Wasteland 2

Introduction

Wasteland 2 is inXile Entertainment's 2013 return to the series Brian Fargo created in 1988 — the game Interplay's own Fallout was explicitly built to succeed when the Wasteland licence proved unavailable. Funded through one of the Kickstarter campaigns that helped kick off the 2010s CRPG revival, it entered backer beta and Steam Early Access on 13 December 2013, reached its 1.0 release on 19 September 2014, and was quietly but substantially upgraded for free on 13 October 2015 into the Director's Cut, which rebuilt the game on Unity 5, added a perk system and rebalanced combat across the board. That Director's Cut is the only version still available to buy — several older negative reviews in this outlet's sample recommending "switch to the Director's Cut instead" are fossils of the brief period between the 2014 launch and the 2015 upgrade, written about a version of the game that no longer exists to buy.

Why a 2013 Kickstarter game still matters to the genre

It's worth being specific about what Wasteland 2 actually did for the genre it now gets compared unfavourably to its own sequel within. Its March 2012 Kickstarter campaign fully funded in 43 hours and is widely credited, alongside the Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera campaigns that followed it within the next year, as the moment that proved there was still a paying audience for old-school, stats-heavy party CRPGs after most publishers had written the format off. Brian Fargo, who had a hand in Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment before founding inXile, brought back several of the original 1988 Wasteland's own designers for the sequel — including Michael Stackpole and Ken St. Andre — a continuity that fits what this review's own sample found from players who'd played the 1988 original: a recurring "100% must buy" endorsement specifically from fans of the first game, distinct from the broader audience's more mixed reaction. Whatever its combat and UI owe to their age now, the game's existence is a real part of why the CRPG revival that went on to produce Divinity: Original Sin and eventually Wasteland 2's own sequel was commercially viable at all.

A genuinely reactive CRPG, even by current sample's own admission

The single clearest throughline in this review's sample, on both sides of the recommend split, is that Wasteland 2's quest design is unusually willing to let a player's choices actually go wrong. One representative negative review complains, with real specificity, that "practically every quest resolution" boils down to trying to prevent a bad outcome, failing, trying an alternate route, and still getting an unforeseen bad result — a structure the reviewer finds exhausting after enough hours, but one this outlet reads as the game doing exactly what its genre promises more often than most CRPGs actually deliver. The positive sample describes the same system from the other side: "It pushes its narrative and player choice extremely far, with an almost absurd number of possible approaches and consequences," reads one 150-hour review, and several others independently praise the squad-building layer that sits alongside it — four fully custom characters whose attribute, skill and weapon choices meaningfully change how the same content plays out.

Measured against a sequel it couldn't have seen coming

What this review found shaping the current conversation around Wasteland 2 more than anything else is a game that didn't exist at launch: Wasteland 3, inXile's own 2020 sequel. It comes up, unprompted, in a large share of this review's sample on both sides of the split. "Wasteland 3 was great, Wasteland 2 is so tedious and boring," reads one blunt comparison; a more considered 105-hour review puts it more carefully, arguing only "the most hardcore, masochistic, old-school-gaming purists" would rate the original as highly as its sequel. Not every reviewer agrees — a handful explicitly call the original better, preferring its tone and party structure — but the sequel has clearly become the baseline the original gets measured against now, for better and worse, which is worth knowing going in: a lot of today's "tedious" and "dated" complaints are really a relative judgement against a much newer game in the same series, not an absolute one.

The rough edges that have nothing to do with its sequel

Setting the Wasteland 3 comparison aside, this review's sample still surfaces real, specific problems on their own terms. The character creator draws repeated, independent criticism for hiding its own consequences — attribute and skill sliders with no visible indication of what perks or thresholds they unlock, forcing new players to look up builds externally rather than learn the system by playing it. Combat's to-hit math gets a similar complaint: one reviewer describes rage- quitting over a stretch of missed "60%-plus to-hit" shots that felt statistically impossible, and a separate 91-hour review argues the game "forces a lot of consequence upon you without you really having much say," a notably different read on the same reactive-quest design this review praised above — evidence the system can tip from admirably unforgiving into simply punitive depending on the player. Technical reports are rarer but real: two independent reviewers in the current sample describe broken or choppy audio with no working fix, one naming it directly as the reason they stopped playing.

Verdict

Wasteland 2 earns its Very Positive rating honestly: the choice-and-consequence design and the flexibility of its squad building are the real thing, not marketing, and this review's own sample bears that out even from reviewers who are otherwise frustrated with it. What's changed since 2014 isn't the game — it's the existence of a markedly smoother sequel that now shapes almost every conversation about the original, fairly or not. Taken on its own terms rather than against Wasteland 3, this is still a CRPG worth playing: patient, reactive in ways modern RPGs often aren't, let down by a combat system and character creator that have genuinely aged, not just aged in comparison to something newer.