I was really happy to hear they would remaster Wasteland, one of my favorite games from the 80s. And while the remaster isn't horrible, it ends up getting an E for Effort. The good: - I do like the new graphics - Integrated journal and a voice over narration of the same really helps - They added little animated scenes for various story relevant steps. These are not super fancy, but that fits the style well. Now the bad: - Tons of ugly new bugs that crop up immediately give the impression that QA was asleep at the keyboard - Controls are still clunky, they really should have been updated for the 21st Century - Gameplay really hasn't aged well - They couldn't even be bothered to pick proper fonts for the main menu - Despite all the things they felt they shouldn't touch, they made the weird decision to force weird gender politics into the game - all player characters are referred to by the gender-neutral pronoun "them" instead of their correct genders (he/she) - which you do pick as part of the character creation process. Please keep your odd agenda out of my childhood experiences, thank you. If you played this game in the 80s, save your nostalgia and 15 Euro by not buying this game. If you never played wasteland, you can safely pass this one unless you really, really want to force yourself for completionist or historic reasons or whatever. tl;dr not worthwhile; weird design choices; not worth buying.
This is a terrible game that does not deserve the title "official videogame". I lost a lot of respect for Sandy Petersen and Chaosium. It starts off well enough with a very Call-of-Cthulhu-esque "haunted house" sequence, that I loved. But it breaks down after that, and not in good ways. There is very little rhyme or reason to the sequences. One moment, the game is a detective game, the next a zombie shooter. In another sequence it's a puzzle platformer. The "RPG elements", i.e. the skill system, is tacked on and pointless. The graphics are mediocre, and the voice over is bad. The dialogue suffers from being written by someone who took English in high-school and thought an editor - or indeed, basic proof-reading - was a waste of time. I could forgive all that, but where the game really fails is where it counts: The Cthulhu Mythos. The writers obviously knew next to nothing about Cthulhu. For example, the "Mythos" is presented as a unified organization or force, which is just nonsense. If you want a third-rate horror game, buy this at a deep discount. If you are even somewhat knowledgeable about Lovecrafts works, or even a paper and pencil Call of Cthulhu player, avoid this completely. Some day someone will publish a decent Call of Cthulhu game. But this is not it.
This game is horrid. Now, don't get me wrong. It is gorgeous to look at, and the procedural landscape generation is brilliant. But that doesn't make a good game. It's tedious, grindy, and boring. The real kicker is, though, that the game isn't anything as advertised. Most significantly there is no "mystery" at the center of the galaxy. Once you get there, you get to see... Nothing. There is NOTHING there. Add to that the debacle about players not being able to see each other, and you have a product that is simply fraudulent. I cannot recommend this game, or doing any business with Hello Games, ever.
