Wasteland 2: Directors Cut Review

Wasteland 2: Directors Cut

The creators of the original Fallout on PC have brought us the sequel to the post apocalyptic strategy and role playing game. After just a year InXile Entertainment have brought us the Director’s cut of the previous “Wasteland 2” which was out in 2014, this includes improvement to certain aspects of the game as well as cool new features!

If you have played the original Wasteland 2, you will realise quite quickly that there isn’t too much difference from the graphics, there’s still an old retro PC look to the game which the classic gamers like myself will love. InXile have however, added in some nice new textures and certain new objects to populate all of the areas within the game! For those expecting it to look like the new Fallout 4 you will be greatly disappointed so, don’t expect too much. A new feature that people will like to know about is, that they have added some new voice acting which makes reading all of the constant scripting a lot easier!

If you haven’t played the game before, to give you an insight, the game itself lets you take control of a squad of 4 rangers trekking through a hellish wasteland which includes, vast desert areas, camps, ruined cities and many different environments for you to explore. The game has around 80+ hours of gameplay so you can be sure that you will not get bored of decking out your rangers with the best weapons, taking on some of the worst enemies and helping others to survive the wasteland!

You can use a default squad of already created characters who have their own back story, perks, characteristics and advantages or, you have the option to create and customise your own 4 man squad! InXile have given us a great little platform to be creative with your rangers with the ability to name them, change gender, age, religion, if he/she smokes, their ethnicity and even creating a biography for them to give them a little back story of their own! Now if that isn’t enough, InXile have also given us the advantage of attributes (Coordination, Luck, Awareness, Strength, Speed, Intelligence and Charisma), Skills which include, Combat, Knowledge and General Skills and a brand new feature of perks and quirks!

“You could be the sensible person who likes to have

good charismatic rangers who know how to talk their

way out of anything”

These aspects of the game will give you a huge advantage if you know how to use them, if you’re the run and gun type of role player and just hate conversing with anyone then, shove all of your squad full of firearm skills in the combat side and put a lot on Strength, Speed and Coordination but, you could be the sensible person who likes to have good charismatic rangers who know how to talk their way out of anything (Which is me), you will help with Charisma, Intelligence and certain general and knowledge skills.

With the new Quirks feature you can also add certain benefits and drawbacks to your rangers personality. This gives you a chance to have an advantage to certain skills but, lose out on others so, use these carefully! For example the Psychopath quirk gives you a benefit of gaining +4% bonus chance to hit and +2% bonus to critical chance with every successful attack but, it gives you a drawback that if you miss the attack you lose your bonus and get a -10% base chance to hit and -5% base critical chance.

The other new feature that they have added to your character customisation is the perk system. This gives you awesome advantages in certain situations and gives you a cool way to play through the game for example, some of my favorites are “Hard Ass, Kiss Ass and Smart Ass” these perks can help in certain conversations and can give you new options for dialogue which, helps you explore and find out new locations, missions information and opens up new adventures for you to play through.

You can level up your perks tree by earning EXP by doing certain things in the game and leveling up your rangers. If you customise your 4 man squad the right way and utilise the perk system, there won’t be anything you couldn’t do in the game!

InXile have adapted the controls of their original PC-Only game (which was pretty fiddly in the first place) to the Xbox surprisingly well with a numerous amount of menu wheels brought up with RT which helps trigger fights, change weapons and use certain skilled attacks with your rangers.

To change between your 4 man squad you can use the “RB & LB” buttons, you can bring up the basic inventory and character menu with the “back/select” button and by pressing your buttons on the d-pad you can bring up the Mission hub and your maps (both world and area map). If the controls start to get too fiddly don’t worry, the game has a really good ingame pop up tutorial which I can say in all honesty, helped me out big time!

Be aware, your 4 man squad is extremely precious and can be expanded with various recruits throughout the game but… if one of your squad dies, you only have 2 options, reload an old save that is close to your point or, trudge on with only 3 of your starter 4 man squad!

The combat system itself is turn based that works on AP (Action Points) that lets each of your characters move, shoot or use various items whilst in combat. This starts once you approach a random enemy in the wasteland and attempt to attack, once this starts a board type grid appears for you to start your turns. Each character has their own amount of AP that will allow you to use the imaginary board to move and attack the enemies strategically. The final feature that InXile have added is the new Precision Strike attacks that makes the virtual dice rolling tabletop role playing game (Try and say that 3 times really quickly) a little more excitable! This will allow you to be a little more reliable and accurate in the shooting aspect and make the game a lot less random.

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