A strong console adaptation of a great old-school roleplaying game.
By Leif Johnson
When I wrote my original review for the PC version of Wasteland 2 a little over a year ago, I gave it an 8.4 for “Great” and had this to say about it:
“Wasteland 2 might not be the prettiest CRPG to hit digital shelves this year, but it captures the harsh hypothetical realities of the post-apocalyptic American Southwest with excellent writing, decisions with terrifying consequences, and background voice work that reinforce the human suffering that results from them. It’s a game about the power of choices, and the few remaining glitches and issues with its combat do little to diminish its power.”
I recommend you read the full Wasteland 2 review to get a clear sense of what makes it a great game; this review will focus on what’s new and different in the Director’s Cut version, which moves the action over to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
The Director’s Cut bulges with new voice acting, new graphical upgrades, and gameplay modifications in the form of perks and traits. The formerly prevalent bugs and glitches are now as common as hope for the return of contemporary society in the grim, post-apocalyptic tale developer inXile weaves for us — which is to say not at all. In some cases, that means I got to witness content I missed the first time around. In a back room in the town of Highpool, for instance, I winced as I started an event that gave me my first big dose of trouble during last year’s playthrough. Here, however, it played out with all the alarms and angry bellows of goons I was supposed to hear.
We want to hear it.
Controls are all wonderfully intuitive, and it helps keep the action moving at a brisk rate.
I’m also impressed with how well inXile handled the transition to gamepad-based play. It particularly performs well when applying character skills such as lockpicking and safecracking to environmental objects. All you need to do is walk up to a safe or locked strongbox, pull the left trigger, and select the appropriate action from a skill wheel. The character with the proper ability will then announce that they’ll take a shot at it or somesuch, and boom, hopefully you’ve got some new goods. The right trigger handles combat abilities in a similar fashion, allowing you to reload or activate a skill like rapid fire with minimal effort. It’s all wonderfully intuitive, and it helps keep the action moving at a brisk rate. Navigating party inventory is similarly simple, as it merely requires cycling through the various rangers in your party with the left and right bumpers and transferring items with a click of the X button. The one drawback of all this is that sometimes the AI pathfinding falls short. It’s generally not that much of a problem, but early on there’s a segment with explosions that forced me to rely heavily on the “wait” command for most of my party members while my lead ranger scouted things out.
I’m much less in love with the “complete visual overhaul” the Director’s Cut brings. Comparing the two versions side by side, it’s easy to see that inXile remade each level down to the smallest detail, introducing new textures and populating formerly sparse maps with additional environmental objects. The catch is that most of the time the Director’s Cut merely looks different and not necessarily better. I’m thinking, for instance, of a decrepit trailer found early in the game, where a merchant named Wormy Jim cautiously hawks his wares. The rocks and trees surrounding his home look more real now, as a result of the shift the the Unity 5.0 engine. The ground around him is parched and sandy in this release, with asocial clumps out grass scattered about rather than the green blanket found in the original. It’s a step up, no doubt, but I admit I wouldn’t have noticed anything was different had I not taken the time to compare the two. That extends to the character models, which may outshine their 2014 predecessors in detail by still look simple and muddy up close. For all the work that’s been done, Wasteland 2 still looks like a game that’s from several years ago.
We want to hear it.
Elsewhere, I found myself wondering if anyone at inXile had tested the console versions in anything resembling a living room. I normally play my console games on a recliner that’s a mere five feet from my television (sorry, Mom), and even at that distance I had to hunch over to read Wasteland 2’s dialog choices and and the dot-matrix printout recounting my past actions. My neck still hurts from hours of doing that, and to my knowledge, there’s no way to make the in-game text larger.
Director’s Cut includes what feels like hours of new, high-quality voice work.
The saving grace is that the Director’s Cut includes what feels like hours of new voice work to add some punch to lines that were once only “spoken” on the readout, and they maintain original’s rather surprisingly high-quality voice acting without. All the same, that still doesn’t help much when you’re digging through your inventory and trying to read the tooltips.
I said last year that Wasteland 2’s turn-based combat tends to devolve into weary monotony after a few hours of play, and that tendency remains. With the Director’s Cut, though, some new options provide some necessary variety. In a nod to the Fallout games the original Wasteland paved the way for, “Precision Strikes” now allow you to take shots at specific body parts for a better chance of a critical hit. That’s a good thing, since even the easiest mode often involves a tedious juggle of weapon jams and misses, and any way of lessening that pain can only be a plus. (I will admit, though, that I chiefly used it during encounters where ammo was scarce or at least one of my party members was at death’s door.)
We want to hear it.
Also adding to the fun is a new, extensive set of “quirks” in the character creator.
Also adding to the fun is a new, extensive set of “quirks” in the character creator that bestow amazing bonuses at the cost of some crippling weaknesses (much like old-school Fallout’s perks). There’s the appropriately named “Asshole” quirk, for instance, which ensures that every Hard Ass dialogue option succeeds while sacrificing all “Kiss Ass” and “Smart Ass” options. There’s “Unlucky,” which causes a ranger to shoot out a random, powerful lightning bolt that can hit either friend or foe. One of my favorites is “Manic Depressive,” which adds or subtracts a point to attributes with every level gain. Mood swings, you know. Perks enrich the gameplay further, allowing bonuses to everything from armor and carry weight to reduced explosion damage as you level.
All of this translates into a game that maintains the elements that made the original release so memorable while seasoning it with a touch of spice. The quirks and perks soften the edges of the rougher parts of Wasteland 2’s combat, as do a few smarter arrangements for enemy encounters. Much as with the graphics, they’re not so groundbreaking that they slap you with the sheer force of their improvements; instead, they’re worked in so subtly that I sometimes only knew something was different after realizing that I was having more fun than I’d had at the same point last year.
The trouble with these kinds of improvements is that they’re not strong enough to warrant a replay if you’ve already finished the game, but taken together, they easily render the Director’s Cut the version to play if you’ve never picked it up before. The focus here is on the quality of life; a way of bringing a touch of green to the barren areas of the original design. While the core experience remains much the same, inXile’s work here affects everything, and generally for the better.
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut presents much the same experience that impressed us last year, but here it’s given a facelift that affects everything from its graphics to hours of new voiceover files. While echoes of the original release pacing problems remain, the Director’s Cut does much to add variety to the experience with new features such as perks, quirks, and precision aiming. It’s likely not enough to warrant a replay if you’ve already finished it, but if this is your first foray into inXile’s bleak vision of the future, this is the best place to start off.
