WL3 is a big, combat heavy RPG through post apocalyptic Colorado. Expect anywhere between 50-70 hours of gameplay if you do most the side quests. The heart of this game is the moral choices it will throw at you. Lots of factions with their own agendas. Most the time your going to piss someone off, and it will get you thinking about the consequences for minutes before you make a choice. There is no pure good path in this world, other games have tried this before as well, but Wasteland 3 really excels at it. Combat is turn based as Wasteland 2 was, built on action points like the old Fallout and Xcom games. Its a tried and true system that works good enough. Guns are pretty hard hitting in this game. Succeeding in combat means taking the first shot so your party gets to go first and aren't caught flat footed where you will be shot to ribbons. Weapons come in various styles: melee based, handguns, shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, heavy machine guns, sniper rifles, energy weapons, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers. Each weapon category has abilities you can take as perks to make them more strategic. For instance submachine guns have an "unload" option to let you empty your entire clip at reduced accuracy. Heavy machine guns have a supress ability to keep enemies pin downed and limit their attacking ability, There are about 20 guns in each category. Most types have several "energy" type variants that do more damage to robots and less to humans. There are mods to make the weapons better, provided you have a character who has taken the appropriate skill. The mods are fairly simple compared to recent fallouts, but some are pretty powerful. Enhancing the range of shotguns and flamethrowers particularly spells a wave of doom to your enemies. Armor mods exist as well, but are less valuable, and not worth the bother imo. Now lets go over some negatives. The world map is decent size, it does feel a little cramped and seems to be always night. Would have liked to seen it made a little larger with more open areas. Load times are long, not sure if its all the hand drawn art or what, but expect near minute load times everytime you enter a new area. Perhaps they could have preloaded areas as you start getting close to an exit point. My final rating would probably be 8.5 for WL3. Since Meta doesn't allow halves, I rounded up to 9 given the sheer size and length of this game. It's rarely boring and combat remains fun even though your using the same strategies over and over. An outstanding achievement by Inexile.
The Divinity Sin series is the best kickstarter games to date. DOS: 2 improves on the original with a better story, expanded skills, and fully voiced NPC's just about everywhere. The heart and hook of this game is the combat system though. A new system is in place where your characters have both physical and magical armor. It serves as an important "buffer" before they start taking real damage to hit points. Even more important, armor blocks status effects and this game has a slew of nasty ones. Stunned, Cursed, Burning, Petrified, Diseased, Suffocating, Frozen, Crippled, to name just a few. Once your armor goes, things get ugly real fast. Enemies have both magic and physical armor as well, so here is where the strategy on your part comes into play. You can build a balanced party good for dealing with all enemies, or you can focus on doing one type of damage and have a cakewalk on some enemies, and a nightmare with others. Up to you. The game has a good amount of dialogue solvable encounters. You work against a persuausion system where where an NPC has a base attitude stat toward you and then an attribute like intelligence or strength is used to reflect the type of answer you can give. To me some of the attributes didn't make a whole lot of sense. I can see intelligence, wits, and memory being used, but think Finesse and Constitution shouldn't really be able to help you answer questions. The crafting system is there, but in a highly neutered state. There is no blacksmithing anymore, just the ability to craft food, potions, arrows, and grenades. Finding an epic recipe and going on a quest for the ingredients make for interesting quests so not sure why they did away with it. Perhaps they ran out of time to implement it. Finally I wouldn't be giving an honest review if I didn't comment on the overuse of elements in this game. Sure they were meant to give another layer of strategy to combat, and sometime do, but nearly every skill can produce fire, electric, ice, poison, etc. I don't think level 1 skills in general should have been able to create fire fields and poison clouds. It also makes every battle graphically quite messy, hard to highlight an enemy sometime because they are often overlayed in smoke, poison, and fire. There you have it. I give it a 9 despite my quibbles about the elements and crafting. With the fall of Bioware, we are really lucky to have Larian still producing high quality RPGs.
Let me say first, know what you're buying. This expansion works more like a supercharged DLC than a true expansion. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of new content, but none of it extends the original ending of the game and it becomes bloated at various points in the game (more on this later). So lets get to the meat of it. This expansion is all about three new bosses (chosen) and making you hate them. X-Com has never been much **** with "bosses", so it feels a little out of place, too Hollywood for a game that once was a pretty gritty and realistic strategy game. These over the top, trash talking bosses could be great if used more subtly, but Firaxis shoves them down your throat. They pop up to tell you how weak and doomed you are at any given point. They die, reappear, only to come back stronger. They would be great for a cinematic game like Metal Gear, not in a strategy game. Now lets move onto the ridiculous power of these bosses. They get to move, attack, move in battle. Can summon Advent out of thin air. They automatically hit (defense is irrelevant, they'll hit you through with smoke grenades and Aid bots). So there is the problem, a once hardcore strategy game has thrown out strategy to create drama, wanting you to hate these bosses. In a game like XCom the mystique of a powerful alien should be mystery and subtlety, I think they did it all wrong. Some new developers are on the Firaxis team for sure. The other main draw if the exp is the three new friendly factions. Reapers, Skirmishers, and Templars. I kind of like what they did with this. Through these new factions you get covert actions which open up some decent strategic options and unique upgrades (I love pistol specialized snipers and getting a flat +1 damage to all of them made for some fun gaming, albeit a tad overpowered :). The actual classes of these factions are well done, and feel distinct enough from the original classes to have a place. My rating of 7 is mostly due to these factions. So I have mixed feelings on WOTC. There is a lot in this expansion pack but fitting it in the original core story seems overwhelming. A new player who didn't play X-Com 2 vanilla will be lost in all the new missions the expansion throws at you. The rate of main story mission to side mission is about 1 in 10 in the expansion, where the original is more 1 in 5. Hopefully Firaxis will tone the bosses down in XCom 3, while keeping these factions. Give us a longer main story with time to better fit in all these new missions and upgrades. Bring back some of the mystery into Xcom. Let us stumble on a big bad boss by turning a dark corner and seeing it for the first time. And always make sure its a strategy first game over theatrics.
This game has been in production forever. I was really expecting to be blown away but like most kickstarter games, it lacks in overall presentation and "polish". The dialogue in this game is abundant and complex, much like planescape, but at times the choices felt pretty random. By that I mean the "right" and "wrong" choices should have been made a little more apparent through either the graphics or text before hand. Another detractor is no portrait of NPC speakers! Just a blank space where one should be. With a zoomed out isometric game, you can't really see them on screen so need a portrait (or at least I do) to make a connection. Otherwise everyone is virtually the same. This is something you might expect to see in Beta but not in the finished project. I would deduct one whole point for lack if this element. Combat is pretty basic and follows the rules of most turn based RPG combat. You get to move and attack in a turn. There are some really interesting abilities that liven up the combat especially with Cyphers. Lots of area and cone type effects. The way you can interact with the environment in combat also spices it up. Flanking exists and adds another strategic element. Animations and sound effects are fairly good. Characters will often do a voice plug relevant to the situation (for instance if flanked and they move will say "let me get out of here"). I was pretty happy with combat overall, others might not be but I liked it. I haven't beat the game yet so interested to see how many hours it will take. For a game in production so long I think 50 should be expected. I would recommend this to old school hardcore RPG players only. If you look at today's mainstream RPGs like Dragon Age, I don't think most of them will go for it even if they play tabletop Numenera.
One of the most anticipated games ever for me, unfortunately turned out to be a huge disappointment. The original was no standalone masterpiece either but at least was polished with little to no game breaking bugs. NWN2 had serious bugs that lingered for months, some unfixed to this day. Camera was annoying and despite patches still doesn't work quite like the original. While graphics, lighting, and textures got an upgrade. Faces, sound, voice acting, and animations did not. And don't get me started on the toolset. Performance crawled on the best machines at the time, highly CPU dependent. Somewhere buried was a decent, but linear, RPG. The community abandoned this game pretty quickly. Diehards stuck around for over a year hoping for bug fixes and toolset support, only to learn Obsidian is no Bioware. On todays machines the game is playable at least, and a single RPG player fan might want to check it out if they have exhausted better choices. Of course the true value of picking up NWN2 lies in gaining access to the excellent expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. As good as MOB was, it still can't quite fix the disappointment that NWN2 was.
