Best atmosphere in a game of this genre ever. Every level has a very unique attitude. The "normal" Mode has just the right difficulty; the levels are exactly how long a level needs to be. Each Boss of each of the 20 levels has its own movement patterns and styles. NO one ever feels repetetive. And Arcade Mode is god damn hard as it is meant to be !
Only buy this at full price if you are a die-hard Wasteland (3) Fan. The DLC is exactly the quality of the "base game" quests, not more and not less. I just hope most of my money reaches gog and inXile, not Microsoft. If not a die-hard Fan, wait for the Wasteland 3 GOTY 2022 and just play it "free" included in the complete game. You will not even notice this is a DLC then. Its not bad, but also not worth ~11+$. Lets hope the second and last announced DLC will hit a spot !
The Skill System is really really intelligent. Progression is fun, every skill is meaningful and you can make interesting combinations with other skills. Just one Example: I took the Mage, which is equipped with a "beam" from the beginning. But you can not Move while attacking with this Beam. My Idea was: what about buying a skill that makes me move while attacking ? And so i scrolled through the existing skills (10+) just to find that the last one ("ultimate") makes me move at 11.5% of my Movement Speed while attacking. So the developers really took a lot of brain into every skill. The skills are even more interesting than in Diablo2 (and much more combinations are possible). Oh and the story is funny. Great Humour !
The game was just released, so i want to write a little bit about the "final" version. Unlike stated in the older reviews, the game is not as repetetive anymore. It has 5 Towers each with a completely different Look & Feel and Color Palette. The "Layout" of each stage is quite identical each time tough; the developers could have made a _little_ bit more Variation instead of just randomly aligning hexagons for each stage, but in my personal opinion it is still "ok" enough. The balance of the game has also improved a lot since the Early Access Version. It was a little bit to hard; now it is just right. While you easily will do the first Tower at first try and maybe even the second Tower, it starts to get interesting at the Third. The Difficulty raises at a linear scale and is always fair. I always played in a coop session which now works flawless. Only the "crafting dialog" is not good, it is too cumbersome to always find the correct button, but you only craft max 5% of the gaming time, mostly you are in action. The music is good, altough a little repetive since you always have the same three, four melodies. Maybe the developers could raise the tracks a little bit in the future for free ? There are a lot of different weapons all with pro&cons, many items, even "daemon" items (get a HUGE buff but be nerfed for the next two floors, for example). You should not compare it to Hades/Curse of the Gods, they are a different Subgenre of roguelikes in my opinion. This one stands alone. Oh and is there any other Sci-fi/Cyberpunk Roguelike like this out there? I know none. Summary: When you enjoy twin-stick shooters and want to do couch coop this game is GREAT and i enjoyed many hours with my gaming partners. When going solo, dont except too much hours of gameplay. But hey - this game is really cheap for the content you get, even at full price ! So support the devs, get this game !
There is a lot of Information about the _game_, which is gorgeous (best isometric party rpg since Baldurs Gate 2 in my opinion, no joke!) (best post-apocalyptic game ever cross genre) (oh - and much better in _every_ category than its clunky, not so-much-love-during-development predecessor Wasteland2) so i want to give it 5 stars here _since_ PATCH 1.1.2 which released recently. This patch makes the game feel MUCH MORE reactive (scrolling through menus now takes <100ms which feels good; it was about 200ms+ before the patch and 500ms in Wasteland 2). The loading times are OK now; it is not "very good" but it is not a desaster than before the patch. You still feel that is is the unity engine ->if you know where to look at<-, the devs really made a good progress on getting everything out of this outdated engine so that the game feels really really enjoyable now in ALL aspects. You spend a lot of time in Menus (and having fun doing do !)so this really matters. If you are a Role Player, get this game, i never enjoyed a world like this in where your decisions really mean something, the atmosphere of the whole world can change because of your choices, no playthrough is ever the same. The World is "crazy" - but believeable. The Humor nails it down for me. Also it has been casualized _just about the right_ percentage. Your Party does not have weight for the inventory now; this may be the only thing where they got too far with dumbing down the gameplay, everything else just feels right.
This is the Doom Engine but feels a lot quake/ish. It has a lot of exploration without guidance, but it never gets frustrating (just almost...). The action is really great. Every Medium to Big sized map you will encounter at least one new weapon and several new enemy types. Nothing is repetitive and there even is a great story. As a old school gamer of the Hexen/Heretic era this is a _must play_. I can not compare it the other recent old-school shooters like dusk, ion fury, and so on because i did not play them yet.
