The game might feel a bit unnecessarily streamlined in comparison to Wasteland 2, but the quality of life features make it a really fun RPG that doesn't feel too cumbersome. The game manages to combine lightheartedness with dead-serious stuff in a fluid way that doesn't feel too tryhard. Although it needs to be said, that the player kinda has to have eye and tolerance for the sort of writing and humor the game strives to offer. Lots of choices to be made and consequences to suffer that aren't clear cut. Combat is pretty fluid and at times even challenging and there's definitely enough content to romp trhough. My copy never had any significant bugs or glitches so technically the game is pretty pure too. I would've liked the skillchecks not be deterministic and the game to have a bit more creativity with the systems in regards to non-combat skills and activities, but all in all Wasteland 3 is a very solid RPG where a sequel does not need to improve much to make it a top notch experience among the classics of the genre. The 5/5 rating is according to times at hand. I wouldn't put it among games like Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum and such, but it's a very good work from InXile, and hopefully not the last of isometric RPG's we see from them under Microsoft.
Audiovisually the game is excellet, if a bit lifeless, and the writing is generally at least passable. A lot of effort has clearly gone into the afore mentioned as well as the cutscenes and story bits, but it seems that all that happend at the expense of everything else. And while there are the things like lacking AI all around the place and lacing interactivity, most sorely that loss of effort and focus is felt in the gameplay department. The game is not an RPG, make no mistake thinking it is one. It's a storydriven open world looter shooter adventure that relies so much in its selfappointed narrative excellence that it completely forgets that games made to be played first and foremost. And that manifests in the horrible loot system, weak character systems and other halfdeveloped features like crafting. It's almost like the games had an identity crisis at some point, but didn't do anything about it and thus left somewhere in between with all of its faults. You spend the entire game killing tons of people through witless mechanisms - though some of them understandable since it at some point wanted to be an RPG - that make the player compare digist or armor and damage values, thinking about if 5% damage/armor increments in the perk trees are worth anything, figuring about the lack of enemy AI, finding out the whole thing is completely out of balance with some very easy to achieve power builds already early on. And of course watching heavy cutscenes while suffering through the longwinded main missions of the quite short main story (that feels out of place with it's length and finality if looking against how much there is to do in the world around it). I found that the small gigs from the fixers were the best part of the game. Simple, yes, not very narrative heavy, but they felt like that's what the sort of edgerunner like the protagonist would do. There is some potential in the game, but it needs quite a bit of work still and some heavy redesigning in places.
