Wasteland 2 Director's Cut Digital Classic Edition

The driving force behind the Wasteland 2 kickstarter was the desire to get back to CRPG roots. In many ways the game is successful at this with the tons of skills to feed and the top-down mildly-hardcore (if slightly simplistic) XCOM-esque combat system holds up fairly well. Problem is, it seems that in InExile's rush to recreate ye olde RPGs of yore they forgot that sometimes things change for a reason. I disagree with Bethesda's current approach which involves throwing all the skills out of the window and treating everyone to a disposable perk chart, but Wasteland 2 is the other extreme. The vast number of skills required to unlock boxes, safes, pass speech checks (3 different flavours), disable alarms, diffuse bombs, hack computers, bash stuff (yes even bashing stuff has a skill), mod weapons, and the (whimsy alert) toaster repair.... don't serve to add depth of gameplay, at best they function to gate basic aspects of the game behind eggtimers. At worst they just gate. Too bad, no box for you (but don't worry the box was probably full of useless crap anyway). This issue is exacerbated by the fact that none of them are tied to the core stats. You don't have to put science skills on an intelligent character, because the game doesn't care. The net result is it feels like you need to "powergame" and skill-pony this game rather than roleplay, which is disappointing. The biggest issue for me however was that the quests are badly designed and badly written. Frankly I felt insulted by the amount of backtracking I was forced to do over large portions of featureless terrain. Quests are poorly signposted, conversations are lifeless and uninspired, and for the kind of open world it is mission resolution was surprisingly linear, often with somewhat arbitrary criteria needed to resolve them in a satisfying way. Trying to get creative with how you solve problems doesn't seem to work, even if they hint at them, it felt like they didn't finish coding alternative routes.

Overall I enjoyed the game. It has many flaws though and is an inferior game to the Fallout series. I didn't play Wasteland 1. The good: - Most of the quests are fun to do and flow along nicely. It didn't feel like you were quest hunting and instead just playing the game and having the quest wrap themselves up along the way. - Fun combat (most of the time) that rewards the patient and puts a lot of focus on placement and movement. Reminds me a bit of Fallout Tactics. - Many different interesting NPC factions. The radio chatter you pick up is awesome. - Real choices were given with lasting effect. The wasteland is a dark sad place. The bad: - Too much grey and brown. There just isn't enough life in the world and makes it boring to look at. - Portraits and the models of NPCs would never match up and frequently show the wrong gender. - No directions! A NPC will often say "Meet me at *place*" and expect you to know where that is. How would I know that as a completely new person to the city? It leads to a lot of backtracking and camera spinning to just find the locations. - The camera is both buggy and horrible to manage. The angle barely allows you to see anything in front of you and it got stuck frequently not letting me move it. - Creating a good team is a trial and error process. You might be screwed if you choose the wrong skills. (Tips. Leadership is not worth it. Mechanical repair is barely used). - A lot of unexplained random events. Perhaps it was for the Wasteland veterans? The ugly: - Bugs that broke dialogue and quest lines. These same bugs also made it so that the choices I made during the game were not actually saved and in the ending it showed me doing something completely different. - Horrible scripted encounters that involves zero tactics and is just a meat grind. They are few but they are horrible. - A lot of quest were very skill dependent. If you didn't have the right one a lot of the options were locked out.

I was really looking forward to this game and frankly was blown away by the financial support given (I was one of many). Unfortunately for the funding they had this game is simply sub par. Still ok but just that. OK. Perhaps a better word would be mediocre. For the price I would be looking to others such as Shadowrun. By time I had reached the third "scene" of the game it was actually becoming a chore to play. It was effectively, in one word, grinding. Most quests were the same thing over and over and frankly after like the hundredth time I was on a "search for some obscure item" I was sick of the game. The ending(s) were anticlimactic and honestly I'd rather have just turned the game into a scavenger style open world rpg than actually have it end. It was that bad in my opinion. Then there were the constant bugs the worst of which being the fact that almost every enemy in the game can hit you through walls but the line of sight is not bidirectional. They could punch, slice and shoot my characters frequently and sometimes I could not even run up to or get in LOS to fight back resulting in a restart. When you find yourself on the frequent save paradigm to prevent story line halts you know you have a game that has not received appropriate testing. The graphics were just ok until you looked at them closely finding them to actually, suck(women look like men, max headroom had more vertices) . The mechanics were glitchy(camera would fly off into nowhere, LOS broken constantly). The attribute definitions and use poor and unbalanced(luck and strength is insanely powerful). Weapon algorithms completely inaccurate and unbalanced(shotguns and submachine guns are useless just punch everything to death and carry an assault rifle). Honestly if you want this game my suggestion is this. Be glad it was funded and wait 20 years because then it will be 15 bucks because it will likely not drop in price much. This is a cash cow for the developers and I think they coded it drunk.

Old fan of Fallout 1 & 2 and that ilk, played RPGs since they came out. I wanted to like this but all the issues mentioned by other reviewers. After something like fifteen hours, I'm done. Can't figure out what I'm supposed to be doing, everything is so convoluted and non-intuitive, and now the timer ran out for the first of my characters due to "acute infection." And I'm still not at all clear on how I could've accomplished more any faster. I'm supposed to be having some relaxing fun. Instead I'm just pissed off. Uninstall button, here I come.

Riddled with bugs, even after all this time. The core gameplay is very annoying, too. Fiddly little puzzles that have tenuous logic, and quest decisions that punish you for not knowing something that you haven't been told.