I am of course way late in playing this and the reason is that I completely forgot that I even owned this. I have this on the GOG platform and never even bothered to install the GOG Galaxy client. I’ve never played the legendary first game either but of course know a bit about its history and how the Fallout series is kind of its bastard stepchild. This was kind of an old-fashioned game even back in 2014 but I found that I rather like it that way.

Set also in the post-nuclear apocalypse, albeit without the retro 1950s aesthetic, the game has you controlling a squad of the so-called Desert Rangers. This is an organization of self-appointed lawmen who help keep order in Arizona and are based in a Citadel that they liberated from the Guardians, a faction who worshipped technology. Here your team is tasked with investigating the death of a veteran ranger who has been following up on mysterious threats about man-machine synthesis. This reminds General Vargas, the leader of the rangers, about the Guardians. He also wants to trace the origin of the radio transmissions sending this threat and this involves expanding the rangers’ radio network across Arizona. So you’ll go from town to town solving their problems and gaining access to their radio towers. Since parts of the desert is irradiated, you’ll also need to find radiation suits to survive the trips to the more inaccessible parts as Vargas wants to end the rangers’ isolation and extend their promise of protection to the entire state.

This is a turn-based party RPG that unlike most modern games allows a quite generous seven party members. It handles things a little oddly in that you get to create a team of four core characters as you like and then recruit up to three NPCs in the world. There are no classes but there are plenty of skills and perks to shape the characters. In addition to the expected firearms and melee weapons, this game has energy weapons to reflect its future setting. However that there are no real power armors like in Fallout and while there are wild animals, mutants, robots and plenty of raiders, you won’t be seeing iconic things like deathclaws or super-mutants either. You travel across an overland map to get to locations and it’s not much of a spoiler to say that you eventually get to go to California as well.

I really loved getting into this game, I suppose because everything is so straightforward and familiar that it feels like coming home. While there are a lot of skills, each one has a very narrow use-case so it’s easy to understand everything and there’s no real need to stress out over optimal builds. The turn-based system is simple as well as you just spend action points to move or attack. Characters can crouch and get move behind cover or go into a kind of overwatch mode. There’s nothing complicated like delaying your action or activating special abilities. There are some quirks here and there, like the fact that levelling up involves radioing home to base so that your commanding officer can promote your team members but that’s just part of the charm.

I enjoyed exploring this version of a post-apocalyptic world as well. I like that it shows how many different communities are rebuilding since it has been so long since the bombs fell and that there is even trade and defense arrangements between them. I mostly like the quest arcs for each location too, even if after a while the pattern of having to dislodge a ruling faction from power or intervene in a conflict between two factions vying for control of the town gets a little too repetitive. I did not like the main quest at all however and I would imagine it would be worse for those who have played the first game as it’s plainly a repeat of the big bad. It’s ridiculous how there’s a big exposition dump right at the end to explain what the bad guys are doing instead of gradually doing quests to uncover their plans. The main quests are really all about placing repeaters to extend the reach of the rangers’ radio network and to find and upgrade radiation suits to get to where you need to go. Why not something more impressive, like rallying the other towns against the obvious threat of the Children of the Citadel or gathering proof from the synth bodies they leave behind?

Another problem is that while I enjoyed the relatively simple mechanics for a while, the game goes on for long enough for me to get bored of them. The tactics get repetitive and too easy. It’s not like there’s a good balance between the weapons and combat styles either as clearly the best tactic is to engage enemies from as far away as possible, so assault rifles and sniper rifles are just plainly better than anything else. The only real concern is the difficulty of finding or buying enough ammunition for the weapon you really want everyone to use. Combat is generally quite easy but there are difficulty spikes. This is because the damage you do is almost entirely determined by the quality of your weapons. Your skills generally only improve your hit chances. This means you’ll have a bad time if you run into enemies who are packing gear of a higher tier than you. It’s gets downright ridiculous later in the game as enemies have so many hit points that your weapons barely do anything to them, even though you’re shooting M-16 rifles at ordinary humans.

Overall this is second tier RPG and feels the part. I enjoyed the old-school feel and the turn-based combat but it really is lacking in many aspects. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if this were a short game but it’s quite a long one and sometimes it even feels like it deliberately drags out the experience by having large maps with torturously long winding paths through them that you have to repeatedly navigate. The game is weird in all kinds of ways too. For example water is made out to be kind of a big deal as you travel around Arizona and there is special equipment and perks to help deal with that. But it isn’t really as there are plenty of oasis around and by the time you get to California it doesn’t matter at all. Then there is the writing for the quests. At times, it can be surprising how many outcomes there can be for some quests, including evil paths. But at other times, progress is artificially gated to a frustrating extent. In one town for example it seems like the commander of the prison will wipe out the surrounding community no matter what you do.

Anyway I actually am glad that I came back to finish this game even if I was surprised by the time that it took. But at the same time I know that Wasteland 3 is already out but I really don’t have any interest in playing more of the same. It was an okay but not great experience and I’d need more sophisticated mechanics and better writing than this to attract me.