Playing this a decade after it came out. I had a lot of fun with it

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut is a competent remake of the eponymous oldskool RPG. Its presentation is a little dry though and in some cases very basic. For example the variety of PC & NPC portraits is quite low, so you'll regularly see the same portrait used for generic NPCs and important NPCs. The music is atmospheric, but again there's this lack of variety. The sound effect however are well done and many of the guns sound very punchy. Combat is fast and tactical and most quests are well written, although easy to break in the second overland map (Los Angeles). Weapon groups are severely unbalanced, with assault rifles dominating everything. Energy weapons on the other hand are weak to regular enemies, but their task is to hard counter mechanical enemies. Regrettably energy weapons end up being fairly bog-standard even against mechanical enemies. Be aware that critically failed skill checks will lead to containers and safes permanently locking you out of their content. I wasn't a fan of that gameplay feature (good there's a quick reload).

It's a fairly long game. Completionists should expect a 100+ hour playthrough. There are still some minor bugs left, but fortunately I didn't stumble into anything game breaking.

I liked Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, but to be honest expected a bit more after reading all the glowing reviews.

Rating: 7,5/10

wish the new fallout games were this good

I was actually very happy that I stuck with this game until the end. The only game i can really compare it to is Wasteland 1 or Fallout 2, both of which you don't really need to play prior. I would say you need to like combat heavy CRPGs though. This game is more combat and strategy-intensive than Fallout so some people might not like that. Later it gets SUPER hard too. They definitely didn't dial down the difficulty from the first game. I like most of the side missions and the main story actually ties into the first game which I was surprised by. I do think it is too long though. It took me like 60 hours to complete the game. The story is paced a little weird but if you hold out the later sections are definitely worth the wait.

Yep, very enjoyable. I do find the fact that the big choices don't make sense annoying but apart from that, it is a good game that honours the genre.

7/10 - flawed but worth playing

Difficulty:
It seems like it could be great, but it's extremely unbalanced. You'll steamroll most enemies like nothing, and then you'll get to one fight where enemies 1 shot kill your party members. There's no way they play tested this game before releasing it. I'm playing on the easiest difficulty and party members are one shot killed by robots found in random encounters.
I just can't be bothered to try finishing the game. They didn't finish making it so I won't finish playing it. I got the game when it was 75% and I'll say I did get my money's worth. If it's on sale, you should definitely try this game, but don't pay full price. I tried restarting the game multiple times, hence my number of hours played being so high, but none of it really matters. There's simply no way to overcome the enemy's ability to one shot you.

Weapons:
It seems like melee fighting was added to the game as an afterthought. Most of the game is based on cover mechanics - enemies will hit you nearly 100% of the time if you are not in cover, and you can hit them nearly 100% of the time if they are not in cover. If you are melee, you are never in cover. One would think melee would have some kind of hidden advantage like doing more damage or stunning the enemy (melee in Shadowrun reduces the number of action points the opponent has), but this is not the case. Melee does the same damage per hit but you'll hit fewer times because you need to close the distance. Closing the distance takes about 2 turns. In those 2 turns, you've either won the fight already because your snipers took everyone out, or your entire party has been killed. There are 3 different types of melee and all 3 of them are completely worthless.

Hacking/Animals:
Hacking robots and animal control seem like a great idea, but it's very poorly executed. A good way of putting those things in the game would be if enemies did low damage but had very high HP, so controlling the enemy would be practical and useful. This game does things the opposite - robots and animals do extremely high damage. If you are close enough to hack them, you are also close enough to get one shot killed by them.

Healing/Reviving:
This is another great idea with terrible execution. In theory, you could have a healer in your party who patches people and revives them. In practice, this doesn't work because enemies do extremely high damage. If you moved to an ally to revive them, this probably means you are not in cover, or you are in an area that is likely flanked by enemies. If you revive an ally, your healer will probably be killed the next turn. In most cases, reviving isn't even an option because the enemy will do so much damage that it immediately and permanently kills your party member. Your party member has maybe 200hp and they have 100 of CON in their almost-dead state, but the enemy that dropped them did 3 crits in a row for a total of 400 damage.

Armor:
Laser weapons doing extra damage to metallic armor is just stupid. The hardest enemies in the game always have laser weapons, so this means metal armor is always useless unless you plan on carrying 2 full sets of armor for the entire party. You obviously can't do that due to money and weight limitations. This leads to something called Meta Gaming where the only correct way to play the game is to know in advance what will be needed. You need to know ahead of time that city X contains laser enemies while cave Y contains non-laser enemies, and that ruins the idea of a role playing game where you are role playing as a person who is not psychic.

Overall, I'm just disappointed. There's a 10/10 game hidden beneath all of this crap but we are stuck with something unpolished that is 7/10 at best.

This was a good post nuclear apocalypse CRPG, honestly if this had come out before Fallout we would probably be associating the genre to this game instead of that one.

Game is good