Wasteland 3

There's a recent five-star review of Wasteland 3 that says the dialogue is better than Baldur's Gate 3's. There's another, also positive, that warns you the game will grow steadily more unstable the longer you play and you may want to hurry the ending before it breaks entirely.

Both of those are true, and between them they're the whole review.

The writing carries it

Wasteland 3 drops you into a frozen Colorado as the remnants of a Desert Rangers squad, indentured to a warlord styling himself the Patriarch, tasked with retrieving his three appalling children. It's a setup engineered to make every choice compromised, and the game exploits it relentlessly.

The quest design is the standout. Situations fork more than you notice on a first run, dialogue hides options behind skills and prior decisions, and factions remember. Players consistently report discovering routes on a second playthrough they had no idea existed — which is the actual test of branching writing, as opposed to the illusion of it.

The tone is the other achievement. It's very funny, in a register that could easily have collapsed the setting into farce and mostly doesn't. You will avenge a family against a giant evil goat and it will not feel stupid. The voice acting is strong throughout and the soundtrack — a lot of ironically deployed Americana — is one of the genre's better ones.

Underneath sits a squad game with real depth: skills, perks, quirks that trade advantage for drawback, and a vehicle you upgrade and fight from. Turn-based combat is competent rather than revelatory — closer to a well-made XCOM 2 skirmish than to the systems puzzle of a Larian game — and it does the job of framing the decisions.

Median recent playtime is 52 hours.

The thing nobody fixed

Now the part that decides the score, and it's unusually specific: the bugs live in co-op.

That's an odd sentence to write, but it's what the corpus says. Sorting the negative reviews by helpfulness, the same complaints recur from 2020 through to the present: quests disappearing from the log and resetting progress, money vanishing, character quirks behaving differently depending on who is hosting, one player being locked out of a conversation because they happened to be in a shop, and softlocks requiring a reload.

Two cases are worth naming because of their age. One reviewer with 206 hours documented a chain-ambush softlock — finish a fight a particular way and the game stops accepting input entirely, including in the squad menu — and reported it had been known for two years. Another describes a UI freeze triggered whenever a character reloads a weapon in co-op, raised with the developer over a year before they wrote the review, still present.

Single-player is substantially healthier, and most of the positive reviews are from solo players. But even there, the instability complaint persists into 2026 — the recent reviewer quoted at the top of this piece is describing a solo campaign degrading as it goes.

For a six-year-old game still selling at NZ$49.99, that's the fair criticism. Not that it launched rough — many CRPGs do — but that specific, documented, game-breaking issues outlived several expansions.

What "choices matter" actually means here

Every RPG claims consequential choices. Wasteland 3 earns the phrase in a specific, unglamorous way worth spelling out.

Most of its decisions are allocations rather than moral positions. Two factions want the same resource and you can only supply one. A settlement needs help at the same time as a patrol. A prisoner is more useful alive to one group and dead to another. The game rarely asks whether you're good; it asks who you're prepared to disappoint, and then it remembers.

That resolves in ways you feel hours later. Vendors close to you. Areas change hands. Characters who would have helped are hostile, or absent, or dead, and the game doesn't announce any of it with a notification — you simply arrive somewhere and the situation is different because of something you did in a different county.

The second mechanism is skill-gated dialogue that isn't cosmetic. A high enough Kiss Ass or Hard Ass doesn't just add a line, it can resolve an entire encounter without a fight, or extract information that opens a route you'd otherwise never see. Because the skills competing for those points also control combat and exploration, investing in talk is a genuine trade rather than a free bonus.

The reason this lands better than in most games is that the writing never signals which branch is the "real" one. There's no obviously-correct path with a token alternative attached. It's the same quality that makes players report finding whole quest routes on a second run — and it's why, when a reviewer says the dialogue beats Baldur's Gate 3's, the claim is at least arguable rather than absurd.

The roleplay question

One more structural point, raised well by a reviewer who wanted to like it: Wasteland 3 is a roleplaying game in which you don't play a character.

You create four Rangers, or take pre-made ones, and command them. There's no protagonist, no personal arc, no single perspective the story belongs to. For some players that's fine — it's a squad game and always was. For others it hollows the experience out, because the writing keeps offering you moral weight without giving you anyone specific to feel it as.

It's a legitimate design choice with a real cost, and it's worth knowing which side of it you're on before buying. If what you loved about Pillars of Eternity was being a person in a world, this is a different proposition.

7.5 out of 10. Rated 7.5 out of 10.

I'd recommend Wasteland 3 to almost any CRPG player, with one condition attached: play it alone. The writing is genuinely top-tier, the choices land, and fifty hours in Colorado is a good use of an autumn. Solo, most people have a fine time — 85% of them say so.

The score sits where it does because a game that shipped with co-op as a headline feature and left known softlocks in it for years hasn't delivered what it sold, and because "it gets less stable the longer you play" is still being written by players in 2026. Fix that and this is comfortably an 8.5. As it is, buy it on sale, save often, and bring your own company rather than a friend.