Wasteland 2 arrived in September 2014 carrying a debt it could never fully repay. The 1988 original helped shape the post-apocalyptic role-playing game, and inXile Entertainment raised the money for a sequel through Kickstarter before crowdfunding a game of this scale was routine. The result is a large, difficult, turn-based RPG that trusts the player to make mistakes and live with them. It is also one of the better games of its kind from that decade.
Trailer, via inXile entertainment.
The Engineers Who Became Rangers
Wasteland 2 is set in an alternate history where a meteor cluster triggered a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1998. On the day of the cataclysm, a company of U.S. Army Engineers was in the southwestern desert building bridges near small survivalist communities and a newly built federal death row prison with light industrial facilities.
The soldiers took shelter in the prison, expelled the inmates, and invited nearby survivalists to join them. Years later they formed the Desert Rangers, in the great tradition of the Texas and Arizona Rangers, to help survivors in the desert and beyond it.
The game begins fifteen years after the events of the original Wasteland, which was set in 2087. The Rangers now occupy the former Guardian Citadel, once home to technology-worshipping monks called the Guardians, who were wiped out by the Rangers.
Ace Is Found Dead
The experienced ranger Ace is found dead by locals, his body showing signs of violence. General Vargas, leader of the Desert Rangers, is troubled. Days earlier he had sent Ace to investigate a strange radio signal speaking of “man and machine becoming one” while threatening to attack and wipe out the Desert Rangers.
The player controls a squad of newly recruited rangers, tasked with finding who killed Ace and why, and completing Ace’s original mission. That premise does the work a good hook should. It gives the player a personal death to answer for and a larger threat to worry about, and it never lets the two sit comfortably apart.
Four Characters You Build Yourself
Wasteland 2 uses a semi-overhead view with a camera the player can rotate. Combat is turn-based and party-based, with tactical positioning mattering more than reflexes. The party holds seven characters: four the player designs, plus up to three non-player characters.
The player characters are highly customizable. Statistics, skills, and appearance choices give each one an individualized personality. The characters who join the party are not blank stat blocks either. Each has their own personality, motivations, opinions, and agendas, which means the squad a player builds is never a neutral instrument. It has opinions about itself.
A Release Date That Moved
The original release date was October 2013. It was postponed, and the game shipped for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in September 2014. An enhanced version, Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut, followed in October 2015, adding versions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. A sequel, Wasteland 3, arrived on August 28, 2020.
That history matters to how the game plays. Wasteland 2 is not a streamlined modern RPG with a decade of quality-of-life lessons baked in. It is dense, occasionally hostile to the player, and built on the assumption that a tabletop-style rule set is worth the friction.
Where the Game Pushes Back
The customization is the heart of it. Four player-designed characters means four sets of statistics and skills that have to cover a lot of ground, and the game does not quietly patch the holes in a bad build. A party that cannot handle a lock, a conversation, or a fight will feel it. That is a design choice, not an oversight, and it is the reason the game holds up better than smoother contemporaries.
The three companion slots complicate that in a good way. Companions with their own motivations and agendas are not just extra guns. They are a second layer of judgment on the player’s decisions, and they can make a squad feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a group of people with their own reasons for being in the desert.
The turn-based tactical combat rewards patience. The rotatable semi-overhead camera lets the player read a space before committing to it, and the party-based structure means every fight is a problem of placement as much as damage. It is slow. It is supposed to be slow.
The Signal and the Murder
The plot’s two threads — who killed Ace, and what the radio signal wants — are a smart pairing. The murder is small, local, and solvable. The signal is vast, vague, and threatening to wipe out the Desert Rangers entirely. The player starts with the smaller question and keeps running into the larger one.
The signal’s promise of “man and machine becoming one” is the kind of phrase that could have been empty menace. In context, it lands as a genuine ideological threat, because the Desert Rangers exist to help survivors, not to transform them. The game’s best material sits in that gap between helping people and deciding what they should become.
What Wasteland 2 Gets Right
Wasteland 2 understands that a post-apocalyptic RPG lives or dies on its sense of place. The former Guardian Citadel, the desert communities, the prison that became a home — these are specific, grounded locations, not generic ruins. The game’s alternate 1998 gives it a history it can point to, and it uses that history instead of just decorating with it.
The writing trusts the player to keep up. The Rangers’ formation story, the fate of the Guardians, the fifteen-year gap since the original game — none of it is over-explained. For a game funded by people who cared about the 1988 original, that restraint is a form of respect.
Where It Grinds
The same density that makes Wasteland 2 rewarding makes it exhausting. A seven-character party with deep customization and companion agendas is a lot to manage, and the game offers little comfort to players who want to see the story without mastering the systems. The postponed release and the later Director’s Cut suggest the developers knew the launch version had rough edges.
The semi-overhead camera and turn-based pacing will not convert anyone who bounced off the original. That is fine. This is not a game trying to be for everyone.
Wasteland 2 earns its place. It is a sequel that respects its source without being trapped by it, and a crowdfunded game that spent its budget on systems and writing rather than spectacle. The party design, the companion agendas, and the two-track plot give it more texture than most RPGs of its era. The friction is real, and some of it is the kind that comes from ambition rather than carelessness. The Director’s Cut is the version to play, and the fact that it took a year to arrive says something about how much the base game needed. But the foundation was always solid. Wasteland 2 is a demanding, specific, well-built RPG that knows exactly what it is.
The Numbers Behind Wasteland 2
- Title: Wasteland 2
- Developer: inXile Entertainment
- Publisher: Deep Silver, inXile Entertainment
- Release: September 2014 (Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux)
- Director’s Cut: October 2015 (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch)
- Genre: Turn-based, party-based RPG
- Party size: 7 (4 player-designed, up to 3 additional characters)
- Setting: Alternate 1998 nuclear war; game begins 15 years after 1988’s Wasteland
- Sequel: Wasteland 3, August 28, 2020
- Score: 8.0/10
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
