Completely missed previous week’s blog post, but now that I got an extra day off this week I’ll write one extra and accidentally it is about another thing that was affected by my degen life – Wasteland 3 playthrough that is now over and I can share my opinion.
I sure took my time and Ragnarok Online appearance didn’t help with removing RPG Mondays for a while, so it’s quite a delayed review, but better late than never, right?
So first bit goes to those who played Wasteland 2 (my review on that one is here) – if you enjoyed second game, then third one will most likely be great for you. It’s not taking away much from main concepts of previous game, just mostly culling some skills and perks, but honestly for me that was one of the best things. Other than that everything is just plain better in third game for my taste, so you should give it a go if you didn’t yet.
Now let’s talk about the game in general, even though some comparisons with previous game probably will be inevitable, so you can check link above to get an idea about what was my opinion regarding that one.
First of all let’s check the “cover” of the book – game is beautiful, engine is working really well and even “talking heads” (term was from Fallout classic games where in some important NPC dialogues you could see their animated and voice acted heads) are looking really good in all the animation, while being completely different view from main game. Sound part is great too – everything is voice acted and it is all done really well too, I can remember how many characters sound even, so it’s far from some generic lazy VA. Speaking of sound music part took a big role in the game with some themed songs that play in some particular moments to build the atmosphere better – really liked it, except little issues, like one super patriotic song that was playing on the loop during crazy long fight, chat sure enjoyed that. Speaking of issues regarding sound – sound balancing is a bit weird, so some sounds would destroy your ears, especially sound “stacking”, like hitting many enemies with one attack (AoE brawler stun for example) makes that attack sound super loud, or looting a lot of items from one container. Towards engine/general technical part of the game – some minor glitches, like name of the area being stuck in the middle of my screen for all session, ended up having one up through all final part of the game and it even was there when credits were rolling. Can’t really remember a lot more bugs, but there were some small one here and there, nothing critical/repeating a lot.
So “cover” is beautiful, let’s look inside the book. First of all writing is super good, it’s a bit weird and funny at times, but it’s high quality, dialogues with all somewhat important characters are either interesting or memeworthy (or both), story is great and unfolds slowly and nicely, giving you more food for your final decision gradually. Gameplay (well story too) was really good in second game and I loved it, but it became even better now, they polished combat of the second game and it feels even better now – every fight felt good, even when I was quite OP already it still felt good being OP and you still could just step in the combat with wrong foot and get destroyed in one turn without even taking control (and that was with top gear and on Normal difficulty, pretty sure harder ones could get very unfair). I want to separately praise the progression in this game – probably best feel of leveling your characters, every level up gives you a bunch of things to improve on every character and you always look forward to it and just enjoy investing all the points, even if you won’t feel the insane difference (depends though, some abilities are making a lot of difference), you still want to farm that XP.
Had some of my own personal issues with ending, some moments were a bit questionable, but just a bit, can’t really make it super flexible to satisfy everyone, liked the way ending was presented though btw. Also hoped there will be a bit more side/main missions to manipulate faction reputation more and that it would play more role in the ending, but I would say it was decent enough.
Overall game is great, joining the list of modern classic of RPG for me, 2nd game I’d probably leave for connoisseurs for factions and world building, but 3rd one is great overall for any kind of player, well if you like turn-based tactical combat as gameplay. Haven’t checked other ending, or rather other result of one-big-decision, maybe I’ll revisit it one day, pretty much every other place also has alternative ways to go through.