As a PC gamer in the late 90s and early 2000s, and a fan of anything with Interplay’s name on it, even I find it hard to believe that I have yet to play the Fallout series despite owning multiple copies from sites like GOG and Steam. Back catalogs have a way of getting out of hand, I suppose. Still, they’re on my mystical list to play one day, as is Wasteland. While I typically play games in chronological order, I had the chance to play and review Wasteland 2 over the past several days, and I’m happy I jumped in.
To be honest/transparent, I do not have a lot of experience in turn-based, strategy/tactical RPGs, whether they’re the post apocalyptic kind, dark fantasy, you name it. I can’t speak to how close Wasteland 2 is to a proper Fallout 2 or even Tactics sequel — and ultimately, that matters little, if anything in general terms. But if this is critical to you, do your research, hope for a demo, or try GOG’s 30 day policy. Moving on, the first time I started up Wasteland 2 I must have spent nearly a half hour deciding on which of the eight prebuilt characters I should choose, and/or if I should try to make any of my own. The task was kind of daunting because the depth of the Attributes and Skills and all that was nigh staggering. This is a very deep experience that demands your focus and time, which is exactly what many RPG gamers are looking for.
I actually did something else with Wasteland 2 I never do in other games, at least for this initial playthrough I’m working on — I set the game to Easy, known as Rookie in-game, instead of Normal (aka Seasoned). The premise and atmosphere of Wasteland 2, the theme really, is one of my favorites, so I didn’t want to risk getting burned out by getting destroyed in early battles. This is not to say I played this game with ‘rose tinted glasses’ — I just didn’t want to ruin it for myself too early due to lack of tactical RPG experience. Furthermore, there is so much customization, quests, and otherwise depth/breadth to Wasteland 2 that it can readily be played multiple times, for many dozens of hours, so I’ll be saving the other difficulty settings for those revisits down the road.
Anyway, I quickly discovered that, to enjoy Wasteland 2, you need not have played or had any knowledge of the original Wasteland, but that it’s included and playable in the Digital Deluxe ($60) version is a really cool. Several of the main characters from the original, like Snake Vargas and Angela Deth, do have very early and long lasting involvement in the game, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything critical by not having seen them before. Snake is now General Vargas by the way, and takes more of an oversight role instead of being in the thick of battle. Angela on the other hand can’t help herself in diving into the action. That said, your four person squad (which can get up to seven members deep as the game progresses) are the newest members of the Desert Rangers, the faction that tries to keep the peace in the southwest territory (Arizona/California region) of this post nuclear war United States. Their history and current state is not universally appreciated as you find out in visiting various other groups of people. Still, there is much work to be done, not the least of which is avenging the death of a fellow slain Ranger, Ace, whose burial scene provides the opening minutes of the game. In addition to tracking his killer(s), continuing his field work is also on your shoulders.
Of course anytime you step out of base, the Ranger Citadel, to accomplish your tasks, you can expect to encounter some pretty nasty folks. Some of these are other humans, including cannibals, the Wreckers, the Red Skorpions, mutated creatures, hell even PO’ed robots, and many more other factions and nasties with their own reasoning and culture. These combat scenarios are known as Encounters, and make up the most dangerous and tactically-demanding part of the gameplay. Being a turn based game, each unit in the encounter takes their turn as it comes up. Each character has Action Points, which you can upgrade, that they can spend re-positioning, fixing jammed weapons (less of this now as of a few days ago with a patch), shooting, attacking at close range, hacking electronics, settings traps, and so on. I liked that inXile made it really easy to determine if you had enough Action Points (AP) to walk x number of spaces on the “grid” (which you can toggle on/off) and then perform an action, or if you had enough to say un-jam your gun and line up a headshot. You can end your turn at any time and save AP for the next turn too, although you can’t have one character like stack up multiple unused turns into one gigantic turn, understandably. Taking cover, position, posture, fire mode, the percentages of success, is all clearly vital, but the game does help with this by providing info to help you decide if an action is worth the attempt or not. Still, there is an appreciable amount of randomness to encounters such as a high percentage action (like a melee attack from one space on the grid to the next) missing, or one of your NPCs going rogue for one turn and doing their own thing. This randomness is obviously intentional and usually feels ‘fair’ and definitely adds some extra spice to the Encounters which are already plenty engaging at face value.
With resources like ammo and medkits being limited, and the enemies being pretty competent if not staggering at times, everything comes back to tactics, so RPG gamers who dig that should have a lot to enjoy here. On my own, much less experienced level, Wasteland 2 has become the game from which I have cut my teeth so to speak, on the genre, giving me more motivation to try other games in the genre without having to worry about the doldrums of a steep learning curve in what would almost certainly be a less interesting game.
Getting back to the characters, as stated earlier I went with four of the pre-built characters including Slick, Pills, Big Bert, and Fade. Having a variety of skills amongst the squad is necessary to handle the variety of threats you’re sure to encounter. Fortunately you will get some help from NPC encounters along the way to help fleshout your squad’s total skill set. Skills, Attributes, and Knowledge are really deep, but the pop-up tooltips from the Character menus let you know quickly what’s what, although I still found it a little difficult to know what to upgrade and when. Thus, at times I sat on upgrade points for a while, trying to get a feel for which of these traits was best to invest in. Rather than run through the numerous traits, I’ll include an image and also suggest you research the game to learn more about these numerous traits and how they will effect your game. Side note, you can enable an Auto Save feature that will save every 15/30/60 min for you, and you can manually save, to multiple save slots no less, anytime you are not actively in an Encounter. So as always, save early, save often, and use multiple save spots. In my experience, this is not because of bugs — I have had no game-breaking bugs. But obviously having multiple, recent save games allows you to experiment and can also save you a lot of lost time and frustration if you end up going down a path, literally or figuratively, that doesn’t pan out.
Wasteland 2’s gameplay is deep, interesting, and once you get comfortable with the mechanics, including the camera controls and understanding distances, cover, and terrain and so forth, addictive. There’s a lot to do and you cannot do everything in one playthrough; for example, within an hour or two there are decisions to be made with dire consequences for those NPCs awaiting your help. Their radio calls for help to Snake at the Ranger Citadel at seemingly scripted times play through to your own ears too, making the decision that much more ‘personal,’ and thus the consequences that much more potent, giving the overall experience a significant margin of immersion, regret, and triumph, elements any RPG game would strive for.
Taking a step back from the gameplay itself, the presentation is pretty solid. Graphically, even on my current rig which is old and soon to be replaced (Core2DUO E8400 @ 3Ghz, 8GB, 4850 1GB, lol), I was able to run this game pretty smoothly at 1080p with the “Beautiful” preset config. Separately, you can toggle things like Saturation, Texture Quality, Shadow Quality, AntiAliasing, SSAO, Anisotropic Filtering, and Motion Blur. Generally speaking, while the game ran well enough for me and I had no major technical issues at all, it’s not quite as visually rich and detailed as you might hope for. The camera can be a little bit of nuisance too, although using WASD and Q and E to manipulate it, along with the mouse wheel to zoom in/out, works good, albeit a tad slow, and I would have liked to have been able to zoom out further. I actually ended up playing this game a lot like the old school Commandos games in which I began to separate my squad members a little bit rather than moving them all at once, so being able to zoom further out for more spatial perspective would have been nice. As for audio, the voiceovers are well done, and the dialogue and text descriptions, of which there are volumes of, are well written and interesting. It doesn’t take long to become interested in the Wasteland universe, its cultures and locations, and a huge step into that world is accomplished efficiently via quality writing.
To the summary…