Recent reviews by Halsey

One of the best RPGs ever made. Highly recommend.

Amazing game, especially co-op!

I recommend Steeltown. I cannot recommend Cult of the Holy Detonation. It has 2 incredibly unlikable factions you have to choose between, and it is extremely hard to get invested in the boring story. But that, and the new radiation mechanic, are small gripes compared to the real problem with this DLC: constant, and I mean constant, fights with infinite enemies. It is so so so annoying and unfun, and it was such a drag that it seriously damaged our enjoyment of the game. Not only that, but some enemies have a mechanic where even after you do lethal damage, they get to go for another turn! And some enemies have abilities to summon other enemies!!

The combat in this DLC is a chore, the new mechanic is annoying, the characters and factions are unlikable, and, like Steeltown, this DLC is entirely disconnected from the rest of the story.

3/10

Steeltown, unlike the other Wasteland 3 DLC, gets a bad rap. It has some flaws for sure, but I felt the conflict had real stakes, with numerous different viable endings. It also mostly preserves the Wasteland 3 humor and tone to a large degree. And it forces you to make large decisions. However, I can see why people criticize this as something that should have been in the base game; the decisions you make are disconnected from the rest of the story, despite the fact that whatever you do in Steeltown should have an enormous effect on the world of Colorado.

This DLC introduces a new mechanic, where you get stacks on enemies in order to disable them in a non-lethal way. It was an interesting idea, and you are incentivized to make use of it during the story, but it is pretty much useless outside of the DLC.

This DLC also is the seed of some bad ideas that the next DLC build upon, especially infinitely respawning enemies. It is not as bad as CoHD, but it is still annoying.

Overall, I definitely recommend this DLC, even with its flaws. I think it is worth the money.

Simply sublime. An amazing experience I (literally) could not put down. 10/10.

A good, short, and fun game - I highly recommend!

The first thing you need to know about this game is that it is quite buggy, especially in co-op. I experienced an enormous variety of bugs, glitches, and other issues while playing this game. Partly this was because I was the co-op partner and so received many additional bugs, but a great many of the bugs affected both myself and my co-op partner.

Our joint bugs included:
1. Randomly losing all character progression, exploration, and quest progress, although this bug stopped appearing after the first patch came out.
2. At times save files would refuse to load, getting stuck at approximately 33% of the progress bar. This was also supposed to have been fixed with the first patch, but it continued happening for us.
3. Animation glitches, most especially with characters and enemies moving while still stuck in the crouched or in cover stances.
4. Some random encounters were quite buggy and had glitched cover and glitched enemies,
5. AP glitches where not everybody would get the ability to go like the should, most especially when sneak attacking.
6. A quest-related companion (The Provost) vanished from us and left for parts unknown and we were unsure when or how.
7. A prebuilt character (Zeus) being unable to hack robots and machines like he should have been able to. If you pick him, you might want to choose someone else to spec for the nerd stuff skill.

Co-op glitches (glitches I experienced as the co-op partner)
1. The radio on the overworld not properly functioning - I would be unable to hear the radio broadcasts, with the last piece of dialogue I heard playing instead. This was fortunately fixed with the first patch as well.
2. Floating dialogue boxes persisting for the entire period that we were on a map.
3. Late-game, the Kodiak became glitchy for me, with it not moving on my screen when it was doing things.
4. Weapons randomly becoming unequipped from two of my party members.
5. Sometimes being in a glitched conversation where both of us were in separate conversations with the same NPC at the same time.

Even keeping all of these problems in mind, I massively enjoyed this game.

The world was deep and broad, and the usage of an overworld with more detailed locations gave the game a sense of scale that similar RPGs sometimes lack. The location variety is good and keeps you guessing, and there are a good variety of enemy types and factions to make sure combat doesn't feel too samey. Random encounters did get old pretty fast, however, and perhaps a greater variety of them could be added in the future.

My co-op partner and I both became engrossed in the story, and I thought that there are a good deal of interesting choices that have to be made throughout the game that substantively impact the game world and the ending. When we were first setting out we made some choices that would come back to bite us (Little Vegas), but I think that's part of the experience of these games.

The gameplay is very good. It uses a cover-based shooting system most comparable in my experience to X-COM, with there being chances to hit, full and half cover, etc. In our party we had people using every class of gun, and it definitely seems like the different types of weapons are not equal in usefulness. Snipers and assault rifles were good the whole game, and pistols and shotguns got better and better as the game went on. Heavy weapons, especially machine guns, seemed to get worse and worse. The late game does have a bit of a problem where enemy health scales massively where yours does not, but the incredibly forgiving revive system in this game meant that it is actually very difficult to have someone die. Crits also became more and more important as the game continues since you'll be needing to deal more and more damage, and by the end of the game dealing crits is vital to succeeding in combat. We were playing on the second-highest difficulty, so I am unsure if that is related.

This game contains a variety of skills that are utilized to pass skill-checks, whether to accomplish tasks in the world or convince someone in conversation. Skill management is on the easier side; with proper planning, you can have nearly every skill in the game covered by someone in your party. I do not see this as necessarily a bad thing, since that just gives you greater freedom to see the game.

The companions you find along your journey come in a variety of flavors and backgrounds, and I enjoyed having them in our party. Not every companion has a quest or story that you can help them with. I did really enjoy the stories of those companions who did have quests, so I do wish more companions had character quests.

Inventory management is one of the weakest parts of the game in my opinion; your inventory space in unlimited, but the combination of console-style item squares and a lack of good filtering tools make it a real hassle to track down items. I have no idea why the game didn't launch with a utilities tab, which otherwise have to be tracked down somewhere near the bottom of the overall inventory page. There should be additional filters for classes of weapon, and additional ways to order the items on different pages like damage, level, or value. It would also have been nice to have a vault or storage of some kind at the Ranger HQ. Merchants also do not restock, which was a mistake in my mind IMO. It was also annoying to see that junk I sold to merchants never vanished.

The music in this game was amazing, and all of the different covers were great and very atmospheric.

Overall, I give this game an 8.5/10, even with all of the bugs. Once the problems are ironed out, especially in-co-op, I think this game will be a masterpiece. I hope we'll see additional story content for this game in the future!

I think this game is Paradox's masterpiece. The sheer breadth and depth of simulation, the enormous range of playstyles and mechanics, and the addictive role-playing gameplay makes this an amazing game.

Great game, but the changes have obviously angered a lot of the community. Personally, I think they're for the better, but many disagree.

The localization stuff is something separate.