This style of game never sat well with me. I played Wasteland 2, and it had a myriad of problems. This installment also felt jilted, slow, and janky. The movement was blocky and stuttering, combat was not intuitive and overly punishing, and the game design and story were both sub-par. Wasteland 3 makes some improvements on the base formula, but keeps all of the flaws of its predecessor.
The opening of the game got me excited. It started off promising, removing some tedious aspects of the game, and streamlining other bits. Simple quality of life fixes, like not having to switch to a separate character and interact with an object to use their specific skill. Instead, no matter who you are controlling, the person with that skill uses it. These fixes are far overshadowed by the lackluster gameplay and, in general, how the game spread itself too thin. There are a lot of areas of focus, but none get enough attention.
You begin the game by picking a two person team to complete the introductory story mission. Afterwards, in typical Wasteland fashion, you get to build your team from the ground up. In an effort to make a balanced team, I made sure nobody had overlapping skills. Even with the created team of 4 people, and getting 2 more to join from story segments, there are still some skills you cannot learn with a full team. There are simply too many in total. I enjoy the idea of having some skills or abilities locked away, to promote certain styles of gameplay, or to make sure that a player can't simply achieve everything they come across with ease, but the balance among this system is trivial at best. Even in the early game, I would encounter skill checks with such a high requirement that you would have had to have known about it and planned to access this in advance to ever be able to reach it at that early of a point. This effectively locks off that area entirely, except to repeat players, someone who is following a guide, or an extremely lucky first timer. Since you have to use skill points to also increase your base accuracy with your weapons, you have even less points to invest in skills. This combination of too many skills, not enough skill points, and division of skill points among different combat, speech, and object skill checks, left me feeling underpowered with all of them. It is further exacerbated by the lack of options. I would often get deep into a conversation with someone and have a skill check arrive to have to complete the conversation properly. Even after investing upwards of 4 and 5 levels into different skills across all characters, you would often still be faced with a high level check of a skill you have no investment in as your only option, forcing you to choose a simpler, worse option. You cannot prepare for these scenarios, and it leaves me feeling continually frustrated, as I fail conversation skill checks and barriers over and over for the first several hours of the game.
Combat in these types of game has never been rewarding. Wasteland is no exception, and often much worse than other games of this type, in the tactical battle genre. Since your out-of-battle movement is so laborious and slow, and you never know when you are coming up on an encounter scenario, you often are at a huge disadvantage going into a battle. For example, one of the first missions has you tasked with finding a kidnapped family. As you traverse this area, you walk past an invisible trigger, and are forced into a conversation option with a group of enemies before a battle begins. This is troublesome for several reasons. Your crew lags behind you as you follow, so unless you were meticulously and tediously moving them one-by-one across the map, you are most likely going to enter this next battle with one person out in front, and then the rest of your team in a large group behind them. Nobody will be in cover, and you cannot effectively disperse your team or plan your attack. This is made worse by a very strange and antagonistic feature. If you do not take an aggressive conversation option with this enemy team, the battle will start on their turn. Personally, I enjoy searching for non-combat conversation options. In this instance, I was picking passive options to try and find a solution, and the enemies simply attacked, giving them the first turn, and placing me out of position. If I scrolled to the bottom and choose the option with [attack] in front of it, we get to move first, and I can take a turn to get behind cover and set myself up for later rounds. It incentivized me to be highly aggressive and always attack, otherwise I'd be at a large disadvantage. There is sometimes a secret back way into a fight, or ways to disable and hurt the enemy greatly, such as destroying the generator powering an enemy turret, or blowing up an oil barrel. These options don't become apparent or accessible until the battle is underway. This meant it was far more advantageous for me to make saves very often, and simply reset and face the battle again on better terms, ruining immersion and enjoyment.
These steps are only necessary because the battle system is horrible. You barely have enough Action Points (AP) to move behind cover and attack. Many times I would be forced to move and then do nothing for the rest of my turn, or stay far behind cover and not be able to help my team. This happened every single battle. I never felt like I could assess the battlefield in real time, and make smart or defensive choices. The enemies are stronger than you, have more AP and better weapons, and you are always walking headlong into encampments filled with turrets and traps. The "play style," that I had to reset and take the battle once I had specific knowledge of what the layout would be, was so boring and trite. In a slow-paced, tactical game, these design decisions are baffling. I did not want to have to plan each battle out by entering the enemy line of sight, triggering a fight, seeing where their weak points were, and then restarting and attacking again after careful placement and preparation. The pace that was incentivized here was mind-numbingly slow and sitting through loading screens continuously is the opposite of exciting gameplay.
In these tactical style games, with the grid movement system, and cover and line-of-sight features, you are supposed to feel like you are playing a sort of chess or board game during your fights. Planning out your moves, making careful decisions, and expertly eliminating your foes through careful preparation on the battlefield. It is made impossible by the arbitrary imposed difficulty, the crude and ancient inventory and supply management schemes, and the random chance attacking. Not only do they force you into battles against a larger amount of opponents than your team, you never know how many or what you are up against, or what they can do. You can't see your opponents movement, range, or line of sight. You don't know what they are equipped with or how much AP they have. Gameplay elements like these have been implemented by much better entries in the genre, such as XCOM, and even newer, less serious games like Mario + Rabids Battle Kingdom give you this information to help plan better. Without this information you have to take a lot of chances, so the whole concept of the genre is essentially thrown out the window. I have also long suspected that games of this type don't represent real numbers to you - at least as far as when showing chance-to-hit percentages. This part is completely anecdotal, but I almost stopped playing entirely when one of my characters missed a 94% chance-to-hit shot. The same character also missed two consecutive 80% shots in a later fight. At the end of all of my gripes, you can still be as prepared and careful as possible, but when you can't rely on your most accurate marksman to hit, it strips all enjoyment for me.
The battle system, which is the focal point of gameplay, leaves much to be desired, and unfortunately, so does everything else. There is no nuance in your conversation options. Another game that pretends to be diverse by giving you several different conversation options, but the characters you talk to are all so flat and one-dimensional, that your choices mean nothing. I love to search out the road less traveled and find a peaceful way to resolve the problems of the game, but you are rarely given that option. In many cases, there are scripted sequences where you are approached by a group of people, and you have to choose sides on the spot. There is no option to take neither side, and no option to explain why you made a previous decision. None of the skills or paths leading up to this can get you out of this choice. You are plainly faced with an option to choose one team and kill the other. This further impacts your reputation with certain factions. After being frustrated with the battles themselves, and then being forced to pick a side and kill a group of people who brought a fight to me, I was then also frustrated with the story. If you want to be a game that is highly focused on combat, that combat needs to be near flawless. When combat sucks and I also don't have options outside of combat, you just get bored.
I'm not saying a game like this needs to have many speech options, but they plainly put skills and perks into the game to sweet-talk or strong-arm people, and then give you almost no meaningful ways to use them. Why waste points on talking when you can't talk your way out of a fight? Why put points into marksmanship when you are highly encouraged and motivated to reset to get the most efficient win? In a game where death and damage is highly punishing, you need to win a lot of battles in winning fashion, and they don't give you fun tools to achieve that.
The story itself makes little sense, and relies heavily on tropes of post-apocalypse combined with the far future. It is a familiar feeling if you have consumed practically any similar media, and it suffers for it majorly. They leave in quirks and call-backs from prior games in the series, and also from similar games in the genre, and those should have been left in the past. Most of these gameplay elements, like the toaster repair skill, add nothing to the game. Games have come a long way since the inception of this style of play, yet they cling to the old, unfun habits for no reason, hurting themselves in the process. I had given Wasteland 2 several tries in the past, and had to quit each time. Wasteland 3 is more of the same. Its improvements too little and too impotent to matter, and the gameplay standard it sets was old 6 years ago. If you are a die-hard tactical RPG or Wasteland fan, you might like it. If you enjoy fun, elegant, and engaging gameplay, you will not.
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