Wasteland 2 Director's Cut Digital Classic Edition

As other reviewers have pointed out - this game is good, but... just that. There's literally nothing I would call "great" in this game. It feels like a cheap clone of Fallout 2, only without all the awesomeness it had and with tons of small frustrations all around the game. Setting is good, and after first 25 hours of gameplay I would say that stories are... bumpy. With more downs than ups, sadly. So far the main plot seems to be the least interesting part of a game, and side-quests... good 80% of them are just grinds, nothing more. Kill the guys there, bring the part here, fix that, fix this... I'm freshly out of Fallout: New Vegas and that game had some grindy quests too, but Wasteland 2 feels like grinds on top of the grinds in comparasion. Then there is combat... if someone thinks that turn-based combat is a guarantee to interesting tactical encounters than he needs to think again and play this game. It's an excellent study on how you can make a game with long, dull combat. Oponents are divided into few types that repeat over and over again, activate in always the same way, follow always the same tactics and basically never, ever force you to adapt. It's just the same repetitive grind - cover, shoot, cover, shoot - over and over again with literally nothing to do in between. You had a thought of making non-combat character? Horrible idea - he'll be useless for a good majority of a game. Eg. you specialize in disarming alarms and you have someone that's useless 99% of time and when he can be used - in 3/4 cases it doesn't make a difference (eg. alarms placed in a middle of the enemy group that you have to kill anyway). And something that's annoying me most of all: ammunition, more precious than anything in the game for no good reason (even though NPCs got infinite supply of ammo). This game is riddle with some obscure design choices I can't even start describing due to char limit, but it does not make game fun or difficult or engaging, but rather.... grindy.

A lot of people nostalgicaly like to think they still enjoy sprawling, epic, turn-based, slow-paced, text-heavy RPGs of old. Then they buy one and found out they actually don't anymore. Suddenly it's too slow, too grindy, somehow everything about the game is annoying and frustrating and difficult. That's fine, I guess, we are, after all, living in the era of Mass Effects and Witchers. That's the modern standard of a good RPG (I enjoy both those series tremendously, btw). But if you still enjoy the epic oldschool turn-based RPGs, the likes of Fallout and Arcanum - that is, if you GENUINELY enjoy them and not just THINK you'd enjoy them because you played them when you were 18 and they were the golden standard and the time - you can't possibly do better than Wasteland 2. This game is a true oldschool gamer's dream come true, without reservations. It's huge, it's got great story, great settings, great characters and everything the old heavyweights ever had, and more. People sometimes compare it to Divinity: Original Sin. There are similarities, sure, but my personal view is Divinity has only two things going for it - the combat and the visuals. The combat in D:OS is truly glorious and entertaining till the end and the game looks beautiful, much better than W2. Everything else though - the writing, the characters, the story, the quests, the settings - feels shallow and drab, like a barely competent work of fanfiction. inXile on the other hand boasts some of the finest, most experienced and most accomplished writers and designers in the industry - Avellone, Saunders, Ziets, Long, McComb, Fargo and others. And it shows. The combat and visuals are not on par with D:OS but they're in no way bad either. And both get progressively better and better. As always, in a game as huge as this one, there are some bugs and glitches. But nothing dramatic, nothing gamestopping. This game is not for everybody but if you have a speck of grognard inside you, you'll be overjoyed.

Wasteland 2 was crowd-funded and sold with a huge hype from inXile as an old-school roleplaying-game on our modern landscape with an emphasis on tactical combat. No casual gamer or wide audience compromises, smart writing, advanced mechanics, a lot of world reactivity, with a full team of great professionals, and so on. Unfortunately, it's none of these things. The technical aspect of it is half OK. Do-the-job graphics, decent but not great audio, but frequent and very long load time to the point were you decide to do this instead of that to avoid said load times. inXile made gamers pay for the “privilege” of beta-testing and it shows with a lot of bugs, technical issues, mangled quests, even after the first patch. But the meat of it, the characters, the locations, the world, the dialogs, and yes even the tactical combat itself, are full of fundamental flaws that no patch will ever solve. The world feel fabricated, artificial and does not react to your actions apart from a few badly scripted points; combat are dull repetitive with bad AI, the enemies are the same bland raiders over and over; the mechanical aspect of rpg building characters feels designed by a Monopoly rule writer, the quests aren't very interesting; grinding is everywhere and all the time; and the game is heavily leveled to the point of being worse than Oblivion, a late game civilian bad health grandma has more hit points than the veteran Desert Rangers officers of the Citadel. To the point where Fallout 1&2, spinoffs of the original Wasteland, games that are over 16 years old, had more depth and better rpg rules and options, and still are more interesting than this one. Unfortunately, instead of showing what can be done to the true rpg crowd out there, Wasteland 2 feels like a cheap knock off Fallout 2, while still keeping his bugs and endless patches. A shame. It's not a horrendous game (although at 40€ it's way way too expensive) per se, but a huge fumble on what it should have been.

I supported this project via Kickstarter and i played the beta. Im really trying to like this game, there are many things done right here, but sadly the turn based combat is not very satisfying. I think that W2 is a good game overall, the setting, story, dialogues and replayability are here, graphics are ok, there are a lot of little funny details, but it suffers from an oversimplified implementation of the turn based combat system, also characters should have had special abilities/traits and statistics that could lead to make them unique (yeah im looking to fallout and ja2 about that). It seems not many devs played ja2 1.13 which is by far the best turn based combat system around with possibly the best character creation and interaction, ok ill stick to ja2 1.13.. but devs really wake up. Combat sadly is boring and not much tactic is involved, starting a fight dont allow to setup an opening ambush turn, also the characters usually moves away from the position you wanted them when the fight starts cause a bad transition between the real time and the turn based system. The random encounters maps are terrible, they dont even offers covers usually. Its not possible to enter buildings and interact during a fight, nor its possible to use the roofs very well as the tiles doesnt respect exactly the turn based grid so can happen you cant place a solider on the edge, also melee combat actually is op. There is no sneak, no hearing, no prone, no aiming levels, no suppression, no % of cover, no day/night cycle, no weather change, and the list is long. I would prefer to have more options also to tune the difficulty level to my taste, the game seems not to offer better AI or more enemies raising it, the higher difficulty is achieved giving the player a slower leveling experience with less abilities which is not so appealing to me. Last thing is about the price, i payed 25 euros this game as Kickstarter project, which is a fair price imho, i dont think it worth more tbh.