aspects all over.

There needs to be more games like this. If you love the original Fallout, buying this is a no-brainer!

The only reason I am glad that I never played the original Wasteland was that I would have had to spent 25 years knowing that I waiting for this. Instead, I even missed the Kickstarter shomehow and this was a glorious surprise that I only had to anticipate for a few months. Bravo. Long live turn-based tactics and post-apocalyptica.

Fun game, lots of gameplay, challenging at times...

I like the character creation and the party system. Weapons are bountiful and diverse, but once you get your party the way you want it you'll find that you get too many useless weapons. The story is really good and engaging. I've seen some criticism of the in game camera, and while it's not without its issues, but it doesn't ruin the game.

Overall, this is a good game and fun to play. It's easy to get the hang of and hard to stop playing.

60 hours later: 10/10, would play again if I had the time.

I haven't played Fallout 1/2 or even Wasteland in the past, and games like Baldur's Gate weren't my kind of beer when I was younger. But I backed Wasteland 2 within the first days of inExlie's campagin because it was promissing and I am really satisfied!

The gameplay is "o.k.". It is a bit slow and you have to run around a lot (get item or kill NPB, turn the quest in, rinse & repeat). The story is superb and rather dark. The choices in the game are not really important for the whole story and the end but it's a nice touch and it doesn't feel tacked on. Each learnable skill has its use and the extra lore for backers was nice to read, too. Oh did I mention that you have to read A LOT? Only radio calls and main characters are voice-acted. There's a lot of talking and lore to read (items) and it is very intriguing and thrilling 'til the end.

If you can spare the time (I played on weekends and up to 10 hours at once) and like these kind of games: buy it!