Wasteland Remastered Reviews

All the groundbreaking strategic fun of the original, but with a brand new dimension.

I loved wasteland 2 and 3. I like retro games, but this game is a shrine of game design choices that oughta be left in the past.

i only played this because it's available for so cheap, & i plan on playing the other games in the series so i wanted to get through this beforehand. it's unintuitive, repetitive, confusing and frustrating. despite this, it's a classic and even though I would say it's a bad game for today's standards, it's also great to experience how games were back in the days and to see how far we've come. the writing and world/lore are great, but even with the new QOL additions in this version, it's wayyyy too punishing and GRINDY. i can deal with clunky controls from an older game, but what the game really could've used was some easy mode where the dice rolls were rigged in your favor or something. if you're at all used to modern RPGs and have little to no patience for archaic game design, i'd steer clear. but if you're interested enough to give it the old college try, i recommend waitinf for a sale and trying it then, but be ready to get a refund potentially if you bounce off of it.

The original game itself isn't bad for the time, but does have flaws that make me not recommend it. In order of severity: First, I don't like the 'treasure hunt' style of campaign progression, where the only way to advance is to use one of dozens of skills or items on a particular tile on the map. For example, using your strength stat to clear rubble that looks like unclearable rubble you find everywhere else on the map, to reach an area where visually there is nothing there, because actually that region is full of enemies holding an item you need. A lot of the fault here is the remaster itself, because the map is full of background deco where before there was no art at that spot. The developers should have really made an effort to visually clarify what is deco, and what were original tiles you could interact with, but they didn't. Second, the interface is cumbersome, lots of menus and keypresses for common actions, with keypresses differing between different characters even for the same skill. Especially frequent and annoying is camping to gain HP after combat, healing 1 or 2 HP every press. You have to sit there hitting 'C' 30 times in a row, waiting for a slow animation between each press. Third, The remaster has a lot of bugs. Hit animations even when enemies did not actually attack you, playing gunfire sounds for a rabbit attacking you, showing a rat illustration for a rabbit, showing alive 3D character models during combat when they are actually dead, and more. Fourth, the remaster is lazy. Besides graphics, there are few quality of life improvements, not even the easy ones. Where are the tooltips to tell me what atttributes/skills do? Why can I not even be told how many enemies are attacking me, or are still alive? Fifth, during combat enemies do not advance closer, including enemies for whom you are out of range, letting you take pot shots forever. It really breaks the immersion. Sixth, the combat balance really gets screwed up once you get weapons that can burst or full auto. Full auto in particular; it's pretty close to just multiplying the damage by the number of bullets. The damage is even spread among multiple enemies. Suddenly a single character can instantly wipe out an enemy group that required your whole team before, which feels broken. Ammo isn't that expensive towards the mid-game, and if it just nearly multiplies damage anyway there's no reason to use single fire anymore. Seventh, the remaster has a lot of bugs. Hit animations even when enemies did not actually attack you, playing gunfire sounds for a rabbit attacking you, showing a rat illustration for a rabbit, showing alive 3D character models during combat when they are actually dead, and more.