So, after nearly 40 hours into the game I must say I am disappointed with Wasteland 2. I admit it is partially my own fault, as I think I was expecting a slightly different game to what the developers' vision was and didn't do a proper research when buying the game. Bear in mind I did all the available side quests and the main quest up to the first mission in Prison. This took me nearly 40 hrs, so I took it slowly and didn't rush things. And so the below review is based on that experience. This is only MY opinion though, your experience may be totally different!
First of all let me say that Wasteland 2 is not a bad game at all. It gets a lot of things right and I like many aspects of the game. Character creation, combat, graphics, writing and humour - all these things are spot on! It is one of the not many games that I actually wrote my characters' bios - just for fun and my own benefit!
Just briefly about the good things:
- Character creation is fun. Especially if you download custom portraits from the web. For some strange reason you can really feel the link between you and the characters you create. The lack of any correlation between skills and attributes is a slight letdown though.
- Combat could be fun! The mechanics are well designed, fit the game and are fun to use. Sadly, the potential is not fully utilised in the actual game (read on to find out why I think so).
- The graphics are good. The locations are nicely done, with many details and they can be really big and fun to roam in (totally apart from the random encounter ones - read on).
- Writing quality is great! The people that wrote the script did really good job overall, the conversations were interesting and fun to go through.
- Humour - likewise, I laughed many times, great writing!
What kills the game for me is the lack of tactical options during fights, lack of location variety and the story itself.
You spend a lot of time travelling on the World Map and a lot of random encounters occur during these travels. The encounters quickly become boring due to small in size and repeatable in variety locations and lack of tactical choices. The maps aren't very big. Most of the times your party starts very close to the enemy so you have little or no time to place the characters in strategic locations to prepare for the fight, which starts very quickly after the map is loaded. Your characters can go into Cover mode, but there aren't many objects on the maps to actually use cover mode effectively. The locations repeat all the time and after a while you know them inside out. I think there are only about 6 or 7 locations I kept coming across, it's a big immersion breaker to me. The combat mechanics are fine themselves, it's just the lack of interesting environment to utilise these mechanics in that's the problem. It takes away all the joy and excitement from the fights and turns them into a boring chore in my opinion.
Now, the story. It is well written, there are a lot of things to talk about with the people you come across in the Wastes. And yet strangely it's not very engaging. Parts of it are great (I really enjoyed Highpool and Rail Nomads stories a lot must say!) but all in all it didn't really dragged me in... Like I said I did all the things that can be done until entering the Prison for the first time and for some reason I don't really feel like continuing. I am just not interested enough to find out what happens next.
If you put together all the above aspects I described, Wasteland 2 becomes boring, unimmersive and rather dull experience all in all sadly, despite all the things it got right. I have now uninstalled it and I'm not sure if I'll give it another chance in the future.
Like I said in the beginning, it is partially my own fault for not doing much research about WL2. I have fond memories about WL1 and Fallout games and I think I was expecting a modern version of Fallout 1 or 2 - while I received a slightly better version of Wasteland 1 with modern graphics - or at least this is my impression.
