I really liked Wasteland 2 and am an old school Fallout fan, so I was hoping to get back to some of that with WL3, but it really isn't. The whole game is buggy, glitchy, unfinished and just poorly thought out, and this DLC doesn't fix any of that. Pros: -The new weapons and armour are nice, but there isn't many of them -The area is interesting -New enemies were needed in the game Cons -Poor encounter balance because of bad enemy design and encounter scaling. -Not much to this expansion; not worth the asking price (if you want to get it be sure to wait for heavy deiscount) -The new energy shield mechanic that enemies use is terrible. It forces you to keep all kinds of elemental weapons in your inventory and equipped for every fight due to the random chance that you MUST use a particular energy type to do ANY damage to an enemy using a random shield of that type. Really poor design. Tedious, frustrating and not a fun mechanic to deal with. What were they thinking? -The limited new resource that you need for upgrading guns & gear is too limited.
I really like InXile, and I kickstarter backed Wasteland 2 and enjoyed it. I really wanted to like the game but this is just bad. The game stutters and lags on PC hardware that is way above the recommended specs, with sound glitching out. The game is also full of graphical and gameplay bugs, ranging from charachter models pointing the opposite direction to where they're shooting, with bullets coming out the back of their gun, to frustrating gameplay bugs that make you lose combat encounters. Wasteland 3 seems really dumbed down and oversimplified too. Aspects like stealth are pretty much non-existant. The stealth skill just affects how long it takes for bad guys to notice you once you enter their detection radius but you can't use it to sneak into encounters because it's not an activatable skill, and when you get within trigger distance, scripted dialogue will ALWAYS klick in stopping you from sneaking or setting up an ambush. The bad guys always get the first turn if you allow this dialogue to occur, putting you at a major disadvantage, so you're encouraged to always attack before they speak, which cuts out loads of atmospheric dialogue. The design is really poor. The AI is bad as well. Accidental friendly fire from a hacked turret (which you have no control over) causes AI followers to drop what they're doing and go fight the hacked turret. The enemy AI doesn't do anything intelligent either. Few things piss me off more than when developers release an ovbiously broken and unfinished game, and then abandon it, never to attempt to fix anything else. Not cool.
If you're a horror movie fan and appreciate movies like The Blob, then this game is amazing. The fluid movement of the creature around the levels is fantastic, the puzzles are challenging but not frustrating, and the horror themes are straight out of the best 80s movies. Atmospheric sound track too. It reminds me of playing the Alien in the first AvP game, hiding in air vents above, waiting for humans to be isolated.
Whether you succeed or fail depends way too much on random loot luck. The reloading and weapon jam mechanics are useless and really annoying. They don't add to the fun and in the case of the weapon jam, will just randomly get you killed. It seems like they went all in on this frustrating gameplay in Synthetik 2. Current reviews for the sequel are bad. At least this one isn't that tedious, but still not worth getting unless on hefty discount.
