Gay Trans Lion

Its really hard for me to point out specifically what I do not like about Wasteland 2. Like everything in it just works in conjunction to create and overall unpleasant and annoying experience.

For example when you start the game you have to opportunity to create 4 characters write out their personality, their ethnicity, background etc. But none of the is ever referenced in the game. Those four characters are blank slates that will say anything and have no real personality. Worse is the fact that dialogue choices in the game only advance the plot or give flavor text they really do not define your characters or what they believe. If anything the other party members you pick up throughout the game fill this role. It sucks when you have a protagonist you cannot really modify in a role playing game.

But this is not the worst part, I hate the fact that this a game really dependent on skill checks. Nothing but skill checks for hours on end. Like to such an extent that you are locked out from certain solutions in the game if you don’t have the correct skill. Or forced into certain story paths just because your character did not have the right Kiss Ass modifier. 

It is so frustrating because other games with skill checks do not force you into these kinds of situations. Usually if you want to devote your character to one path or one faction the resulting skills checks are usually done to see what kind of play style you want to do or how easier it will be in the mission. In this game if your team invests in Mechanical Repair instead of Hard Ass, well you cannot reconcile with this character and now you have to kill all of them. You are not really given a choice. Essentially the skill checks are not complementary to the base game they are mandatory and the wrong party build up can waste your hours as you have to reroll and try again.

I also really don’t understand the tone of this game as well. It tries to be like Fallout (the original isometric ones) and be a serious story about life in the apocalypse and how there are a group of men bringing order to chaos and yada yada but then it has and has pop culture references, jokes, and black humor strewn throughout where its not really appropriate? It feels so weird to play a game where you are defending a settlement from a bunch of murderous raiders and then hear someone shout some stupid catchphrase from a Clint Eastwood movie. Or someone talking about how hungry they are after looking at a bunch of corpses of a murdered family.

In the Fallout games the reason why I could, more or less, accept all the tropes and jokes and what not is because the game knew the perfect moment when to make them and when to let the drama play out. When you are traveling across the wasteland, doing nothing but waiting essentially, seeing a Monty Python and The Holy Grail joke is fine since like the story has come to stand still essentially. On the same note when you work with the sheriff to kill a corrupt and ruthless Casino Owner the game does not have constant jokes about the situation, its going to be a shootout and the game does not distract from the severity of the moment. 

In essence the Wasteland 2 tone operates at weird and inappropriate moments that just underplay the overall world and story of the game.

Lastly the game is buggy and its systems are poorly explained in so many ways that it just can be aggravating to play. The best example of this is in the Canyon of Titan or the Rail Nomads. In the canyon if you want to have a more peaceful run then you have to go obey the laws of having a priest escort. However after you reach the end of the canyon you lose the escort and are not able to get one again even if you wanted to go back into the canyon and look for items or boxes you might have missed. You are essentially forced to fight with raiders and when you do you are instantly hostile to a group of priests who control the valley. Essentially fucking up any chance you had of trying a peaceful run. Sometimes in the middle of a battle the game can crash to desktop or when a scripted event is supposed to happen or the game can be stuck in a cutscene and you will have to quit the game because it wont progress. Sometimes if you progress through the game in the wrong way you will break the scripts and the game will just be fucked up and character interactions will not operate correctly.

I could go on and on but I think at this point its clear what my problems wit the game are. Feel free to play it but I couldn’t find anything good about the game no matter how hard I tried. The turn based tactical gameplay is fun but honestly aside from that the game is meh. Play the fallout games instead (any of them really) they are much better.