Waste(of time) 2: Directors Cut
Our story this time starts back in 1988 when Brian Fargo directed Wasteland. A post-apocalyptic role-playing game for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and DOS and published by EA, the title was critically acclaimed and commercially successful. Despite this, there was never a sequel produced. 1990’s Fountain Of Dreams was close, and Fargo’s follow up Meantime was cancelled. However, 1997 saw Fargo and Interplay produce Fallout, a name that is now in the legendary in the pantheon of gaming franchises. Meanwhile, the name Wasteland is a footnote in the annals of game history as the thing that inspired Fallout. On March 13th, 2012, Fargo and his new studio inXile entertainment launched their Kickstarter campaign for Wasteland 2, a direct sequel to the 1988 game. 61,290 and almost $3 million dollars later and a new Wasteland hit the PC and now, a year after it’s original release, the director's cut is hitting consoles.
Wasteland 2 follows the player as they take on the role of four desert rangers in Arizona after a nuclear holocaust destroyed the planet in 1998. After one of the senior rangers is found dead with signs of violence left on his body, the four player created rangers set out into the desert to find out what happened along with keeping the peace in the wasteland. The game boasts a reactionary tale, apparently accounting for your choices and serving up a different experience with every playthrough. However, as with most titles, the choices are not grey but disappointingly black or white. One example being the choice between saving one of two cities then hearing the destruction of the other. It’s handled kind of decently but falls in line with the rest of the game being a mix of stupidly obtuse and just not delivering what is promised with a surprising lack of polish.
You begin by creating your team of rangers. You can either create each one from the ground up, from rather limited options or pick from some premade rangers with names like Pills or Big Bert. Assigning points to your team can also be a bit of a pain, you don’t get that many points for a huge amount of skill trees, meaning that you will have to forgo some skills making some situations unavoidably frustrating.
After being set out into the world, you interact with it in two ways. When you in the town, you’re running around with an isometric perspective interacting with the world and NPCs just like you would expect. You’ll be chatting to people, shopping, taking on quests, being generally bored. Most of the quests involve simply moving from one place to another and talking to someone; no better than a job at a post office. Some of dialogue is interesting with a modicum of charm, but thumbing through endless dialogue options is tedious. Then when you leave towns, rather than a fully built open world, you’ll be an icon running around on some brown with no idea where you’re going. Even without a fully free roaming open world, it’s poor. Moving around the world is slow, with nothing in it but hidden crates. I adore the alternate history, post-apocalyptic setting, but found myself thoroughly disinterested.
Much of the game is combat focused, a practice that is obtusely explained and an exercise in frustration. It’s a turn-based, cover-based system featuring repetitive encounters and poor artificial intelligence. Every fight feels exactly the same, with endless random encounters in the open world which just exaggerated my exasperation. The long and short of it is you are either thumbing X throughout the fight or dying and restarting because the enemies are capable of performing out of this world feats. By the later levels, your still performing the same tasks as you were at level one. If you even get that far in the game, that is. Honestly, I had to struggle through much the tutorialising that Wasteland 2 sends your way. Scrolling through pages and pages of text is, one, not at all fun, and two, an awful and unengaging way of teaching mechanics to players, especially when the default controls mapped on the DualShock 4 are overly complicated.
The question remains if you are still game for Wasteland 2 despite my complaints, why bother grabbing this new ‘Game Of The Year’ edition for your console. Well, Wasteland 2 is now built in Unity 5, which means improved lighting, shading, and textures. Still the game manages to look like it was built after right after Fallout 2 rather than just before Fallout 4. With the game coming to consoles, you’ll be getting gamepad support on PC. On top of that there are some balance changes, new voice over, along with a perk system and precision strikes in combat. To be far, it’s a compelling upgrade for those already with the game and, credit where credit is due, it’s going to those owners for the low, low price of nothing.
To be fair, with almost 70,000 people backing the sequel on Kickstarter, there has to be a market for this type of game. However, Wasteland 2 never grabs you like other games do. A tease of a promise of a glimpse of something special is laid in front you by the marketing and promo materials but I just ended up sad and disappointed as I began to pay more and more attention to the man behind the curtain.
If you are the right type of genre fan you’ll be able to overlook the flaws the game has to appreciate it in a much more positive light than I. Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight and games of a similar ilk respect the past by using it to inform certain design decisions then using the progress of the last decades to make them modern-retro classics. If you’re looking for something needlessly complex, obtuse, obscure, and irritating, you’re looking for Wasteland 2, you’re looking for a game lodged back in the 1980s. A time where manuals were thick, patience was long, and attention spans were not necessarily as distracted by other things. In the passing years, it’s spiritual cousin Fallout has morphed one of titans of the RPG genre, while Wasteland 2 is a relic that is stuck, in almost every way, 20 years in the past.
