GB Feature: Wasteland 2 Review
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It took nearly 26 years for a true Wasteland sequel to be realized by Brian Fargo and team, so we wanted to make sure we took an adequate amount of time with our full five-page review as well. But it's finally here, so I'll provide a sampling from what WUE had to say about the game's skill system:
InXile has done a good job offering a large amount of opportunity to use most skills, either because they feed directly into the game's core systems, or because checks for those skills were handplaced in many areas. Even skills like Outdoorsman, Animal Whisperer and Mechanical Repair can occasionally solve a quest, and, as one might expect, checks abound for skills like Computer Science. As for combat skills, Wasteland 2 has a large number of them, but still manages to make every weapon category feel distinct. The game also does a good job of giving every weapon type a similar progression from low-level to high-level weapons, so every combat build feels viable (if not optimal) throughout the entire game.
I do, however, take issue with some aspects of Wasteland 2's skill system. There are a number of balance problems with combat skills (at the moment, Assault Rifles are the de facto kings of all weapons) and a few of the general and knowledge skills are underused (Mechanical Repair, in particular, becomes useless past Arizona), for starters. The way skill checks are implemented (percentile checks with a chance for critical failure that can otherwise be repeated indefinitely) also rewards players for wasting their time rather than building their characters properly, an issue compounded by the large amount of skill checks present in the game. Finally, too many of the skills boil down to small variations of the same theme: Lockpicking, Safecracking, Toaster Repair, and even Brute Force and Computer Science to some extent, are all used to open containers and doors.
