Divinity Original Sin and Wasteland 2 reviews: Turn-based gaming's not dead yet!

Kickstarter funded fun-packed thrills

Wasteland 2

Another game people have been keen to put there money behind on the Steam early access program is Wasteland 2 (full release September 19th). inXile’s original Wasteland was the inspiration for the Fallout franchise and a seminal release in gaming history. With Wasteland 2 it has turned back the clock to create one of the best post-apocalyptic role-playing games to emerge in a long time.

Mad Max revisited?

After a hilarious cheap-as-chips live action intro straight out of the original Mad Max, I take control of a band of trainee Desert Rangers tasked with find a missing comrade, fixing radio antennas and being general do-gooders. My initial team of wannabe Rangers is a mix pre-generated and customised characters – a combination of Medic, Tech, Sniper and Sub Machine Gun Tank.

Wasteland 2 positively encourages specialisation. It’s really important to create a cohesive party with characters that rely upon each other. Followers crop up throughout the game, the most useful is Angela Death. She’s a veteran marshal who’s very powerful compared to my starting characters and you don’t have to travel very far to pick her up, (hint hint).

Character building

Set 15 years after the original, Wasteland 2 travels back to the same irradiated American Southwest. Travelling across the acrid and in places radioactive landscape uses lots of water, but oases are easy enough to find and, surprisingly, water was never an issue.

Combat with groups of bandits in the wild, is very tactical with action points to be spent wisely. Like the original XCOM, every point spent needs thought behind it. Loaded up with a couple of assault rifles with burst fire, the combat became a heck of lot easier. Combined with ambush and a whack load of ammo, things ran smoothly... until the attack of the killer robots.

Radioactive wasteland warning

Levelling up gave my crew skill points that could be added to boost gun, melee, medic, tech and social skills, but attribute points were found at the shrines scattered across the wastelands. The towns I came across seemed small but scratching beneath the surface there’s so much going on and while much loot is just tat, in some way everything ties into the sweeping narrative, making the game extremely organic and immersive.

Paying attention to what folk are saying to you is an important part of any game and if you’re the type of player who just clicks through all the options without reading them you will find yourself in trouble (be nice, drug dealers). Certain skills like Hard Ass and Kiss Ass allow you to affect dialogue in different ways.

Ticker tape time

At one point in the game I have to find a way of entering a prison, either by saving some unfortunate doggies with the plague or finding a robot track and killing bad guys. Guess what – I went out of my way to rescue the doggies.

The Reg Verdict

Wasteland 2 isn’t as polished as Divinity Original Sin and there are a few small issues here and there. Making a sequel to such an old game should be fraught with pitfalls. Wasteland 2 manages to have spent people’s Kickstarter money well with tons of content for a contemporary audience.

The marketing budget for both these games combined doesn’t come close to that of many full retail releases but they feel way more invigorating and immersive than big budget games I’ve played lately. And so the tide turns for turn-based games. ®