Aight, niggas!
I've played this for a fair share of hours now, restarted thrice because, well, the game is just too damn fun, and build diversity and C&C is great! Still haven't finished it yet, but I feel I'm ready to make a mini-review, however, so here goes..
Wasteland 3 is a game I've looked forward to for a long time, which should come to surprise noone at this point. You might say that, well, I was kind of HYPED. So does the game live up the expecations? In short, yes, but let's dig in..
The Good Stuff:
Story, writing and C&C:
WL3's story is nothing earthshatteringly novel and new, but it does work. You got a slew of factions with nice variety in a war with eachother, and you got some big bads with a backstory. The story is defnitely an improvement from WL2, and it seems to harken back to things like new vegas and fallout 2 in terms of having factions and C&C as endgame stuff.
The Patriarch as a dictator feels like it's natural, as a thing that would happen irl, with 1 leader or tribe uniting or subduing the other factions and clans.
The C&C feels great and well implemented, there are numerous tie-ins, call-backs and direct consequences to your actions throughout the game, that either progress or lock you out of content, well done.
The "fame" or "karma" system also seems to work nicely, as it influences trade, quests and flavor in terms of NPC conversations.
The writing is definitely an improvement over Wasteland 2, and I quite liked it. Nothing earthshatteringly shakespearean as usual, but great enough for me to not outright notice any type of "bad" writing. It gels well with the world and the characters, and serves to breath life into different parts of Colorado.
Highlights were things like Aspen and Victory Buchanan, well done overall and super fun, Union Station and "Fish Lips" gave me several chuckles, too. also very much liked the gipper faction and scar collectors.
Character customisation and skill checks:
There's quite a few different ways to build your character, in terms of visuals, attributes and skills and what not.
Feels great, and varied, and lends itself well to replayability. There's a lot of different perks and skills to choose from, too, which also feels useful in at least a handful situations.
There's plenty of skillchecks in the game, which is great, and no more RNG % that Wasteland 2 had.
Music and sound design:
I found the soundtrack pretty damn good, and the sounds and action, too.
The full voice acting is great, most NPCs have varied and interesting voices, which gives the world more vibrance immersion. Weapon sounds pack a punch, and feels great in the different types of weapons, grenades included also.
Combat:
Combat in Wasteland 3 feels great, simply put. There are a lot of different kinds of builds you can try out, alot of different combat perks and skills for each type of weapon specialization, although I wish there would have been more (DLC maybe)..
It's basically well known territory in terms of a sort of x-com style gameplay, with different terrain and covers, different attack styles and such. Nothing too complex, not overly simplistic either, could definitley have been expanded more though, more on that in the Bad Stuff part of this review.
Weapons and explosives feel great and pack a punch, feels meaty in terms of visuals and sound.
Graphics:
The game won't win any next-gen awards, for sure, but it does its job. Still an improvement from WL2, and the unity engine feels stretched to the limit. Wasn't any time during game when I thought, damn this looks fucking low quality and bad.Art direction is also a huge step up, and actually feels vibrant and cool in most areas. I also tried Reshade 4.0, and it definitely also helped bring the game up a notch in terms of graphics.
Armor models are incredibly well done, and weapon models too. There's quiete a few different armors and weapons to choose from, which lends itself to a nice flavour and variety for your squad. Nice.
The Bad Stuff:
It is all sunshines and good vibrations in Colorado, then? Unfortunately, not quite.
The game does have it's fair of annoying and jarring things, which leaves you kind of with mixed impression overall, at least at first glance.
Performance and bugs:
LOADING SCREENS, my god. Please optimize that shiet, holy fuck. I could build a space shuttle by the time shit finished, and I got an SSD. Performance during the game was "ok", but in some areas there were noticeable slowdowns, and sluggishness, even on a powerful rig. There were obvious memory leak during long game streaks, and I found several differnet bugs already. Disappointing, but expected I guess.
Badly tuned progression and balance:
XP, progression and overall balance seems to be InXile's achilles heel. Progression feels very off in this game, I have to say, which is a shame. You overlevel stuff often, and the xp bonus from stuff is out of balance. They should have done a balance pass in terms of xp and character progression through the world before release.
Skills are incredibly easy to obtain, so you never feel like there's any skillcheck you CANNOT pass, which in turn feels bad. You feel super powerful even early on with just abit min max. It's not that hard to tune your ranger squad to be able to handle anything the game throws at you, and that's kind takes some of the charm away.
The UI:
The UI felt very clunky and cumbersome, consolized. Especially inventory management and trade was tedicious and lacked several filters and quality of life improvements seen in most other recent rpgs... sad.
The itemization and item progression:
Itemization is another thing Inxile doesnt seem to get right with every game. There's several tier of weapons, but they feel weirdly gated and locked until some quests have been done, and you can go long streaks without ever replacing a starter weapon, but other weapon you can get upgrades right away.
There's also simple TOO MUCH FUCKING LOOT. Nigga this ain't diablo 5, calm the fuck down, aight.
Simplistic dumbed down mechanics, including combat:
The overworld map and kodiak looks cool, and really gives a good vibe, but it's very very underutilized. Like, alot. There's very few places to visit, and there's absolutely very few random encounters and no penalties for just driving around, like running out of gas or something like that.
I guess it was done to give players less hassle, and just fuck around the world.. eh. Alot more could have been done to flesh out the world traveling to acompany the RPG elements, but alas.
Difficulty is a joke, simply put. I played exclusively on Supreme Jerks difficulty, and while it certainly was a challenge, especially early on, it felt horrible lop-sided and unbalanced. Enemies totally annhilate you right away without any chance of comeback, or you murder enemies instantly at the start of fights.
Armor factor is a joke, and constitution too, as most enemies will simply just fucking one-shot you straight up if given the initiate to it.
Which leaves me to another point, initiative is very poorly handled in Wasteland 3. You can cheese fights by engaging first, and you will always start, and the turn order is all fucked and not transparant.
Combat felt great as I said, but the mechanics feels dumbed down. Rangers can be downed or killed, but without any consequences what so ever, other than just popping resurrect kits and heals... ehm ok, weird. There's no punishment for swapping gear, or doing other tasks during combat.
I guess if you prefer a fast, slick combat, yeah it delivers, but it's very shallow even with some implemented perks and weapon styles, which does feel great though. Armor modding and weapon modding for combat also seems like an afterthought.
Conclusion: So is it GUD?
Overall, well, Wasteland 3 feels like a worthy successor to Wasteland 2, far surpassing it on virtually every front. Wasteland 3 builds upon and improves most if not everything that Wasteland 2 set up or tried to. It's a vastly better game, which clearly shows this time around. This is by far InXile's best game to date, and dare I say feels closer to a real "Fallout 3" type of game than most of what we've gotten in the past 5-10 years time, barring only a select few gems in the same type and vein like these isometric tb ones.
When the Director's cut come out, (and it will) - I expect it to improve and fix most of my grievances with the game and, well, more content and maybe add some more complexity and mechanics to not dumb the game too much for the hardcore strategic combat fans.
Final rating: 7.5/10
