Wasteland 3 is neat, I like the canon, setting, story line, gritty writing, occasionally severe decision making and harsh consequences, all the little parallels to what made Fallout 1 & 2 really good, and am alright with the gameplay despite not being a fan of turn-based combat. This game had good potential, unfortunately it crashes a lot, and I hit a sort of wall in Little Hell, seems no matter what I do it crashes hard as it fades out to enter the dialog scene with Vic, tried changing game settings several times, changing equipment, dismissing critters, back tracking to go there earlier (instead of doing Steeltown first), etc, until after a few days of frustration I just gave up on it and uninstalled. Sorry to see inXile was bought out by Microsoft, which I assume means Wasteland 3 won't be fixed, I see their forum disappeared along with community support & a lot of troubleshooting references (dead links), it's always sad to see MS eat good studios and kill off good games. I like that this runs natively on Linux, I run Fedora and stopped getting Windows games awhile ago, with some exceptions. I'm also disappointed with the lack of modding support, this game really needs a community bug fix patch, or even a way to bypass buggy stuff like the dialog scenes and broken bits of side quests. Compared to Wasteland 2, there's a lot to like here, with the expanded gameplay features, new setting, and better graphics, but suffers similar frequent crashes (I could not finish WL2 either), and WL2 has some mods including a community patch. I didn't play Wasteland 1.
Throughout my few decades of fairly heavy gaming there are a few games which stand out as "worst use of game engine", this obscene piece of garbage is one of them, Dues Ex Invisible War won PC Gamer's award for that but this is much worse. I loved Red Faction 1, the terrain deformation was neat, I remember spending an hour tunneling through large rocky areas then scrubbing levels of all explosive ammo, also liked the setting, themes, and the campaign wasn't too bad for its time. Coming from that this, sequel is an even bigger failure. The most attractive feature, terrain deformation was barely used, and the campaign/canon theme was inverted into a fascist propaganda piece. I take that as an obscenity in context of parallels to US historical labor struggles where workers were routinely worked to death by the hundreds so rich industrialists could get richer, this game seems to claim if the poor are not being worked to death for profit by the rich will result is communism, which will evolve into some Stalinist regime.
