Wasteland 2 Director's Cut Digital Deluxe Edition

It's not intended to be Fallout 3 or anything of the like. It is intended to be the sequel to Wasteland. If you loved Wasteland, you will love Wasteland 2. Period. Don't pay attention to people comparing it to Fallout or X-Com or anything else. Those games are unrelated. Wasteland 2 is a fantastic sequel to the original which is still very much playable today if you can get around the graphics. Hopefully InXile will make an update to where we can beat the game and then lose all our gear and restart the game on a higher difficulty level just like the original allowed for, but as of this moment that is sadly not possible.

I expect better, given how much this game hyped itself up on its pedigree. As a post apocalyptic rpg adventure the game works, which is about as much as can be said for it. As an RPG, it is somewhat lacking. Character build options are quite versatile, but every character is still going to boil down to some combination of melee fighter/ranged fighter/talker/medic/thief/engineer. There are woefully few opportunities for role play within the story. There are few ways to express your character, even in dialog. The story itself is solid if rather uninteresting. Characters are awfully flat if they're given any personality at all. Scenario design is creative but every situation plays out about as you'd expect. Quest design is horribly inane. The skill system is inane pass/fail savescumming of the highest caliber. It's ridiculous how many loot crates are randomly trapped. For how much of a hassle it can be just to open a box, there's never any remarkable loot inside. Mostly junk items for sale. Combat encounters are simple and get repetitive after a while. This game is ugly. This game would be ugly in 2005. The graphics are absolutely atrocious. The gameplay updates the Director's Cut adds are negligible and should have been in the base game anyway. The graphical updates make the game look better, but it still looks like turd. And for that, it's inexcusable how poorly the game runs on such fugly visuals. Animations are pretty slick though. Sound fx are delightfully pleasant. Everything from the creaking of leather travel packs to the snap of a firearm reloading to the UI sfx are pretty nuanced. The UI is functional and aesthetically appropriate, especially for immersion. If you play it, Wasteland 2 is a discount game. I got it for free as part of GoG's Deadfire deal. I feel like I paid too much for it.

WL2 is great fun but the Mac version is virtually unplayable on a wide number of machines by the second half of the game--Retina MBPs and iMacs in particular. The game freezes up on loads. I've given it 2 stars and look to boost that when the fix is in. inXile is aware of the problem but can't seem to reproduce it in spite of many players on the forums finding it. The apparent solution is to drop graphics to unbearably low levels. The backgrounds become sheets of black with strange textures. I feel like I'm beta-testing a child's first Unity project.

The spiritual successor of Fallout 1 & 2 is also a post-apocalyptic RPG where instead of starting with one character, you get to build a squad of 4 desert rangers. Pretty much all you do in this game is combat and unfortunately combat is not that great. There are no formations for your squad and there is no stealth, so engaging in combat can be a lot of micro-management. Characters have to be positioned individually while the enemy might come close enough and start combat themselves and ruin your plans. Just because you positioned somebody before the combat, it doesn't mean that they'll keep their position when the turn-based combat starts and each character has to belong to it's own square. Repeat this enough times and you'll get enough of it pretty soon. The range of the weapons is pretty limited and you can't target anything outside of it. Makes sense that you have penalties when firing rifles (very) close range but 0% is ridiculous. I disagree that this is really an open world game because there is not much else to be done besides the "main quest". Your party can have a lot of skills for situations other than combat and you do get to use those skills. Those skills give you a success percentage for a particular action, so even if you have a 10% chance of something, you can abuse the game with scum saving until you succeed. A way to make the game more challenging (and fun?) is to never re-roll your skills check. The main difference between the difficulty levels is in how much damage you take and deal. A higher difficulty, while extra challenging, might not be really worth the pain of a poor combat system. Rating: Three goats. And they are all the best! http://pixelloot.com

I expected not much looking at all these reviews, but what i got caught my whole attention, successfully taking me away from real life for several days. I like the story, the atmosphere, music, a bit repertitive tho, is doing its job well. Visuals are very nice for a unity game, but most importantly it's obvious from the first look how much effort devs put into locations and the world itself. UI is unusual at first, but its customizeable, there are no checkpoints and plenty of options to save however you want and you can complete any level in several ways. There are only two things i think i dont like: bumb followers (both in team and completely uncontrollable npcs following you in some quests) and very weak stealth. First 10 hours into the game i had to place my followers into the farthest corner of the map so they wont rush into battle, now with some skillpoints spend in crowd control this is a rare iccurence. Other that that, im not dissapointed and would reccomend this game to anyone who wants to explore post-apocalyptic world of wasteland2.