The ‘big muscles, small brain’ stereotype, hits with fists’ stereotype? Have at it. Want to create a fast-talking charismatic shotgun-wielding toaster repair expert? It’s possible.

There’s also a nice slew of skills to pick from, each with various tiers of capability and taken all together the result is a wide range of customization options. Expertise with a variety of different weapons is possible, from good ol’ melee brawling to sniper rifles and just about everything in between. For those of you who love to carefully pick and choose skills and stats to make your characters stand out – not to mention give them some real personality – chances are you’ll be pleased with the level of customization on offer here. The option to go into the game with a selection of pre-made characters exists, but of course the real fun comes from custom-assembling your own mix of would-be Rangers. On this front, inXile has delivered in spades – and best of all, there’s a whole lot to discover, both in terms of areas to find and lore to read.īut in order to explore the world of Wasteland 2, you’re going to need to gather together a posse. For a game that emphasizes exploration as a key selling point, it’s important to craft a world that actually provokes interest and the desire to actually search for what’s out there waiting for you. Right from the get-go, despite having an unavoidable Fallout feel to it all, Wasteland 2 manages to feel unique in terms of the setting and story it offers to players. There’s no lack of games out nowadays that have the whole “experience a world after a cataclysm” thing going on, but the whole southwestern angle is – if not entirely absent – typically underplayed. Leading this effort (at least in your little slice of the world) are the Desert Rangers – a Texas-themed pack of soldiers and survivalists doing their best to tame a very hostile world. A good share of the world is still irradiated, just of much of it is hostile, and humanity is struggling to crawl out from under the rocks and out of the bomb shelters to try and rebuild something approximating civilization again. Wasteland 2’s story takes place in a world struggling to piece itself together in the wake of nuclear disaster. If you’re into turn-based tactical games, especially with an after-the-bombs-drop sci-fi flavor, this is a must-have. The quick verdict: inXile Entertainment has managed to bring back the spirit of Wasteland successfully, giving us a post-apocalyptic world that really stands out in its own right, managing to be fun, demanding and deep all at once. Well, now – after many a false-start, dashed hopes, and more – we have finally have Wasteland 2 to play. So the fact that, not quite three decades later, there was still substantial demand for the sequel to this game really says something about the impression it made on the more ancient gamers around. The internet was really only a “thing” for universities (and the more tech-inclined attendees at that), video games were on the relatively scarce side compared to nowadays, and they were played on machines for which “more than one color” was the sign of cutting-edge equipment.

The original Wasteland debuted way back in 1988 – a primitive time, by most measures.

Wasteland remastered review