With the release of The Cult of the Holy Detonation DLC last month, inXile has completed all scheduled content for Wasteland 3 and are now heavily focused on their next major game. We first saw Wasteland 3 in September of last year. In June of this year, the first of two DLCs was released in The Battle of Steeltown. And now we have the simultaneous release of the second of two DLCs, alongside the complete bundle known as The Colorado Collection. You can purchase this new DLC for just $7, about half of the price of the first DLC. inXile has made great strides with the quality of the game since it’s initial release, with more than a dozen patches released for this expansive and complicated RPG.
The Cult of the Holy Detonation is a modest but quality DLC, offering players several additional hours of content. With the first DLC, players had to be at least a level 9; for this DLC, your Desert Rangers need to be at least a level 16 before you can get the call from scientist Theo Curie, who is tracking a powerful energy source within the Cheyenne Mountain military complex (which is a real location by the way).
If/when you answer the call, your crew will arrive at the entrance of the mountain base faced with more tough decisions that the game is so well known for. The basic premise is that there are two factions, crazy cultists really, that are fighting over a nuclear bomb that is held in a precarious stasis: it’s emitting massive amounts of radiation and energy. There is enough energy here to power all of Colorado Springs for centuries, but then again we’re talking about a nuclear bomb, so it could just as well wipe the area off the map, too. Players have to ultimately decide what to do with this massive power source, and how to juggle the battle between the two sides, with outcomes that can effect the main storyline a bit and your interaction with the Patriarch.
The Cult of the Holy Detonation is maybe a little bit lighter on content than the first DLC, but it’s quite fun and can be very challenging. Wasteland 3 has been a challenge for me, but I found the setting, story, characters, dialog, etc., just too interesting to turn away from. This new DLC introduces a new type of mission called objective based encounters, which pits players against an endless flow of enemies that can only be stopped by, you guessed it, completing certain objectives. Not all missions in the DLC are like this, but just a few; I found them to be pretty tough. The reason for these type of missions is explained by the security devices within the mountain — they spawn enemies, and have to be turned off as weapons cannot destroy them. Now, you can buy yourself some time by temporarily disabling the spawners with certain tactics, but the fact remains that the objective must be cleared for the threat to stop. So if you’re used to brute-forcing your way through situations, well, that can still work to some degree, but the few objective-based missions here require a little bit more planning and tactics on how you spend your Action Points. I found these to be tough, but also a bit refreshing as well.
New armor, weapons, and enemies are part of this DLC as you might expect. The new mutant enemies are neat and well-designed; they’re pretty wild in appearance. I wouldn’t call any of the new armor or weapons ground-breaking, but they do have radiation stats that are pretty cool. Radiation in the mountain has an effect on your Rangers, too; believe it or not, the radiation can provide extra healing stats, but simultaneously it can have negative effects on your aiming, critical hit chance, and even your movement.
In sum, The Cult of the Holy Detonation is a nice bookend to a massive game. The extra story content is really interesting, but I am on the fence about the objective-based missions (mainly because they’re tough and I’m just not very good at this game!). This DLC further showcases inXile is in their prime when it comes to compelling, turn-based, action-and-story driven RPGs. At just $7, it’s pretty easy to recommend this content if you at all enjoyed the base game or the first DLC.
###
