It's pretty common for your first time playing a game to be full of mistakes. Sometimes you don't fully grasp the system so you play sub-optimally. Or maybe you don't know what skills are going to be more valuable for the sort of playthrough you're going for and you spec in the wrong direction. But Wasteland 2 is the first time I made the mistake of using pre-generated characters instead of making my own characters (apparently by following a specific guide and not actually choosing things on my own, according to more veteran players). If you use the four preset characters, you'll not only be lacking on a lot of valuable skills you'll also have overlap on some only mildly useful ones! Hope you don't like opening doors, openings safes, hacking, disarming traps, or shutting off alarms because you'll run into all those things immediately and never get to interact with any of them! But don't worry, you've got multiple people with the same dialogue option skills (called "Hard Ass", "Smart Ass", and "Kiss Ass" which I guess is supposed to be funny/clever but only got a groan out of me). Oh, but those skills aren't high enough level to actually use, just high enough to see that there are things you could say if you leveled up more.
So it already felt the game was funneling me into a sort-of triage mode where I needed to spend my levels getting into the skills that I lacked to be able to interact with the world in the way that I wanted to. Unfortunately, everyone is so miserably poor at shooting things that speccing into combat felt like the much more vital thing. Every character seemed to have about a 70% chance to hit on every shot but in practice it seemed to be closer to 30-40% because, good god, these people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
On top of all that, the game feels very clumsy. This is an area that, within the CRPG genre, I'm willing to cut an awful lot of slack because a lot of these games are unwieldy to try and control. But this one is kind of incredible in just how bad it can get. As an example, I had my medic character go down in combat. Not the end of the world - or so I though. I'll use the second medic character that I picked up to heal them. But the first medic has all the healing supplies because they're the better healer so it'd be an inefficient waste to have the second person carrying a bunch as well. This becomes a problem because when someone is downed, you lose access to their inventory. So I had a group of five people standing around, watching their friend bleed to death, and no one would reach into her pockets to pull out the thing to save her life. So she died there, on the floor because, I dunno, I guess it'd be rude to rifle through her backpack. It didn't have to be like that. Just let me take an item from them, what the fuck.
I do have one half-compliment though. I think the idea that you have to radio back to Ranger HQ to get your "promotion" is a neat idea that could be used in an interesting way but in practice just adds a few extra clicks because there's absolutely no restriction on where you can radio from. I was in a cavern underneath a research facility and apparently my radio got absolutely perfect reception down there. If I had to choose between pushing forward in a dungeon or backing out so I could level up then that could be an interesting choice to make but instead it's just tedium. Wasted potential there.
Even with all that frustration and utter lack of interest or fun with the combat, I'd be able to put up with it if the writing in the game were strong. But it isn't. It's extremely rote post-apocalyse fiction. Have you seen or read any post-apocalyptic fiction about a guy in a cowboy hat and a duster surviving in the wasteland? Congrats, you've pretty much seen the level of writing this game is at. In the handful of hours I got through, there was absolutely nothing that made me think sticking with this game was going to be worth it. No intriguing plot lines, no likable characters, no interesting lore to the world. Maybe I didn't get far enough in. But in the opening hours, this game is impressively dull.
Overall, I don't think I had any real fun with this game at all. There are some cool ideas that I'd like to see reworked into anything that isn't as miserable as this but there is nothing in this game that really makes me want to engage with it any more than I already have.
So it already felt the game was funneling me into a sort-of triage mode where I needed to spend my levels getting into the skills that I lacked to be able to interact with the world in the way that I wanted to. Unfortunately, everyone is so miserably poor at shooting things that speccing into combat felt like the much more vital thing. Every character seemed to have about a 70% chance to hit on every shot but in practice it seemed to be closer to 30-40% because, good god, these people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
On top of all that, the game feels very clumsy. This is an area that, within the CRPG genre, I'm willing to cut an awful lot of slack because a lot of these games are unwieldy to try and control. But this one is kind of incredible in just how bad it can get. As an example, I had my medic character go down in combat. Not the end of the world - or so I though. I'll use the second medic character that I picked up to heal them. But the first medic has all the healing supplies because they're the better healer so it'd be an inefficient waste to have the second person carrying a bunch as well. This becomes a problem because when someone is downed, you lose access to their inventory. So I had a group of five people standing around, watching their friend bleed to death, and no one would reach into her pockets to pull out the thing to save her life. So she died there, on the floor because, I dunno, I guess it'd be rude to rifle through her backpack. It didn't have to be like that. Just let me take an item from them, what the fuck.
I do have one half-compliment though. I think the idea that you have to radio back to Ranger HQ to get your "promotion" is a neat idea that could be used in an interesting way but in practice just adds a few extra clicks because there's absolutely no restriction on where you can radio from. I was in a cavern underneath a research facility and apparently my radio got absolutely perfect reception down there. If I had to choose between pushing forward in a dungeon or backing out so I could level up then that could be an interesting choice to make but instead it's just tedium. Wasted potential there.
Even with all that frustration and utter lack of interest or fun with the combat, I'd be able to put up with it if the writing in the game were strong. But it isn't. It's extremely rote post-apocalyse fiction. Have you seen or read any post-apocalyptic fiction about a guy in a cowboy hat and a duster surviving in the wasteland? Congrats, you've pretty much seen the level of writing this game is at. In the handful of hours I got through, there was absolutely nothing that made me think sticking with this game was going to be worth it. No intriguing plot lines, no likable characters, no interesting lore to the world. Maybe I didn't get far enough in. But in the opening hours, this game is impressively dull.
Overall, I don't think I had any real fun with this game at all. There are some cool ideas that I'd like to see reworked into anything that isn't as miserable as this but there is nothing in this game that really makes me want to engage with it any more than I already have.
2 Comments
@Erato_Heti Thank you so much!! I'm glad you enjoyed A Heart Between Parts! One of the things I enjoy most about using Backloggd is finding the smaller indie games and trying to get more eyes on them, so I'm glad to hear that it's working!
Erato_Heti
2 years ago
I was surprised to come across a longer and more negative review of yours. I can see why its not particularly common for you, but I was impressed by how well you were able to convey the clunky dissonance of this game in terms of the mechanics offered vs. the narrative implications. This insight will probably stick with me for a good bit, thanks.