The Positives
- The game features deep, strategic and satisfying combat that offers up a solid challenge on higher difficulty settings. Each type of weapon has different strengths and weaknesses, and ammunition management can end up being vital to your survival. Unless you want to enter an encounter, outnumbered and only with your fists as a means to defend yourself, you need to keep track of how much ammo each character is burning through per encounter. In a lot of cases, running away ends up being the optimal solution, and you can still earn experience for successfully retreating.
- Character creation lacks nothing. You can change and alter every physical feature and you can have as diverse and multicultural a team as you want. If you’re really committed and creative, you can flesh out entire backstories that make your characters feel more personal. This is the best way of creating a connection with your team since the overarching narrative is more world-driven than character-driven.
- The game does a great job of selling the illusion that you are a Ranger. Not only from a narrative standpoint, but from a game mechanics one as well. While you are out adventuring in the world, you will get calls from the Ranger Citadel, updating you on events around the world, most notably, emergencies that you did not pick up, and you get to listen to how each situation has unfolded. What’s also interesting is that each time you level up, you have to “call it in” to earn the promotion, which works hand in hand with the role you are taking on.
- The game’s visuals have received a nice upgrade in the Director’s Cut from the previous version. The game now runs off the brand new Unity 5 engine which enhances visual fidelity on character models, environments and lighting effects.
- The transition from mouse and keyboard to controller feels seamless for the most part. Menu navigation has been slightly overhauled to make everything feel more organic and convenient for console players, which also translates into environment interactions.
- What makes Wasteland 2 most addictive are the different ways that you can interact with objects and people in the environment, and the consequences that may ensue. Locks can be picked, safes can be cracked, computers can be hacked, the success of which is dictated by how you choose to allocate your Skill Points upon leveling up (and you don’t get many of them). If you fail, you can break the lock or set off an alarm or trap, making the rewards you were going after, impossible to reach. This makes for emergent gameplay opportunities that really encourage the player to experiment with the world around them.
- Moral dilemmas translate into interactions with your party members as well. In one portion of the game, there was a scientist that was dying slowly and painfully from plants that were gradually penetrating his body. He asked me to kill him out of mercy so that he would not have to endure anymore, knowing that he couldn’t be saved. I chose to acquiesce his request, and immediately after killing him, some of my party members took a strong exception to my actions. This resulted in what the game called a “Rogue Percentage”, which meant that every time I entered a battle encounter, there was a chance that I would lose control over these characters, and they would end up acting of their own free will. While this was a tad frustrating at first, I came to appreciate the depths that the game was willing to go to really make each choice (even the ones that weren’t presented on a silver platter) matter in this chaotic world.
- The writing in this game is hilarious and carries an attitude that’s all it’s own. There is one self-referential joke about RPG’s early on when you examine a dead body that goes, “Some sort of skin infection, like a druid cast too many barkskins on him.”
The Negatives
- While the game is very strong mechanically, it is flawed from a technical standpoint. On more than one occasion I experienced some slow loading times that ultimately made the game crash. There were also some framerate hitches that coincided with these slow downs, but these things were fixed with a simple game restart. There were also a few instances of wall clipping that let me talk to characters through walls and sometimes NPC’s were un-selectable in rooms that were filled with selectable objects.
- Pathfinding on A.I. companions was at times hit or miss, which became problematic in environments with explosives. Every character in your party follows the same general path that the player character walks, so when you suddenly realize that an explosive is about to go off and you need to get away ASAP, your A.I. team members will first walk towards the location of the explosive to the spot your character was standing at before the run away, which ends up causing some cheap damage. One way around this into use the wait command on the rest of your party, and use your PC as a scout to find these hidden dangers.
- Wasteland 2 suffers a bit from a really buggy camera that can completely shield your view and force you to accidentally walk right into environmental dangers. Occasionally, the camera will pull back to a really wide angle and lose its focus on your party. These instances aren’t plentiful, and seemed to only happen in certain environments, so it wasn’t like it completely ruined the experience.
- Some elements feel like they are beyond player control, namely percentages in opponent striking and picking/cracking/hacking mechanics. It’s a bit odd for a melee character to come face to face with a large enemy and only have a 40% chance to hit it. This can result in some semi-frustrating moments of pathetic flailing as you watch your knife/bat wielder helplessly swinging away. Granted these percentages can increase with level ups, but it’s still counter intuitive to the idea of getting a player’s feet wet.
Wasteland 2 was a game that was Kickstarted all the way back in 2012 and released in full as a PC exclusive in September of last year. If the game reminds you of Fallout, there’s good reason for that. Brian Fargo of Wasteland 2’s Developer, inExile worked on Fallout 1 and 2, when the series was known for being a top-down C-RPG. While Fallout 4 may be the most anticipated post-apocalyptic RPG (if not game) on tap for this year, Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut is not a game to be missed by console RPG fans, despite a number of technical flaws.
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut takes a lot of cues from top-down console games and plays like a mesh between Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and X-COM: Enemy Unknown. You start the game with one of the more in-depth character creation tools you will find, and you have the choice of building a team of four characters from scratch, from facial features, to field abilities, right down to individual backstories. Or you can start with a pre-made set of characters, each with a unique and predetermined set of skills that won’t leave you feeling completely helpless. As a newbie, I found it easier to go with the pre-made characters first, then once I felt comfortable with all of the mechanics and understood the context of each ability in the game world, I tried my hand at crafting my own team. Suffice it to say, it’s still a work in progress.
In Wasteland 2, you take on the role of a team of law enforcement officers called The Desert Rangers. Law enforcement in this world is a pretty loose description as there are so few people willing to wrangle in the madness, that evil inevitably rules this world. Wasteland 2 isn’t a journey about heroic justice and idealism, but more about the management of madness. This is evident even from the get-go when you are faced with the dilemma of two dire emergencies as soon as you leave the “comforts” of the Ranger Citadel. No matter which one you choose, your inaction in the other emergency will cause death and reflect poorly on the organization you represent. Wasteland 2 is full of these moral choices, and throughout the game, you will be constantly operating in various levels of grey areas, rather than black or white.
Let’s take a look at the positives and negatives of Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut.
