Wasteland 3

This plays as a quintessential modern isometric RPG, which has learned the lessons of revival-pioneers like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin. It's a solid game with decently engaging writing, good combat, great worldbuilding, and nice artwork and soundtrack. It also runs phenomenally and has well-implemented difficulty settings. By being such an exemplar of its genre, however, it led me to clearly see the biggest weaknesses of the genre, which are so prominent in the game. It is caught between being driven by the story and factions and being driven by combat strategy - part Disco Elysium, part XCOM 2, and scratching neither itch satisfactorily. The D&D-based approach to skills and perks quickly comes to feel tired, like something this game should've outgrown. Minmaxing and party composition become chores which stunt the gameplay experience, and world map exploration feels incredibly shallow when contrasted with something like Expeditions: Viking.

Though my impressions seem negative, these are reflections on the genre as well as the game. The points stand, but it is nevertheless a very well polished game with an engaging narrative, and enjoyable combat and roleplaying.

Wasteland 3 is a mix of Divinity and XCOM and it's awesome. The story is great, and the fact that most characters in the game are a**holes make you actually have to think before deciding whether you wanna help them. There is a lot of choices in this game and it allows you to roleplay whether as a bunch of bloodthirsty murderers or absolute saints. This also vastly improve the replayability as there are many different outcomes to quests as well as different endings to the game. The lore of the game is rich and interesting, and the characters are well written and believable making Colorado one immersive wasteland to explore.

However there are some glaring issues with the game. Even after over a year the game still have many bugs and technical issues, although I did not encounter any game breaking bug throughout my playthrough. The open world also feels empty at times as there is only around 15 explorable areas on the map making the later stage of your playthrough just clicking to drive the Kodiak from point A to point B without much happening. This is bad compared to Divinity Original Sin 2 which have big fully explorable open world crammed with side quests and NPCs. However I understand that it would be very difficult to do the same thing with Wasteland 3 considering the different regions of Colorado that the story take place in. The combat is also not as deep and engaging as DOS2 and XCOM, and mostly just come down to how you build your Rangers rather than using tactics.

Despite all the cons, Wasteland 3 is an expertly crafted RPG that is definitely worth playing if you are into the genre.

For 2020, Wasteland 3 was my most anticipated game outside of perhaps Cyperpunk 2077 and that's despite not having played any of the Wasteland games prior. Not that I trust Inxile that much (immense respect goes to the OG legend Brian Fargo), but it's just from everything we've been previewed from the game over time that it just looked amazing with its scale and its ambition. And after having finishing just now, yep it does live to it's potential.

Wasteland 3 plays like a modern version of the old Fallout games. Desolate land after a nuclear apocalypse land, you have all the RPG stuff with weapons, armors, items, medicine, skills and perks. But unlike Fallout, this isn't the story of a single hero, but rather a team of rangers. Your team will consist of 6 rangers, 2 of which you choose at the start of the game (the game will offer you different pre-made pairs, or you can make your own), 2 more recruits and eventually the 5th and 6th slots are made up of NPCs that you can decide to add to your team. For my playthrough I stuck with the same 6 rangers, but there is definitely options in this game for a lot of flexibility.

The battle systems is awesome, it's essentially XCom. The battle system is turn based and works with the same cover strategies, it's not quite as hard as you can revive your fallen teammates but it's just so satisfying to play a Xcom-like battle system in such a big RPG game. After your victory you get to loot your enemies in true Fallout fashion, and another cool thing is that you have infinite inventory so you never have to worry about space and you can just pick up everything without worrying about it. The key is to have a balanced team with each ranger preferably using a different weapon type so you don't run out of ammo, if everyone has an automatic weapon for example you'll run out quick of those type of bullets. The strategy is good and the battles are quite fun, there is some bigger ones with friendly allies joining in the carnage.

There's lots of key skills that you will need, and the best approach is to balance them between your team. Each one should focus on maxing out certain ones. Some are pretty obvious like Barter allows you for better trades, but some others like Kick Ass and Hard Ass allow you to walk yourself out of sticky situations and force your enemies to comply to your demands. Lockpicking is pretty key too as they are some many locked doors and crates all over the game. Each weapon type has its own skillset too, so you'll want to focus on just 1 or 2 for each ranger. There's definitely lots of flexibility in how you want to create your team and who does what, the game is not exactly linear that way and everyone will have a different team on their playthrough.

Decisions, decisions. There's lots of times the game will throw you a hard decision that will affect the rest of the game. Which faction will you side with? Will you go with a certain one and then betray and kill them anyway? Not that this is a brand new concept, but it's quite well executed in this game and it feels like the choices really matter. You'll get to places with 3-4 different factions and have to choose how to best handle the situation, and it doesn't feel like that is a correct or wrong way to do things but some decisions might leave you on a more complicated path. All of these decisions will affect your path in the game, and even to the point of affecting who your true final enemy will be.

I greatly enjoyed this game. Unfortunately Game Pass for PC doesn't track the number of hours that I've played, but my guess would be around 60 hours as I the most side quests possible and probably listened to too many NPC stories (I really got into the lore of this world). The battle system did get a little repetitive around halfway in the game, but that's something that can probably be said about all RPGs that are very long and it has very few flaws otherwise. I would highly recommend Wasteland 3 to fans of CRPGs and Turn Based Tactics, it marries both genres quite well and is overall really great.