I will begin saying that Wasteland 3 is a clear improvement on pretty much anything from Wasteland 2 with exception of the total size of the game, Wasteland 3 is a shorter game and Im not 100% sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. If you only wanted to know that, there is your answer but if you want to know more, keep reading.
I will start this review by what Wasteland 3 does the best and will finish it by what it does the worst, so if you hate Fargo or love him, feel free to ignore what you dont like to hear or just read all this super long bs, waster of time I wrote so you know how this is an OK game. I play RPGs, if Im bored by them, I mock them and curse the next three generations of the developers families, if Im not bored, it is OK, if Im really excited, it is a good game, I use that simple criteria and this game didnt bored me, that is it.
So, lets start, I watched an interview from Fargo, he claimed that they really focused on the little things on this game where you can always find something amusing spread through the world map.
The thing Wasteland 3 does the best is exactly those little moments. What a revelation, Fargo wasnt totally bsing this time, who would have thought?
You know, on Wasteland 2, after my 10000th trash mob killed on Ag Center I was thinking: "God why am I wasting my time with this bullshit? Am I insane? Is this punishment for my sins?" Ag center has two interesting moments in it: a)You see the big vegetables and learn that the place was destroyed on the begining and b) the end with the synth. All that middle, was the most forgettable, by the numbers garbage gameplay, a complete waste of time. It wasnt the only area like that, Damonta was the same BS, the Red Skorpion area was the same BS and that mediocre bullshit was on the same game where stuff like the Canyon of the Titan existed.
So, how is that relevant? All areas with exception of Aspen (even Aspen that is kinda trash mob intensive isnt as bottom of the barrel bullshit like Damonta was for example) are like the Canyon of the Titan and the California part of the previous game with faction choices galore and different ways to solve conflicts. On some areas, there are companions that interact alot like Lucia, Major Kwon and Cordite, some of those are crucial to the story, you can even recruit one of the Patriarch children, Vic. There is alot of options in quests now.
A special mention is reserved to your base, with all sorts of smaller factions pleading with you and you being able to recruit all kinds of characters. Every time you visit your base, you can hear conversations from secondary characters like Sergei Greatski talking with the radio guy, the marshals on the armory bragging about the people they shake up for money and the mechanics crew bantering with each other.
Also, most places have something that improve your team, like upgrades to your vehicle, hand placed loot, books and etc. It is hard to say much without spoiling the whole game but for the most part, I felt rewarded for exploring.
Other little details that are worthy mentioning is that I liked the radio interactions with the Patriarch doing public pronouncements, crazy characters doing advertisements, music playing and all sorts of people entering in contact with you through radio when you got to your base or when you are travelling on the world map. I also liked the inclusion of your vehicle in combat, unfortunately, for the most part, the encounters where it is present isnt what I would say brilliant (look to the combat section to know why).
So, everything is good, right? No, unfortunately.
The game is lacking in content that is why the game being short is sort of a big problem, only Colorado Springs, the Bizarre and Denver are proper quest hubs and of those three, alot of action happens on Colorado Springs, the Bizarre has a little bit less of side quests and choices and Denver is really, really small, claustrophobic being almost exclusively about the main quest with very few simple side quests. The Gippers that were hyped as one of the major factions were a disappointment , their HQ is just two small rooms and a statue with barely no side quests.
If the game were short but the content were enough for what the game was trying to accomplish, I wouldnt be so disappointed but it isnt. After you finish Aspen, capturing the second Patriarch child, it is pretty obvious that there were something like 20% to 30% of missing content by end game, after Aspen,the game rushes you hard into the main quest and it is over very quick. You barely can use the end game weapons by the time the game ends, and the main story barely develops enough so you have a satisfying context before the final choices of the game, the ending felt incredibly rushed.
THE STORY
As, Im talking about the story, the story in concept is much better than Wasteland 2 as the story of the Cochise Ai was very cliche. Wasteland 3 tries to be more shades of gray this time and the game sort of achieves that goal. The Patriarch isnt a boy scout and much of what is said about him has alot of truth but also alot of pure propaganda. His marshals shake people up with impunity, he doesnt care into properly policing Colorado and only seems to worry about keeping the power, he told a series of lies to his own people for years. At same time, he is a broken man with a destroyed family that is running out of time being surrounded by vultures.
On the other side, there is the idealistic Angela Deth, that has a no compromises personality and seem to not like the Patriarch way of ruling Colorado, her plan being based on alot of assumptions and trusting people that are much worse than the Patriarch.
In theory, this could end on a really interesting story, it sort of still works on the way it is implemented but only the skeleton of it is present on the game, you have two major interactions with the main characters of this story, once through the main story and one more each by the end, that is it.
I felt I needed a bit more context than that to be more invested on what was happening, I wasnt all that invested and just cared into an abstracted gamey "How can I get the best slides by the end?" level. It isnt bad, it isnt good, it is also very predictable, there is barely any mystery on it, everything happens as you expect it will, there isnt much excitement in there. It is enough to give a major context to the whole game but it isnt the best story of the world.
So, are there bad dialogue writing, massive black holes on the plot, lazy plotting or leaps of logic? Nope for the most part. The writing is pretty decent this time. I was furious with Wasteland 2 completely nonsensical BS for most of it, most of that is gone and I even laughed a few times of some jokes, I also found some character interactions really cleverly written. The writing was good enough to be amusing, no it wont enter on the hall of fame of the best written game of the ages, the dialogue is functional and on the same level of a Fallout New Vegas (no DLC), very utilitarian. There are no episodes of terrible writing that takes you out of the experience on how dumb it is but there are no moments of brilliance either.
What this game isnt, is a Fallout New Vegas in terms of setting. On the general themes and ideas around the setting, the Wasteland series was always very utilitarian. What I mean by utilitarian? There are barely no unifying idea behind it. Want crazy monks that worship a nuclear silo? You got it. Want cannibals with good manners? You got it. Want hippie robots? You got it. Every "cool" sounding idea enter on the kitchen sink with no much consideration beyond being "cool". What the Scar collectors want? Well... they want to murder and mayhem, I guess. What Cochise wants? Murder and mayhem because it doesnt like the rangers. What the rangers want? Be the good guys. What the Machine commune wants? Keep being hippies, I guess. That is it.
People complaint about the random whackiness on the Wasteland series all the time and while I agree with some of those complaints, the major issue I have with Wasteland isnt the whackiness as Fallout 1, 2 and Fallout 3: New Vegas have plenty of whacky moments too. The problem is that the Wasteland writers idea of world building is to have cool ideas and dont go anywhere with them, so they try to have the most over the top ideas on a kitchen sink setting that isnt that interesting.
"So, you want the game to be edgy and dark, DeepOcean?" No, I want it to have an interesting identity and they go somewhere interesting with this setting instead of just having random cool ideas all the time. What I mean for identity? Look for Beautiful Desolation made by the same guy that made Wasteland 3 concept art. There is some well done whacky shit in there.
CHARACTER BUILDING and SKILLS
Nope, this game isnt Underrail, this game isnt Kingmaker, you can even argue that this game was streamlined from Wasteland 2 (not that it is a bad thing per se). This game wont make your little autist inside jump of joy. No, you wont die with no friends by no lifing this game.
Its basically the same system of Wasteland 2, streamlined a bit, worse than Wasteland 2? Nope.
It is better because on the streamlining, they rebalanced the whole thing and pushed powerful bonus on pretty much all the attributes.They are all useful, depending of what you want to do and I had some hard time choosing which one I should invest on.
About the skills, some were merged like bladed was merged with blunt weapon, pistols with shotgun, SMGs with Assault rifles, it isnt major decline but I'm never for cutting skills when you can improve them. There is already a surplus of skill points on the game as it already is, having less skills to waste them doesnt help.
There is also plentiful skill checks on the game, I love this stuff. You can avoid even the final fights of the game if you have the right skills. You can solve entire quests with no shooting if you have the right skills. I always value this on a RPG and the game has it so it scores a major point.
The perks also add some complexity to character building, some perks can really have a serious impact on how you play, they arent just some +5% bullshit and you can do some building theorycrafting even if basic theorycrafting ( I wish there were more options on character building). It is mostly the same basic system of Wasteland 2 with improvements. You wont lose hours theorycrafting, there isnt much to min/max here, the system is too basic for that but what is in there was enough to entertain me. I got some builds that were fun to play with, if you expect a massive amount of options, play Underrail.
Also, more perk options are needed, only some skills provide perks all the way, some skills have no perks, some skills only have perks by the last level of the skill, some have questionable perks, others have useless perks because of the way the combat works (see the combat section).
So, I mentioned surplus of skill points, there was also a surplus of perk points (not enough good perk options by the end game). Yeah, there is a surplus of skill points and I was swiming in them by the end game, I also pretty much maxed out four of the six attributes with each of my characters. I wasnt on a situation of "Man, it is to sacrifice stealth and suck at combat to be able to open this level 10 door.", what should I do? Unfortunately.
Also, you can create new rangers on the fly for zero money and zero punishment what lead to the mule rangers degenerate gameplay, you can unload skills that you barely use like armorsmith, weaponsmith, barter and toaster repair into mule rangers, what makes you be able to max out the important skills even more easily. Taking in consideration that books give you the equivalent of 4 whole level ups to each skill, if you know what you are doing, and some skills, you dont even need to max out because they dont have good or dont have max level perks at all or they dont have level 10 skill checks. I ran out of skills to place skill points into.
All I have to say is that I enjoyed the character building system enough, it is better than Wasteland 2 and I had fun with it, but I wish it had more options.
THE COMBAT
Okay, now is time to talk about the elephant in the room, the combat system.
The combat system of Wasteland 3 could be good but it isnt because there are serious balance issues that pretty much break the system and some bad habits from Wasteland 2 remain here (the formulaic encounters and the broken armor system). So lets start by talking about the most broken system in the game, the stealth/initiative system:
The enemy perception works like this: Once you enter a circle around an unaware enemy, a detection meter starts filling up, once full, you are detected. The stealth skill increases the time it takes for this detection meter to fill up.
The initiative system on the game currently works like this: When the enemy notices you, there is a chance of you or the enemy having the first turn, this chance is individual and is in percentages, to increase the chance for a first turn of a certain party member, you need to improve the awareness attribute and the stealth skill.
All this sounds great in theory and many RPGs arent exactly known for having great stealth systems, many dont even have one. So, what is the problem? The problem is that Wasteland 3 designers made a system that pretty much nullify the stealth system and also made the game broken as fuck: the ambush system.
The ambush system: How the ambush system works? If one party member of yours had the first shot on an unaware enemy, combat starts with EVERYONE on your team having first turn indepedent of their initiative. This makes initiative useless and how on this game, fights end on 2 turns at best, having this overwhelming firepower on the first turn means enemies having no chance. This is a massive balance problem and it isnt the Sawyeristic autistic "muh balance" complaint, this is straight broken.
Enemies also dont have realistic lines of sight when they are on unaware mode, they have just a small circle around them, being pratically blind to your presense when you are just a few meters from them before the combat starts. Nope, this do not require massive investments on stealth, this is the default. You can just position your guys on perfect positions, even the ones with zero stealth, have your sniper/rocket guy take a shot, then have everyone active on the first turn and blast all enemies without chance of reaction.
One easy way to fix this is to remove the ambush system as it is now, you wouldnt need even to return to Wasteland 2 initiative system, just balance things to make hard and expensive to reach first turn on combat for all your guys after the first shot. If you have the first shot with your sniper, then it would be the initiative system to decide who would go afterwards on ALL situations. Also, why the enemies are blind before the combat? There is no reason for this. High stealth should be required to even get closer to enemies without being shot.
This would fix the combat?
There is also the problem of weapon balance and how the encounters are designed that I will explain bellow:
I like the way Wasteland 3 make each gun type unique and it is fun to play with them:
Shotguns have AoE cones and can obliterate cover, they also have a devastating special sttack.
SMGs are great at DPS but they have short range, arent that accurate and cant have precision shots.
Heavy weapons (flame throwers and heavy machine guns): They do great DPS, have decent range, can apply all sorts of debuffs to the enemies
Sniper rifles have long range, great damage and can do precision shots that when hit apply all sorts of debuffs to the enemy.
Revolvers: They can do devastating special precision shots with high frequency.
Melee weapons: Can stun enemies on special attacks and can apply bleed or poisoned status
Guns also come with different damage types like: explosive, ice, fire and energy, each with its advantages and disadvantages. You can also mod the guns and change their damage types.
There are also, all kinds of unique weapons and weapons with interesting twists on each category, explosive shotguns, explosive crossbows, freezing shotguns, weapons like the raytracer that subvert the sniper rifle archetype. Many of those weapons are hand placed, some of those weapons are faction rewards, some of those weapons are hidden Easter Eggs, some of those are rewards from faction travelling merchants that you might only find once. Some of those weapons and armor are long term rewards for investing on Toaster Repair and etc..
There are also, all sorts of perks unlocked by skills that can change how some of those weapons like providing extra damage if you hit burning enemies with melee weapons, providing free actions after reloads and all sorts of combos that change how those weapons work.
There are all sorts of armor as well, while I find the visual design of some of them questionable and the models too low res (the tank armor helmet is just ugly), they provide all kinds of bonuses, some are unique. The Verchitin armor (another armor that is also ugly as fuck) can make you a God with fucking 80 armor and pretty much immune to all energy damage, fire and ice damage and is a reward of toaster repair. There are also all sorts of implants and mods you can install on armor.
Beyond all those weapons, you can add special abilites and consumables, like all kinds of special abilities, you can hack enemies, you can debuff enemies, you can buff you guys, you can use drugs, you can place turrets and summon robots, all sorts of grenades like emp grenades, smoke grenades, plasma grenades, you can use animal whisper to charm certain animals that are little tanks and some hit hard like a truck.
Example: You are facing a scorpitron and you do a precision shot on it , hiting its CPU, making it go crazy on its allies. You can use machineguns to supress enemies, smoke grenades to give you cover, summon slicer dicers and laser turrets and etc.
I would be a KKK harvesting edgy lord if I pretended all those things didnt exist and they werent fun to play with but there is a very important question that Wasteland 3 fail to answer:
All those thing sound good but why shouldnt I simply make a whole team of 5 snipers and 1 rocket guy and call it a day?
All those stuff above is great but the encounter design of Wasteland 3 when associated with the armor system and the broken initiative system pretty much nullify most of the above. You see, the game tries to balance sniper rifles by making their ammo scarce but later on, you have so much money, so much ammo that you can easy afford a whole team of snipers and this way, wipe out the opposition, any opposition (even scorpitrons with 7500 hp) on the first turn. You can also mod snipers to shoot at even longer ranges to make double sure that the enemies are irrelevant.
So, should Inxile nerf sniper rifles into oblivion like they were on Wasteland 2? Nope, the real problem arent the sniper rifles, they are just the consequence, but the way the combat is setup, the first part of the problem, the completely broken ambush system and the useless initiative system, I already explained extensively, that is the first part of the problem, but the problem is made of three parts and the second I will explain now:
The armor system sucks.
That is it, the armor system sucks. The major problem is combat balance again and also, it isnt Sawyeristic "muh balance" complaint, it is just broken, period. Why is that the case?
The armor system on Wasteland 3 works this way:
There is a armor value.
There is a penetration value.
If the peneration is higher, the armor doent provide you any benefit. If the penetration is lower, armor starts applying debuffs to your damage that can reach 85% if the difference is large enough. Also, explosive, ice, fire and energy weapons completely ignore armor.
That is it. It is a very simplistic system, also, the penetration value doesnt change with range, if you shoot a target at 36m(max distance of the game), you will penetrate as well as if you penetrate at 1m. There is no loss of kinectic energy to attrition.
Okay, lets assume, applying varying penetration power with range is to ask too much from normie player brains, you could still make the current system work if a)There were enemies with high enough armor so they couldnt be so easily obliterated by you in 1 turn (If you think a massive scorpitron should have insane armor, the Inxile designers disagree with you) and all those armor stripping debuffs and abilities would be useful for something. b) If the enemy didnt have so insane penetration/weapons that ignore armor to the point that only ultra high end game armor being useful.
Yes, you can one shot even armored vehicles with sniper rifles and there are also alot of extremely powerful energy sniper rifles that just use common energy cell ammo, yeah, the same ammo that goes on energy SMGs and HMGs. Do you see the problem?
As the enemies dont have any way to mitigate damage and for some reason, Inxile thinks huge numbers are cool. Enemies can reach to Final Fantasy HP inflation levels of 10000 Hp and still manage to die in 1 turn to your guys. I dunno why Inxile doesnt copy other rpgs with sane systems.
Because armor doesnt protect you for shit unless you amass massive numbers of it and get some resistances, your entire team can be entirely obliterated on a single turn. I had a hilarious fight where my whole team was wiped out by two explosive turrets with exception of... you guess it? The sniper guy that could out range the turrets. Get why snipers are the way to go? He destroyed the turrets alone while my other team members kept trying to resuscitate each other and kept falling again after being one shotted again. Yeah, your rangers dont get automatically out of the fight after falling down, you dont even waste resources to have them back up beyond some ultra cheap first aid kits and it is ultra easy and cheap to remove injuries.
So, the armor system doesnt protect the enemy and it also doesnt protect you, yeah, it is broken. Well... there are implants that make you immune to critical hits, the enemies dont use it, there are armor mods that make you resistant to energy damage, the enemies dont use it. Well, encounter design has problems then?
Yes, my friend, the encounter design has issues, so I will talk about the third part of the combat problem:
I wouldnt say that the combat encounters completely sucks.
The game has a variety of encounters, with enemies that use smoke grenades, that use rockets against you, vehicles with powerful macineguns, suicidal enemies, enemies with flame throwers, some like the scar collectors use alot of energy weapons and mechanized animals, the Dorseys have robots and animals with them, the clown gang have explosive pigs they set on fire, there are mutants that explode when killed, there are massive scorpitrons roaming the wasteland, on some encounters, you can use your vehicle and etc. There is a decent variety of enemies and situations.
I also have to say that there are many situations where you can use your skills in your favour in combat, stealth to shut down alarms, you can shut down turrets with repair, open doors with lockpicking to open flanking positions, you can use perception to locate hidden alternative approachs to enemy positions, can use nerd stuff to poison or shut down enemies and etc. There are whole combat situations that can be avoided with the right skills and all of this is really fun and I really like when RPGs do this sort of stuff.
There are enough variety to keep the player interested but the major problem is that as the game progresses, there is less and less of the above.
You have an awesome first impression with all this (and later there is still some interesting encounters) but by the time you reach Denver, you start noticing that most combat situations are: Enemies behind cover on open spaces waiting for the tactical nuke. Aspen for example is mostly an enclosed place and still... most enemies are there standing behind cover on open spaces waiting for the nuke. This makes sniper rifles so good and the other weapons (with exception of the tier 8 Jackhammer shotgun, this thing is a broken monster) so useless in comparison.
This formulaic encounter design was the bane of Wasteland 2 and it remains here on some fashion even if there were a few encounters that managed to avoid the formula. You rarely if ever are attacked from multiple directions, you are never ambushed, you are rarely if ever swarmed by alot of enemies, enemies dont get reinforcements, there are enemy vehicles on Wasteland 3 but they behave like normal enemies with bigger hit boxes, you dont have blind spots where enemies might be hidden in there and you need to get close to check up, you never have to storm a place where you cant nuke the enemy inside from afar, you rarely deal with snipers where you need to actually hide and flank them with short range weapons and etc.
What I'm asking isnt Jagged Alliance or Fallout Tactics but look to games like DOS 1 in comparison where the variety in encounter design is big to see how limited Wasteland 3 remains here. There is not a single combat encounter that I said, "man, this is memorable". Some combat encounters are fun but nothing out of expected from good rpgs and most are just formulaic.
It is a shame because the systems to support such encounters are in there on the game but the encounter design on many places is formulaic as it can get and rarely take advantage of all those tools Wasteland 3 have available. At some point, the formulaic nature of the combat make you bored by it, especially random encounters that are very throw away encounters on copy pasted maps for most part.
So, the game punishes you if you try to do anything that isnt alpha striking and rewards you when you alpha strike, guiding the player on a very boring way to play.
CONCLUSION:
I enjoyed the game and I'm curious about the DLC even with all the issues I extensively exposed above. As I said on the begining of the review, the little moments and how clever designed some of them were carried me through but you need to have your expectations in check with this one and having in mind exactly on what you are getting yourself into. Do not try to compare this to Underrail or other incline codexian RPG.
It is a nice RPG hamburber while you wait for a full meal on the future, that is it. It is better than Wasteland 2 and honestly, that was exactly what I was expecting from it.
you want to do steady, reliable damage, both single target and aoe. Luck also looks fun tho. My favorite gun is just a pistol with +max range scope, favorite stat INT, and does it make sense to give Sneak Shit to everyone including level 10 perk? well I guess it does if you have Explosives, it's just that a sneak specialist with giant missile launcher (and 1 point of strength) didn't feel logical to me 
then again rambo did it, and sabouteurs with explosives do exist eh.
