Wasteland 2: Director's Cut (2015)

Great game!!

It's a bit getting used to, both mechanics and how to build your characters. If you like the original fallout games, you'll likely enjoy the humor in this one, it can be a bit quirky and millenial at times but it's not as bad as modern Bethesda games at all. You do notice it's not the biggest budget game, voice acting that changes between lines, same voice actor doing multiple characters (in an obvious way). it also feels like there's heavy use of the environment editor in Unity, at least it feels very basic in it's environmental design; This doesn't really ruin the experience for me though. I would recommend playing Wasteland Remastered (The original game) first if you care about some of the lore and repeat characters, it is a bit rough and grindy especially if you're not familiar with the older style RPG's, but it's interesting that minor events come back in the story of this game.

It took me just over a week to get these hours & finish my first playthrough of the game. The game hooked me fast & my sleeping pattern was on life support. The good. Weapon choices matter, I felt rewarded when diversifying my squad weaponry & didn't feel shoehorned into 1 or 2 weapon choices. Melee characters are incredibly useful too which is rare in my experience with these games. Combat heavily incentivises strategy, positioning & teamwork. I like that you can carefully set your squad up before combat starts, and get a cheeky free shot off to level the playing field round 0. Choices matter. The weight of decisions & playing with NPC "lives" leaves you with a sense of immersion. Tech "trees" (rows) allow you to mix & match far more than you'd expect, the amount of synergies I could combine lategame from unrelated techs was amazing. Without spoiling too much, the enemy AI were better off NOT using cover against my sniper. This trend of diverse options also extends to avenues of approach. Whether it's multiple ways to open a door, multiple ways of physically approaching a combat scenario, or multiple ways of solving a quest, this game generally allows you to find your …

Unbalanced mess. Every turn my weapon jams. I regret buying this especially since I enjoyed Wasteland 3 so much,

Got to a dead end early on. Not clear on what to do next. Became bored.

I actually prefer this one to W3, it's much grittier and in that closer to Fallout 1 and 2, it's got that post-apocalypse reel feel. This is what Fallout: Tactics wanted to be but never managed.