The world ended in nuclear fire and the only ones hard enough to survive were the cops.
Ms. Wong is a recurring annoyance in Wasteland 3. The landlady of the dingy Sans Luxe Apartments (get it?), she lives in squalor in an apartment full of filthy furniture, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by overflowing catboxes and at least a half-dozen unruly cats. She’s constantly radioing the Arizona Rangers to investigate her tenants or bother the neighbors, because the ruling Patriarch’s police force, the Marshals, won’t take her calls any more. She’s comically pathetic, and Wasteland 3 never shies away from cracking a joke at her expense. The most obnoxious thing a person can be in this game is someone who calls the police for help.
In Wasteland 3, you play as Team November of the Arizona Rangers, transplanted to Colorado at the behest of the Patriarch. The Rangers have fallen on hard times since they had to destroy their home in Wasteland 2, and the Patriarch offers them a lifeline, as long as they help keep the peace in Colorado by tracking down his three unruly children. Bring him his three children alive, and prosperous-if-frozen Colorado Springs will send the Arizona Rangers back with enough supplies to survive. Things go badly right away, forcing you into the service of the Patriarch whether you like it or not, and it quickly becomes clear that this is clearly a deal with a devil.
Wasteland 3 is the sequel to 2013’s Wasteland 2, one of Kickstarter’s early runaway successes. While the series nominally begins with Wasteland in 1988, the real touchstone for this series is the game series it inspired: Fallout and Fallout 2, developed by Black Isle Studios in 1997 and 1998. Wasteland 2 was widely promoted as an antidote to Bethesda Softworks’ take on the Fallout series, particularly their first entry, the love-it-or-hate it open-world first-person-shooter Fallout 3. The Wasteland revival positioned itself as a return to the Fallout series’ roots, cheekily turning the 1998 game that originally inspired the Fallout series into a competing franchise. Both the Black Isle Fallout games and the latter Wasteland games are isometric-view RPGs, with a heavy emphasis on tactical, turn-based gunfights, as well as coal-black humor and a cynical outlook towards humanity. Wasteland 3, like its predecessors, has detailed, stat-heavy character creation and development, where you pick from a list of many skills and perks and quirks, trying to guess which ones the developers intend to be useful. (Hint: Automatic Weapons is probably going to do more for you than Toaster Repair.)
Character creation is Wasteland 3’s first big puzzle, and it tells you what kind of game this is right away. You need to be very concerned with the difference between a .38 caliber pistol round, a 9mm round, and a .45 round. They aren’t interchangeable! In some cases, a gun with a different type of round might require a different one of the four different skills for shooting guns. If you’d rather, there’s also a skill for explosive weapons, a weird science skill that turns out to be good for shooting rayguns and energy cannon, a skill for deploying disposable robot drones to defend you, and two different skills for beating people senseless with a club or your bare hands. However, the only skills to get people on your side by talking to them are Hard Ass and Kiss Ass.
Wasteland 3 is a game where you play cops. The Rangers are here to help the Patriarch bring the law, fighting against lawlessness encroaching from all corners. Colorado Springs is a simmering kettle of resentments among the Patriarch, his Marshal enforcers, and the relatively-wealthy Hundred Family founders, but the real threat are outsiders. The Patriarch’s three children have allied themselves with outside forces, like the redneck Christian apocalypse cult Dorsey Family (“We’re gonna wash y’all away in the Deluge o’ Blood!”), the bloodthirsty Native-coded Godfisher human sacrifice cult (they use every part of their victims), or the Hispanic juggalo murder-clown Payasos (“There’s more where that came from, pendejo!”).
Kill first or be killed is the law of Colorado, outside the limited area civilized by the Patriarch. It crops up in all sorts of ways. Even with difficulty tuned to “normal”, Rangers can generally only survive a couple hits, while enemies can take numerous shots before going down. Getting ambushed can easily turn into a disaster, especially at close range, because enemies get a full turn of moving and attacking and will likely take down the first couple Rangers standing flatfooted in the open. However, if you attack first, your Rangers can take cover and fire off their first several shots, usually taking out at least a couple bloodthirsty gang members. This is already a bit imbalanced, but it’s aggravated by a new wrinkle in the way Wasteland 3 conversations work.
Like most RPGs of this kind, Wasteland 3 has lots of branching conversations. Most of the frameworks will be familiar: conversation options locked unless you have a particular skill, “Can you tell me more about X/Y/Z?” followed by “Let’s talk about something else”, “Done talking”, and “[Attack] Enough talking, I’m shooting you now.” The new wrinkle is that those attack-now conversation options are actually useful, because they give you the jump on the enemy, while trying to talk to someone who’s about to try to kill you means they get the first turn and a free opportunity to seek cover and shoot your flat-footed Rangers.
You learn this lesson the hard way. The first couple of times you actually try to talk to one of the bloodthirsty, usually-ethnic murder-gangsters, they break off the conversation and then immediately start shooting, probably taking out half your party. After a couple times, you learn your lesson: talking to these people is a waste of time. From the moment you sniping the bad redneck Christian hostage-taker from outside of his vision range to save the good Christian hostage from the bad redneck Christians, Wasteland 3 has one key message to teach: some people are just better off getting shot down as quickly as possible.
And there are so very many of these fights that break down the same way. Wasteland 3 treats the difference between an assault rifle, an SMG, a handgun, and a light machinegun as if they were as distinct as the differences between classes in other RPGs, and they just aren’t. Every fight leads to your characters breaking for the relatively sparse cover, or simply running to their optimal range, dropping to a knee, and shooting the incoming enemies. Some characters might have an ability to hack a robot or tame an animal, but the vast majority of those abilities are only usable at melee range, forcing you to break cover or kneel stance to use them, which is suicidal.
The lines are clear: if someone from the Hundred Families is a traitor, you can talk to them then they will submit to your justice, be it summary execution, a lingering execution at the hands of the Patriarch’s Marshals, or imprisonment in the brig at the Ranger base. But a Payaso will shoot you first if you give them a chance to talk, so you’re better off shooting them first. The Arizona Rangers end up being a glorified freelance SWAT team, dispensing harsh frontier justice in a world where everyone who speaks Spanish or weaves their own ropes will kill you for deranged, inhuman reasons. The only people ever afforded a measure of grey morality, any decision whether they’re doing the right thing or not, are people in power. The people who run the cities, run the police, run the shops. They might be bad people, but they aren’t trying to kill you right now. Everyone else, nah, fuck ’em. Shoot first, loot the answers to your questions from their bodies.
Wasteland 3 occasionally tries to lean into social commentary. There’s a cult that worships a Max Headroom-like Reagan AI, or a robot hippie collective struggling with holding onto their pacifism and respect for autonomy in the face of a world of humans who hate them and want to destroy them. One character in particular is marked by how her adherence to a simple, straightforward belief in the goodness of her family and fellow Christians is constantly challenged by the lies and brutality underlying Colorado Springs. But all of these attempts are superficial and brief compared to how much time you spend killing people who obviously deserve it from the moment you see them, or deciding people deserve to die after long deliberation.
By the end of Wasteland 3, no matter what path you take, you’ve broken everyone who would question your decision. Whether you take power for yourself or you choose one of the many morally-grey bad options to take control, your might has chosen who has the right to rule, and either keep the cowering civilians safe from the murderous slavers and clowns or decide they didn’t deserve protecting anyway. The law of Copland is whatever the cops say it is.
