Title: Wasteland 2
Genre: Adventure, Indie, RPG, Strategy
Developer and Publisher: inXile Entertainment
Release Date: 18 Sep, 2014
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Price: $39.99
Intro
Wasteland 2 is a top down RPG set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic USA. A successor to the 1988 classic, which was the inspiration for many post apocalyptic rpg series including fallout. So after 26 years including 2.5 years of production and 70,000 Kickstarter backers (About $3 Million) later we have Wasteland 2. Did inXile Entertainment manage to do justice by reviving the bygone ? Fortunately Yes, inXile Entertainment breathes new life into the old by revamping it to modern standards while still maintaining the original’s essence. Expanding upon the gameplay and style, Wasteland 2 stands upon the foundation set up by the first and builds on it, frequently making references to the original, like an ode to the past.
Story
You start off as a group of new desert rangers (law keepers) who travel and solve the issues of small towns under their protection. You will managing this party of 4 characters (something pioneered by the original) which can grow as the game progresses. The story centers around a new cryptic message that is a threat to the desert rangers. Your party is sent to investigate the same and you end up receiving signals of distress which you choose to help or ignore, though these choices are not always that simple. You will constantly have to make moral choices, like in an early mission, when two towns being attacked simultaneously and you have to choose one while the other succumbs to their fate as you listen in on your radio. This adds weight to your choices and not all actions have immediate consequences. The rangers you play are flawed and not all the inhabitants of the world hold them in the best regard. Sometimes you will feel the action of one decision affect other areas and this is the beauty of the game, if you choose you can affect a lot of decisions in the game and the world does a good job to show that. You often end up winning trust by your actions as you stumble across the desert, both furthering your mission and helping others along the way.
Most of the game offers up text to read as you converse, and most of the main storyline is voice acted. These conversations are also very dynamic with numerous choices, you can free a prisoner to the anger of a town or distract the folks as you sneak her out. There is a lot of text to read through, but it’s detailed and full of lore and dark humour aplenty. These dialogue choices can vary the path you choose to a solution as investing points in the appropriate skill can unlock options where you can armtwist others for information. This does reward those who like to read through the dialogue; for others they have highlighted the keywords to give a glimpse of the main objective if you are in a hurry. The writing is good and overall conveys a good portrayal of life under such hardship, however there is also a lot of humour present. The dialogues while trying to be funny can be a bit cheesy as well, especially the further you go into the game. This humour is subjective. Some may like the occasional joke in the middle while others like me will feel it’s out of place. Yet these small doses only add to the enjoyment and do not stick out or distract from the core experience.
Most of your in-game actions will lead to some kind of quest line. For eg., Using animal whisper allows you to befriend some animals that provide you stats and also attack enemies. Critically failing in an attempt would lead to the animal attacking you. This is a great system where you may try your luck with tough safes, with the risk of locking them permanently or leave them to try later with more points in safecracking. The same principle works for the majority of the skills and is a great system, although it may lead to some broken situations. Like when I critically failed on a tough dog within a town, the whole town went berserk and started to attack me, forcing me to either live with mass murdering an entire town or loading a previous save. Yes, you can continue the game after killing an entire town. This sort of flexibility in the gameplay and story makes sure the world remains believable and immerses you in it.
Presentation
The game sound design has a very retro vibe with dot-matrix printer printing noise and heavy static distortion over the radio. The sound for guns and ambient noises are average with little to none background music. With an isometric camera it has a nice American western feel to it with rugged men, lots of brown and biker attire. The voice acting is good for the most part but nothing spectacular. There were some memorable moments in the game and the voice talent was apt to take good advantage of them. Occasionally you will find a few poor performances, but these can be easily forgiven as these characters are mostly minor. What cannot be forgotten are many bugs and broken quest lines. Fortunately, most of them have been fixed in the recent patches. There is still a rare pathing issue or stuck items.
Wasteland 2 is a series of small maps interconnected using a world map, which you will be presented with when you use one of the exits. You use this overview map interface to travel around locations. This world interface is strangely missing many options, like being being able manage your inventory or view objectives. Also frustrating was the how lacking the quest-tracker/objective screen was in displaying important information and was most of the time a very vague log of the choices you made. There are numerous other issues with the UI, like the lack of a scrollbar to navigate through text paragraphs, the lack of being able to slide the font size or increase the text window a little to have more of the conversation on screen. These are minor though and with time you will learn to adjust, as the game picks up both in pace and challenge.
Gameplay
You start off with 4 characters as you may choose the defaults or set up a custom group. You choose their attribute points like coordination, strength, luck etc. These are primary stats that affect things like action per turn and Hitpoints. After this you get to choose specialisations which is a choice of a lot of different parameters. These are split into 3 main categories of Weapons, General and Knowledge. Weapons allow you to specialize in a certain type of weapon like energy, shotgun or smg. This increases your hit chance and it is a good idea for each character to specialize in a different aspect, as ammo is scarce and expensive. Under General, you have you conversational skills, leadership, bartering, etc. Finally, Knowledge has medic, safecracking, computers and toaster repair. It is important that characters have varied special skills, but it’s also a good idea to have more than one medic. While the early points are cheap, the deeper you go into a skill tree, the more points you need, hence promoting you to create specialised characters. The entire gameplay is centered around these skills as having more points in weapons allows for better combat, while better general skills like conversations and outdoorsman skills allows you to avoid it. Knowledge makes for more loot and mostly provides utilitarian functions like being able to heal a critical teammate in battle or risk losing them permanently.
Even after losing a couple of members you will still be either a 4 man party or greater, as during your adventures, you will also find people willing to join you for various reasons. To recruit them, you may have to talk to most of people on a map as not all willing members will find their way to you. You will have to search for them. For e.g. I missed a very powerful character near the citadel where you start the game because I did not talk to every single character. Only 10 hrs in did I walk around while digging for ammo, that I found her and she was still 8 levels above all my chars. This provides a great reward for exploration and eventually changed my playstyle to look at every nook and corner. Often while traveling opportunities will come on on the world map, if you take indirect paths, you might unearth rewards in the form of shrines that provide bonuses and items.
Combat in wasteland 2 is turn-based on a square grid closely similar to what you see in XCOM. You can issue commands like move, reload, attack and advanced options are also available, like changing the fire mode of certain weapons. The interface is nice and clean with clear indications of how far you can move. Weapons have a good chance to miss or jam and adding attachments to them can improve their stats till you find a new better gun. There is constant tinkering although you will be dismantling the weaker guns for parts to sell. Ammo is scarce and expensive, providing an interesting risk reward system for playing it safe and conserving ammo or go in all guns blazing.
The difficulty of the game is uneven. Also this has more to do with the old-school roots of when the game does not interfere with your gameplay no matter how bad you are stuck and the appeal of this will change from person to person. An example of this: After completing a few of the earlier missions, the toughened enemies wiped me clean repeatedly and I had no response to their high attack damage. Its was only after 10 reloads that I checked my inventory and thought of equipping tnt to my character’s primary slot and was able to take down the enemy. The game never explained the mechanic and as a first time player I thought TNT was supposed to be to blow up static targets rather than act as a throwing grenade. You will often find yourself making similar mistakes/discoveries and while I enjoyed this, it could be frustrating to others who like their gameplay mechanics more explained. Expect your characters to be getting stuck behind locked fences only to discover that you have to manually click on your brute force skill and open it or blowing up on a trip mine because you did not check the safe using the demolitions skills before opening it or not being able to find key to a door only to realize that a rocket launcher works just fine on it.
Conclusion
The main story is about 40 hrs, more if you take on side quests which could add another 20. Wasteland 2 has a lot of passion and it shows it. You will find a few minor annoyances here and there, but they never hamper the overall experience. There is plenty to do and branching storylines enough that justify a second playthrough. With developers continuing to push many huge updates post game launch based on player feedback, we took our time with the review and saw the game being vastly improved. Give Wasteland 2 some love and it will love you back, which is why it’s an excellent RPG.
