Reviews
[Review] ‘Wasteland 3’ Brings a Wickedly Weird, Violent, and Puerile Post-Apocalyptic RPG World to Life
The return of Wasteland in 2014 was a welcome, and increasingly necessary, thing. There was no longer a post-apocalyptic RPG quite like the original isometric Fallout games. In the years since Wasteland 2 was released, the world of RPGs has changed significantly, with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin II taking the cRPG style of old into deeper, fresher territory, and Fallout becoming something else entirely. To succeed, Wasteland 3 needs to do a lot more than ring the nostalgia bell. It needs to be a far more concrete reminder of how great that irradiated American landscape of old can be, but find fresh relevance and accessibility in order to stand out from its inspirations.
Wasteland 3 does indeed achieve this. Developer inXile has delivered a post-apocalyptic RPG that’s not shy about being seedy, violent, and somewhat distasteful, whilst also offering substantially in-depth player choice and customization.
After the desert wastes of Wasteland 2, inXile has taken the Rangers to the nuclear winter wonderland of Colorado, where, surprise, surprise, a power struggle is occurring (this time between a war-hungry family) that your team of battle-hardened bastards will have a hand in sorting out however you see fit.
The Rangers will deal with deranged cults, power-hungry mobsters, bitter and broken soldiers, movie monster-obsessed clans, and tetchy synthetics as they plow their way through blizzards, mountain ranges, and deadly radiation both on foot and in their hulking armored snowmobile.
While the story has to head in certain directions, there’s an incredible depth of choice to how you approach it that’s made stronger by the variance your character’s abilities bring to the table. You take a squad of up to six Rangers out into action, and customize them as you see fit. From skills, abilities, and equipment to look, personality, and perks, there’s a real effort to make these characters engaging, and fluid in terms of how they handle.
As they gain XP, you can further upgrade skills to make a character a specialist in a particular field, thus helping to balance the squad for all kinds of situations. Want to have an animal tamer? A snarling, intimidating hardass? A sniveling ass kisser? A master of the blade? Or maybe someone that just enjoys fixing toasters? Wasteland 3 can give you a Ranger for every season, and skills benefit characters on multiple levels.
Say your specialty is as a mechanic. Not only are you better at fixing things, you also do more damage to certain enemy types. By having several benefits to each skill, there’s genuinely viable variety. The game provides plenty of opportunities to test out your specialized skills too, with lots of conversation options, doors, equipment, and abilities that are only open to certain skill sets and levels.
This is what adds a richness to Wasteland 3’s world beyond the storytelling. Your squad may be relative strangers to the Colorado wastes, but you feel much more involved with the people and places in it.
While the world of Wasteland 3 may be one ruined by the aftermath of nuclear war, it’s not exactly a grey, bleak place to inhabit. Instead it’s filled with wackadoodle places to go and a varied mixture of eccentric and downright ridiculous people to meet. Colorado has its stony-faced soldiers, spirited resistance fighters, and grim political warfare, but it also has exploding pigs, a gang of clowns, antique porn collectors, abusive parrots, and an entire colony devoted to a dress code of classic movie monsters. Throw in giant worms, death robots, and various other nasties and you have a wonderfully pulpy concoction that has the ability to surprise at every turn.
That isn’t to say it all hits. The humor is obviously subjective, and your tolerance for/acceptance of crude satire is definitely tested with some subplots, but overall the balance of the puerile and the satirical is pretty well handled.
When time is not spent chatting with the locals and exploring the wintry wastes, it’s generally spent fighting anyone or anything that doesn’t want resolution. As per-Wasteland 2, the real-time movement of exploration switches to turn-based action once a fight is initiated. Things such as distance, elevation, and cover come into play as you maneuver your squad into position for battle with only a limited amount of actions per turn. It pays to scope out the situation ahead of time where possible in order to give yourself the tactical edge. Often you can take out multiple enemies at once by hitting explosive objects before even starting the fight proper. In many cases, the enemy outnumber the squad, so finding any advantage ahead of time becomes imperative as the threats become deadlier.
On console, the management of combat is fiddly. There’s only so much that can be onscreen at once, and as such, it’s easy to forget special abilities in the heat of the moment, and it’s not always easy to understand exactly what chance you have to hit or be hit. It understandably gets easier to grasp as you get deeper into the game, but the early going is often a sloppy, chaotic, and frustrating struggle to keep the Rangers on their feet.
It has to be said though that Wasteland 3 adapts to a controller fairly well overall. Sure it can be a tad finickity getting through menus and finding what should be easily accessible information, but it handles in a largely comfortable manner otherwise. There are better attempts at condensing a PC-centric title’s interface into more console-friendly form (see XCOM 2 or Divinity: Original Sin), but Wasteland 3 still does the job to a satisfactory, if unremarkable level.
Wasteland 3’s biggest stumbling block currently is its technical hiccups. Though there have been some improvements made since launch, there’s still an inordinate amount of times where menus freeze, textures don’t load, and actions suddenly become impossible to perform with a reload. It’s a real shame because there are times where I was so drawn into the game, losing hours to it, and having a great time, only for it to be soured by one of those problems. The previous game was certainly a rougher experience, but then you could excuse it a bit more. Now, with a more comfortable development, it’s disappointing.
The negatives are not enough to really affect how I ended up feeling about Wasteland 3. It’s a far superior game to its predecessor, and I really liked that too despite its many issues. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in exploring, fighting, tinkering, and more in this world. It’s not afraid to let you figure things out for yourself and do things your way, but it isn’t impenetrable for newcomers either. Throw in a co-op mode that doesn’t overly dilute what makes playing solo so enjoyable, but actually enhances the experience, and you have a highly engrossing dose of silly, violent RPG goodness.
Wasteland 3 review code for PS4 Pro provided by the publisher.
Wasteland 3 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Books
‘Scary Movie Night’ Review: A Hitchcock-Themed Thriller Full of Juicy Twists But Not Much Else
A secluded mansion. A group of friends each harboring secrets. A party built around one woman’s love of Alfred Hitchcock. These are the ingredients laid out to begin Scary Movie Night, the sophomore novel from Miranda Smith and follow-up to her breakout debut, Smile for the Cameras.
They’re all, standing alone and taken together, very promising ingredients, and when Smith starts to bounce all those secrets and all that seclusion around with a little murder in the mix, they make for some juicy plotting. But fun twists and macabre themed party nights do not a thriller make. There is fun to be had here, but for all its reliance on classic horror tropes and the films of a master of cinematic suspense, Scary Movie Night never quite finds a way to become something more.
Movie blogger and influencer Tippi (yes, she’s named for Tippi Hedren from The Birds) is going through a rough patch. Her upcoming marriage was just called off, and she’s planning to hit the Cannes Film Festival then travel the world as a newly single woman, even shifting her career focus from movies to travel in the process. Her friends Ava, Marlowe, and Constance are supportive, but they also know it might be the last time they see Tippi for a while, so master party planner Ava comes up with the perfect sendoff: A themed scary movie night party, complete with costumes, hosted at the elegant estate of Tippi’s grandmother, Marmee.
Marmee, you see, has her own history with the glamour of Hollywood, and even has a private cinema set up in her mansion. It’s the perfect venue for the perfect night, at least until Tippi starts receiving vaguely threatening notes from her ex, and the first body turns up.
See what I mean about all the ingredients being there? This book starts with so much promise, particularly when guests turn up for the party and reveal their various movie costumes. There’s so much to chew on, and Smith wastes no time diving directly into the drama of it all. The book moves primarily through Tippi’s first-person perspective, so we get the lowdown on her friends, their various relationships, the quarrels that have defined previous social interactions, and much more. It’s a series of rich veins all tapped at once, and it feels like the book is genuinely going somewhere quite fun.
Here’s the thing: The book does go somewhere quite fun; it just gets there in a way that I found both frustrating and often unfulfilling. The characters aren’t defined by their choices in the book so much as they’re defined by what Tippi tells us about each of them, and while the notion of Tippi as an unreliable narrator is key to the plot, her supporting cast never really gets a chance to sit up and exist as anything other than archetypes in her head. The dialogue doesn’t help matters in this regard, and I kept finding myself wishing one of Tippi’s friends would just seize the narrative, just for a moment, so I’d get some sense of these people beyond the broad brushstrokes of the protagonist.
Which brings us to the issue of Tippi as the narrator in the first place. Like the Hitchcock blondes on which she’s clearly modeled, we’re meant to learn about her through her choices, and constantly question whether or not she’s made the right ones. Why did she leave her ex with a wedding looming? Why is she changing career paths? Why does she have to be talked into her own going-away party? How she reacts to these things, and what she’s really after, will be what defines her, but here’s the thing: Tippi, for all her Hitchcockian layers of plotting, never steps forward as a fully formed character. Like the Hitch films playing in the background during the party, she’s more like a suggestion of a character than a person.
Writing first-person present-tense is tricky under the best of circumstances, but doing it when your protagonist is meant to be harboring secrets of her own is especially challenging, and it just…never quite entirely works here, and drawing very direct parallels between her and Hitchcock’s various leading ladies doesn’t really help matters.
But here’s the really interesting part: I wouldn’t be invested in any of these issues were it not for a story that genuinely kept me reading. For all of this book’s shortcomings, and I found a few, it ultimately holds together because Smith has a genuine gift for plot twists, and secrets, and the kind of juicy drama that makes a thriller keep barreling forward on the page. There’s good stuff in here, even if it’s sometimes overshadowed by missteps, and that means that while Scary Movie Night might not obsess you or give you nightmares or stick in your head for weeks on end, it will entertain you. I wanted more from this book, but I also want to see what Miranda Smith writes next, and that’s an achievement in itself.
Scary Movie Night is available July 14 wherever books are sold.
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