Wasteland 2 (PC) review

[H-Man]

I will always love Kickstarter for seemingly, single handedly, reviving the isometric rpg. First we got Shadowrun Returns and Divinity, which were great, and now we have a sequel to the original post apocalyptic isometric rpg and the daddy of Fallout, Wasteland. The original is one of the few games of this type that I haven't played and I came into Wasteland 2 expecting old school Fallout, which is exactly what it is. Skills, attributes, inventories, turn based combat, moral dilemmas and resource management. It's geek-tastic. I spent the first hour creating a group of cowboys (A wyatt Earp, a Jayne from firefly, a sweet talking hussie, and a beardy old doctor) and have spent most of this weekend killing Mad Max like bandits and saving the day. You can really go to town on the characters - Jayne is a badass who can intimidate people in conversation, smash down doors and stuff that gets in the way, and generally beat the crap out of people with blunt weapons (not sharp mind, that's a different skill!). There's lock picking, safe cracking, computer hacking, bomb disarming, about 10 different types of weapon proficiencies! You can be a smart ass, a weapon smith, a field medic, a surgeon (they're not the same thing!) charm animals, and a toaster repair man. There's 3 different types of conversion skills! And a whole bunch more I can't remember. I genuinely love all this stuff and it's been something sorely missed from our video games for the best part of two decades. If I have to gripe, the visuals are functional and there's been the odd glitch, but so far (a day or so in) it's been brilliant. I'll finish by quoting some guy on metacritic who sums it up better:

'I like very mach fallout 1, 2, tactics. I played Fallout 3 - one run I had, no more than one hour. My best wish is TBS+RPG+post nuclear world. Finally I got it. Wasteland 2 had come. Now I play this game slowly, to realize happiness.'

[Guts]

LOL, that quote!

I'm anxiously waiting for my new desktop PC to arrive so I can finally dig into this. My big box should be on it's way from the U.S. and I got two digital keys for it too as a backer. It's great to read that first impressions have mainly been positive after all this wait for a proper, old-school roleplaying game.

Btw. what difficulty are you playing on, H-Man?

[H-Man]

Nice - i'm jealous of your big box!

I'm on the standard difficulty, which has been enough. I was getting my arse handed to me early on! It can be quite unforgiving - guns jam quite often, which usually takes a character out for two turns - the turn it jammed and another to unjam - and friendly fire is frequent if you don't watch los. This all adds to things for me tho - my pistol guy now carries two fully loaded pistols to quickly swap if one jams or if there's no time to spend a turn reloading. Things still balls up in spectacular fashion tho - my shotgun guy was hiding behind cover, in ambush mode. A bandit ran by, deftly ducked under the resulting shotgun blast that killed two of my teammates behind him

[Guts]

Hah, nice one! That example reminds me of all those good ol' times when Sulik shot me to giblets with a full-automatic SMG in Fallout 2. The crazy tribal f***!

Good to know about the difficulty, I'll probably start with Standard then too, as I'm probably spoiled rotten by years of all these modern pansy games.