Wasteland 2 Review
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Introduction
Wasteland 2 is the sequel to the 1988 post-apocalyptic turn-based RPG Wasteland, and was made possible only thanks to a crowd-funding Kickstarter campaign. While the original title took the menu-driven first-person combat seen in series like The Bard's Tale and mixed it with top-down skill-driven exploration, Wasteland 2 is an isometric turn-based RPG in the mold of Fallout 1 and 2. It's interesting to note that those two titles also happened to be greatly influenced by Wasteland and are generally considered its spiritual successors, making things come full circle with Wasteland 2.
Judging by the success of the Kickstarter campaign for the title, I have no doubt there's a hunger for late 90s-style RPG gameplay and depth. I can safely say that the game delivers in that respect. But is respecting all the promises made during the original Kickstarter campaign enough for Wasteland 2 to be a good game? And can a small developer with a mixed track record like inXile do justice to such an illustrious history?
Plot and Quests
Picking up 15 years after the events of the original Wasteland, which pitted the Desert Rangers against a mad computer AI and its army of robots, Wasteland 2 sees a group of rookies investigating the murder of fellow Desert Ranger Ace, who was inquiring into some mysterious radio signals. The story starts all the way back in Wasteland 1's Arizona, where the player gets to revisit both reimagined locations from the original and completely new locales. Around halfway, though, the action move to the ruins of Los Angeles. While in Arizona the Desert Rangers are an established presence with a powerful base of operations, in California they are newcomers with little to no intel and support, something that is effectively communicated through the game's writing.
Unfortunately, there isn't much to Wasteland 2's main plotline besides its murder mystery hook. It's dull, and stretched to cover a 60+ hour game while it arguably only has material for 10 of those hours, and as a result ends up feeling even worse than it is. To add salt to the injury, it relies too much on plot points from the original 1988 game, plot points that a newcomer will only learn through exposition dumps. Wasteland 2 attempts to both pay homage to the original and also reintroduce and update many of its central concepts, much like Bethesda's Fallout 3. While the quality of the writing is much higher than in Bethesda's title, Wasteland 2 doesn't do as good as a job at walking the line between reboot and sequel.
I've established earlier that the elements related to the central plot make for a small percentage of the total in-game runtime (the game lasted me a good 65 hours), so it's definitely worth mentioning how the rest of the writing fares. Compared to the main plotline, it does much better, thankfully. There are a lot of interesting factions, regional conflicts and off-kilter encounters peppered throughout the game, and even the dullest quests tend to feature at least some witty dialogue and descriptive prose. Even the backer NPCs and shrines are implemented tastefully and feel at home in the game's world. Considering what I've seen in other Kickstarter titles, that's worthy of praise in my book.
In other words, while Wasteland 2's main storyline itself might be boring, it still makes for an excuse as good as any to move from encounter to encounter and locale to locale. Especially on the tail end (when I got to Hollywood, to be precise) the game often reminded me of Fallout 2, and showed a similar commitment to variety and freedom. Quests can range from dialogue-heavy investigations to dungeon crawls through high security bases, and almost never fail to offer a wide array of options. Whether we're talking of full-blown alternative paths, different ways to accomplish the same objectives or, in some cases, even different ways to fail an objective, Wasteland 2 has you covered. InXile pulled off something impressive: they managed to consistently offer choices that feel interesting without being contrived.
And there are, of course, consequences to the player's actions too. Wasteland 2 might not quite go The Witcher 2 route and dramatically bifurcate after its introduction, but it's nonetheless a game that goes out of its way to acknowledge the player's actions. In the most dramatic cases, consequences can have ripple effects throughout an entire location, completely changing its layout and population (something that can happen twice in Arizona). Even minor touches, like seeing the presence of a CNPC or the gender make-up of a party acknowledged, help reinforcing the feeling of player agency over the developer's story. I've heard a few developers condemn canned, non-procedural choices in videogames and, while I understand the position from a pipeline perspective, I think Wasteland 2 is a perfect counterargument.
Given Fallout has been clearly a point of reference for the game's fiction, it's also worth pointing out a few differences between inXile's and Interplay's titles. First, the story in Wasteland 2 is much more gated than in a Fallout title, and as a result, there is less freedom to explore. At times the game can even feel slightly railroad-y despite featuring an open world map system (more on that later). Second, the game's tone and setting, despite operating in the same coordinates, are subtly different from those of Fallout in a few important ways. While they definitely weren't always smart or nuanced, the Fallout games had a darker and more mature take than many video games on subjects like war, humanity's need to form communities, technology, etc. When Wasteland 2 approaches the same subjects, it does so in a far blunter manner, often offering facile and unsatisfying answers.
Finally, given I talked so much of the game's writing, it's worth briefly going over the game's dialogue system. While Fallout used a dialogue tree structure for conversations, Wasteland 2 opts for a keyword-based dialogue system, though it's always possible to know exactly what a character would say by hovering the mouse pointer over a keyword. It's a system that lends itself to the party-based nature of the game, but gives the conversations a slightly less structured and natural feeling. It's also possible to input a keyword manually via a text box, something that should theoretically let enterprising players discover additional keywords and unlock even more conversation lines. I can't say I actually ever found any additional keywords to use however, as the NPC's responses always ranged from befuddlement to total silence (at points making me wonder whether what I'd typed went through).
All things considered, though, Wasteland 2 mostly succeeds at recapturing not only the volume but also the quality of the writing and quest design Interplay's titles offered in the late 90s. For that, the writers and designers at inXile get my full appreciation.
Character Progression and Gear
Wasteland 2 certainly wears its inspirations on its sleeve when it comes to character progression and offers a wide range of stats to select both during character creation and level up. A full party is composed by a core of four rangers that can be either created by the player or selected from a number of pre-made characters, to which a player can add a maximum of three more companion NPCs, for a total of seven party members.
Before making some considerations on how the character progression system of Wasteland 2 influences the gameplay, where it succeeds and where it fails, I'll give a brief breakdown. There are 7 main attributes: Coordination, Luck, Awareness, Strength, Speed, Intelligence, and finally, Charisma. While some of these attributes are checked directly in some situations (the sum total of the party's Charisma is referenced when attempting to recruit CNPCs, for example), attributes are mostly a mean to influence the game's derived stats. For example, Intelligence determines how many skill points are earned at level up, and Strength influences melee damage and a character's carry weight, among other things.
Most of the derived stats are self-explanatory, but just for the sake of clarity: Action Points or APs are the currency that's used during a turn to perform actions of any kind; Combat Initiative determines how fast and how often a character's turn comes up; CON or Constitution is Wasteland 2's equivalent to Hitpoints; Combat Speed determines the amount of distance a character can cover with a single AP. Wasteland 2 is a combat-heavy game so Awareness and Speed, the attributes that influence Combat Initiative, are vital. A character that doesn't act often in combat is essentially dead weight.
Given the number of skills present in the title, Intelligence is also a useful attribute, though it's worth noting that it's more important to not have a character with few skill points than having one with an enormous number of them. On the other side of the spectrum, Luck and Charisma didn't really feel like particularly compelling choices for a character, with benefits that felt respectively obfuscated and minimal. Overall, the attributes could have used another pass for balance purposes.
The other half of the equation in terms of character progression is skills, and Wasteland 2 really didn't skimp on this aspect. There are 31 skills in total in the game, 29 of which are available from the beginning of the game, plus a backer-only skill that adds flavor text to the game, and a secret skill that can be learned from a hidden item. The skills are divided into three broad categories: weapon skills, general skills and knowledge skills.
Weapon skills include weapon categories such as Assault Rifles, Bladed Weapons, Energy Weapons, Handguns, Shotguns and Sniper Rifles just to cite a few, each with its own pros and cons. The distinction between general skills and knowledge skills is a bit less clear. The first category includes the game's three dialogue skills (funnily called Hard Ass, Kiss Ass and Smart Ass), Brute Force, Outdoorsman, Leadership and Weaponsmithing among others. The second includes skills that I suppose are slightly more specialistic like Computer Science, First Aid, Surgeon, Lockpicking and Safecracking.
InXile has done a good job offering a large amount of opportunity to use most skills, either because they feed directly into the game's core systems, or because checks for those skills were handplaced in many areas. Even skills like Outdoorsman, Animal Whisperer and Mechanical Repair can occasionally solve a quest, and, as one might expect, checks abound for skills like Computer Science. As for combat skills, Wasteland 2 has a large number of them, but still manages to make every weapon category feel distinct. The game also does a good job of giving every weapon type a similar progression from low-level to high-level weapons, so every combat build feels viable (if not optimal) throughout the entire game.
I do, however, take issue with some aspects of Wasteland 2's skill system. There are a number of balance problems with combat skills (at the moment, Assault Rifles are the de facto kings of all weapons) and a few of the general and knowledge skills are underused (Mechanical Repair, in particular, becomes useless past Arizona), for starters. The way skill checks are implemented (percentile checks with a chance for critical failure that can otherwise be repeated indefinitely) also rewards players for wasting their time rather than building their characters properly, an issue compounded by the large amount of skill checks present in the game. Finally, too many of the skills boil down to small variations of the same theme: Lockpicking, Safecracking, Toaster Repair, and even Brute Force and Computer Science to some extent, are all used to open containers and doors.
I also have to mention that, while the system immediately impresses with its breadth of attributes and skills to choose from, there isn't a lot of depth. Character progression consists entirely of leveling up skills every level and attributes every 10 levels. There are no perks to choose from, no traits, no skill synergies, or any other possible element to spice things up. To a degree, I understand why: more options make the game more difficult to balance, and in Wasteland 2 we deal not just with a single character but a whole party, so things might have gotten unwieldy. That said, while I liked the decisions I had to make in character creation, I still wish there was a bit more after that.
I haven't tackled itemization so far, and to be honest, that's because it's really hard for me to say anything interesting about it. Weapons and armors progress from weak to strong in a largely straight line. I once found a Sniper Rifle with a huge gulf between the minimal and maximum damage value and later decided to drop it in favor of one with a more consistent damage output, but that was one of the few exceptions to the rule I can remember. There are also trinket items that give bonuses and occasionally also maluses to attributes, skills and derived attributes, and they are by far the most interesting type of items that can be found in the game, but they are unfortunately not enoguh to make up for a game with a dull gear progression.
Combat and Encounter Design
The first word that comes to my mind when I think about Wasteland 2's turn-based combat system is simplistic. There are fundamentally only a few maneuvers a character can choose from in combat: attacking (including multiple fire modes and a headshot modifier that lowers hit chance but raises damage), ambushing (triggers a reaction shot when the enemy performs an action while in line of sight), crouching (raises hit chance), moving, and using a skill or an object. Additionally, positioning is also a consideration, as there are bonuses for cover and elevation.
Whereas other games can get by with a few trash mob encounters simply thanks to the strengths of their own combat systems (a large number of interesting abilities to use or the inherent thrills of kinetic action, for example), Wasteland 2 lives and dies on its encounter design. Unfortunately, the game is very uneven on that front. At times, Wasteland 2 uses its combat system to its full potential, but for long stretches it can feel dull and underdeveloped.
I'll give a few examples. On the one hand, you have encounters like Whittier Narrows. It can be summarized as a typical Dragon Age II encounter in turn-based form. Cover is minimal and enemies keep pouring in from inaccessible parts of the map on all sides, essentially invalidating the party's positioning. It's simply dreadful. On the other hand, there are occasional gems. Areas like the Prison, which offers a range of entertaining firefights in highly polished arenas that play with elevation and cover, and interesting "boss fights" like the Scorpitrons, which can feel really thrilling, showcase what Wasteland 2's combat can be at its best. In between of the two extremes, there's a large amount of encounters that simply feel dull and repetitive.
It's also worth noting that one of the reasons combat can feel exasperating at times is that most of it is absolutely mandatory. While the encounter rate can be mitigated by using Outdoorsman and moving carefully around the maps, there is still a lot of fighting to do through a full playthrough. Seen from this lens, it's not difficult to understand why many encounters don't feel as compelling as they should: there's simply too many of them for each and every one to feel properly polished and curated. A part of me simply can't help but wonder if I'd feel the same way if stealth hadn't been cut from the game during production, but I guess I'll never know.
I also have a few other minor problems with the combat system, problems that I wouldn't even feel worth mentioning if the core was more compelling and complex: there is no way to properly position your characters before the start of an encounter, there is only one standard ammo type per weapon, the enemy and ally AI is unsophisticated, there are fewer enemy types than I expected and not as distinct as I'd hoped, and cover isn't conveyed well from a visual standpoint, especially outside of combat.
On the upside, though, the game can often feel challenging, especially without a thoroughly optimized party. I ran into plenty of situations where I had to save a character on the brink of death by putting my specialized medic into the line of fire, and even lost a couple of NPCs along the way. Resources are a little tighter than in most RPGs too, which can occasionally make even dull encounters feel meaningful and important. Ultimately, though, Wasteland 2's combat has too many problems to feel genuinely satisfying, and could have used more robust mechanics to offset its uneven encounter design. There's still fun to be had, but there are plenty of classics that did it better.
Exploration
When talking about exploration and level design in Wasteland 2, we're actually talking about two different gameplay phases. There's the navigation of actual areas with a full party, which takes up the bulk of the time spent exploring. In addition to that, there's also an abstract world map system that sees the player's party move from location to location. It involves managing the party's water supply and fending off hostiles along the way, and allows a player to discover new maps, hidden caches and oases, among other things.
Some zones on the world map are blocked by radiation walls that will damage a party without the properly upgraded radiation suits, which makes exploration feel more gated than it would be otherwise. That said, the map system still gives Wasteland 2 more breathing room and suggests a larger, dangerous world, sidestepping a bundle problems relating to the encounter rate and environments' size that players of the 3D Fallouts will be very familiar with.
Unfortunately, though, inXile didn't fully capitalize on the system they built. There isn't enough to discover in the world map. Sure, there are a few random caches and mysterious shrines (they reward a player with either skill or experience points) that pop out with regularity, and I appreciate that. However, the overwhelming majority of locations is either uncovered during the main storyline or pointed out by radio calls from fellow Desert Rangers. Some maps really feel like they would have been perfect for the players to stumble upon on their own, and seeing them doled out to the player via the radio feels like a lost opportunity.
As for the areas themselves, they tend to feature convoluted and generally messy layouts, but hit the right notes when it comes to size and optional paths. The vast majority of them are fairly large and feature a lot of optional content in addition to giving multiple, often skill-based ways to reach its points of interest. I take issue, however, with inXile's philosophy concerning loot distribution: I can't think of any location that didn't contain a frankly ludicrous amount of locked and trapped containers. Loot and resources are fairly important in Wasteland 2 so it's not a good idea to ignore these containers, but checking them all can feel exhausting, and I wish they were rarer and more spaced out.
I mentioned Fallout 2 earlier in the review, a title absolutely nailed the balance between quest-heavy interconnected hubs and more combat-heavy dungeon-like areas, so I should also note that Wasteland 2 relies comparatively too much on the latter. This is especially evident in the first half of the game: Highpool, the Ag Center, and to a lesser extent the Prison and Damonta place a premium on combat. As a player progresses through the main quest there's a gradual shift from shooting to talking and exploring, culminating with extremely satisfying locations like Angel Oracle and the aforementioned Hollywood. I strongly believe that the game's pacing would have really benefitted from breaking this progression more often than it does.
Sound and Art Design
Wasteland 2 is a relatively low budget game, so I'm really not surprised by the fact that it's mediocre in terms of graphical fidelity, nor do I intend to dwell on that too much. That said, I was genuinely disappointed to discover that, despite some promising early artwork, the game's art design is a bit of a mess. Assets often don't feel like they belong together or are obviously misused.
Portraits, in particular, are a disappointment. A lot of them are meant to be displayed at much higher resolutions than they are in game and end up looking crummy as a result. There are also too few portraits in general, with some of them reused even when not appropriate. I discussed with disheveled hobos dressed like bold yuppies, or even, in one particular egregious case, with a tall black man that looked like a small white man in his portrait.
There also isn't enough visual variation in terms of environments, something that's best exemplified by the fact that the locations in Arizona and Los Angeles look very similar. The transition from Arizona to Los Angeles is the perfect opportunity for a visual change, but aside from the presence of slightly more greenery and a different loading screen, the game looks fairly uniform throughout its entire runtime.
Sound-wise the game performs much better, luckily. The sound effects are about on par with the industry's standards these days: the weapons sound appropriately punchy and enemies sound like they should. The game also features some voice acting, and all performances are competent. A few of the deliveries are slightly exaggerated, but all characters sounded more or less like I expected.
Finally, Mark Morgan (already responsible for Fallout 1 and 2's soundtracks, as well as Planescape: Torment's) turns in another fine example of ambient music. Compared to his work on the Fallout series, Morgan seemingly aimed to create a constant musical texture that worked behind the scene to enhance the atmosphere of the game. This means that the soundtrack of Wasteland 2 isn't as fun to listen while you're not playing the game, but that's hardly something I can criticize it for.
I do, however, feel that making the soundtrack more distinctly different between Arizona and LA would have helped selling the game's atmosphere and the idea that the Rangers really have moved out of their comfort zone, while Morgan aimed for overall consistency. This is a nitpick though, and those who were excited about learning that the composer was involved in the making of the game will get exactly what they want out of his work.
Technical Issues and Polish
Wasteland 2 isn't a polished title by any measure, which shouldn't surprise anyone one bit given its size and genre. Just off the top of my head: there is a large number of typos in the game text, there's a number of script errors and broken quests, especially in the Los Angeles part of the game, objectives are often communicated poorly, and basic actions can take a few many clicks (though I'll note that this is the only major problem I had with the game's UI).
One thing that really surprised me, however, is how taxing the game was on my system (I currently use a Radeon R280x and an i5 4670 processor). Even after disabling SSAO, the game couldn't maintain a steady 60 fps framerate in plenty of areas, with occasional annoying dips down to 29-30 fps. It's true that the 60 fps standard isn't as important for turn-based games, but considering how ugly Wasteland 2 can look I'd have really hoped for something more. It's also worth noting that I'm basing this report on the game post-patches: a lot has been done in terms of usability, performance improvements and general bugfixing, but a lot more still has to be done for the game to feel fully polished.
Concluding Thoughts
Quite honestly, there are a lot of perfectly good reasons to dislike Wasteland 2. We're talking about a title that doesn't do anything genuinely outstanding gameplay-wise and features stretches that can honestly feel boring even for an RPG veteran. However, I can also see why someone could see it as a masterpiece, and while I don't myself, I certainly lean closer to that side of the spectrum. Wasteland 2 is a good game. This is because, for all its failing, inXile's post-apocalyptic sequel values the same things I value, things that ultimately make for a good RPG. Just to name a few: compelling character progression based on trade-offs, branching content, resource management, plenty of colorful prose and dialogue.
It's disappointing to find out that a game that could have been great is merely good, sure, but all things considered I'm satisfied with my first playthrough of Wasteland 2, and I'm already thinking about a second. Apologies to the denizes of Highpool, but I'm afraid I won't save you a second time.
Full disclosure: I was one of the backers during the original crowdfunding campaign for the title, and two ex-GameBanshee staffers, Thomas "Brother None" Beekers, and Eric "searanox" Schwarz, have been involved in the development of the title in some capacity. While I have maintained contact with them, I didn't provide any kind of advice nor was I consulted during the development of the game.
