Graphics

Don't let 'em shake you down

Nobody ever said that the post-apocalypse was pretty, but Wasteland 2 could have done with a little more graphical refinement. Textures are not terribly sharp, character models don’t look so great up close, and lighting lacks subtlety. Everything just looks a little washed out, a little bland, and some environmental assets are overused to say the least.

On the upside, the game runs extremely well on a wide range of hardware, and for an Indie game with turn-based combat, the combat animations are much better than I was expecting. Characters move convincingly across terrain, scale ladders fluidly, flatten their backs against cover you position them against, and just generally behave in a lifelike way. And true to the legacy of the original Fallout games, death animations are suitably over the top, with gallons of claret gushing from unfortunates who find themselves bisected, decapitated, de-limbed, or liquefied by energy weapons.

In the wasteland, trash is every man's treasure

And although it won’t be a big deal for some, I really appreciate the amazing job inXile did with the character portraits. They have a suitably old-world meets dystopia charm to them, and I had a lot of fun thinking about my dainty, painty Southern belle roaming across the wastes with a submachine gun concealed in her corset