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If Wasteland 2 was as good as its feature list suggests, it would be incredible.
Everything about it is vast and intricate – from the sprawling semi-open world, to its branching and intertwining storylines, to its unashamedly complex stats and dice-rolling; a tangled web of maths affecting every action in the game in subtle and overt ways.
It’s deep, and it’s big. Perhaps too deep, and dare I say it, a bit too big.
The truth is, it sags in the middle, and it’s a long middle. Every new area you discover progresses as predictably as an episode of Power Rangers, and it grates. Fight dudes, help locals, advance plot, repeat.
WL2 also has a nasty habit of funnelling you into stat traps, like ploughing all your XP and money into guns and weapon mods just to have a fighting chance of your characters hitting something when they pull the trigger, only to find that you’ve neglected skills which are key to progressing through the story and getting essential loot.
As complex and deep as the stats and levelling system is, it just isn’t very well balanced. You could even go as far as to say it isn’t fit for purpose. Weapons which have a stated 2% chance of jamming can and will jam every few turns, which is an extreme annoyance at best, and can be the deciding factor in a shock defeat at worst.
Percentages become meaningless. The game might tell you there’s a 92% chance of hitting someone, but the 8% chance of missing seems to win about 30% of the time.
There’s challenging, and then there’s unfair. WL2 is far too often the latter. There’s a lot of game for your money here, and a good story to be found if you’re willing to wade through the nonsense, but it’s a big ask.
It’s not a bad game, and it’s worth playing for the plot and setting alone. But it’s not a great RPG, and that’s a problem, because it’s an RPG. Somehow, it amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
