Wasteland 2

I barely remember the original Wasteland. I suspect I power-gamed it and waltzed through it.

A Short Review

On the heels of the excellent Hard West, playing Wasteland felt like a chore. Combat is mediocre. The voice acting is sub-par. The UI is lackluster. 

The RPG elements are okay. I would have liked more description of how skills work and how they relate to stats... basically they don't. The stupid grunt is just as good at computers as the genius. It was unclear how to plan for leveling. How many skills do I want to max out? Should I focus on a few or have a great breadth? Will my game be miserable if I don't have a certain skill? Do I need all the skills?

The random encounters were annoying. In my entire time playing I had about 10 encounters but they were almost all identical within two categories -- wimpy bandits or super tough lizards. The bandit encounter were a monotonous waste of time. The lizard encounters were annoying difficult and success was completely determined by how well my "animal specialist" rolled. 

The worst part of Wasteland 2 is that a single exploratory click can ruin the game. I had two such instances.

The first was in Highpool. After I saved the citizens I was walking around and exploring. Came across the graveyard and the UI lured me into digging up a grave. Look. I know it was dumb. I deserve the town to be mad at me. But in my defense, I am used to this style of game reward random clicking around. I'm fully willing to accept some punishment but what happened is the entire town aggroed on me, forcing me to slaughter them. That sucked, from a roleplay perspective but the gameplay also suffered because I lost out on quests, shops, and so on. Worst, it broke the gameflow in that I still had mandatory quests to accomplish in town but the clue-givers refused to talk to me. I had to read spoilers on the Internet to discover what to do. 

The second bad click experience was in the base. After being promoted, I was allowed to enter the base proper. In the barracks there was a nuke with a button. I hit the button. The nuke exploded, killing me and everyone in the base, GAME OVER. Uh.. seriously? You are going to leave a live nuke sitting in the barracks without even putting duct tape over the death button or a sign that says, "warning, live nuke, do not touch". I had even asked an NPC to give me a tour and he refused, saying that recruits never pay attention. Well, maybe if you had given me that tour, you and your buddies would still be alive and I would be playing Wasteland 2 instead of complain about it on a blog that nobody reads.

Summary

Don't bother. Go play Fallout 4 again. If you want squad tactics, try Hard West or XCom.