SNOW JOKE

Make friends with weirdos in cold Colorado in WASTELAND 3

-  Jody Macgregor

The Wasteland games have always mixed grit with silliness, offsetting slavery and cannibalism with mutant killer bunnies and the like. That’s one of the things that hasn’t changed in Wasteland 3, which is still an RPG where malfunctioning toasters can be cracked open for loot if you’ve got the Toaster Repair skill, and my squad of hardened wasteland warriors is joined by a goat, a swearing parrot, a cyborg chicken, and a cat who wears a hat.

What’s different is the setting. The endless sand of Arizona and California has been traded for the endless snow of Colorado. Your Desert Rangers are way out of their depth here, sent north to cut a deal with the prosperous local leader for supplies your home desperately needs, which means helping the patriarch of Colorado Springs round up his rebellious offspring. Each of his three large adult children have sided with different bizarre factions, from Reagan worshippers to Hispanic murder clowns, and you’re thrust into this political shit fight with only your wits, an AI car, a bunch of guns, and those three points you probably shouldn’t have put in Toaster Repair.

Wasteland 3 is also less old school than Wasteland 2. That was a game where you’d find a loot container then have the character with Perception check it for traps, then a character with Alarm Disarming or Demolitions render it safe, then if it was locked use Lockpicking or Safecracking or Brute Force to open it. Now some of those skills have been excised, and if you click on something the character who has the right skill will just automatically interact with it.