Wasteland 3
2020
Audio: English · Subtitles: French, German, English, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Polish
- role-playing (rpg)
- strategy
- turn-based strategy (tbs)
- tactical
- adventure
- action
- science fiction
- survival
- single player
- multiplayer
The story
As the sole survivor of Team November, a Ranger squad dispatched to the icy Colorado wastes, you find this is a land of buried secrets, lost technology, fearsome lunatics, and deadly factions. No one here has ever heard of the Desert Rangers. Your reputation is yours to build from scratch, and your choices may save this land or doom it. With a renewed focus on macro-reactivity, you'll be picking between warring factions, deciding whether locations are destroyed or saved, and making other far reaching decisions that have a marked impact on the shape of your world.
What it’s like
Frozen, washed-out palettes of grey snow, rust and bruised sky give way to warm amber interiors, lit by lanterns and sodium glow in ruined towns and bunkers. The camera sits at a comfortable isometric distance, so the wasteland reads as a diorama you tilt and rearrange, and the turn-based fights unfold in clean, readable steps with a steady, mechanical clink of gear and distant wind under a sparse, brooding synth score. The mood is bleak but wry, a dry, cold-weather melancholy where grim humour cuts through the snow. Pacing is unhurried: long stretches of travel, camp-building, and dialogue trees punctuated by tense squad skirmishes. Violence is frequent and stylised, with gunfire, melee and explosions shown as bright hits and crumpling bodies rather than gore, and some scenes of cruelty and moral compromise hit harder than the combat does. Its people are hardened survivors slowly deciding what they owe one another, and a lone newcomer earning a name among suspicious strangers. Best for players who want deep tactical squad play, meaningful consequences and a sense of building something in a hostile world over a long, absorbing campaign.
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