Thanks for the reviews, ericthecleric. I backed the Wasteland 2 kickstarter and I thought there were some really fun things about the game, like the character creation and the dark humor. Some of the areas and factions are really interesting. I liked how the skills worked and I liked your possible party members a good deal. A lot of the pop culture references were fun.
But I also got frustrated with how linear certain sections of the games were. My annoyance was amplified by the game's makers saying how much choice you had about how you could proceed through the game, but there are only a few places where you get any real choices and most of them are meaningless/have very little impact on how things proceed through the game. In some places where it seems like you have a choice there is really only a better way and a worse way (for example, the very first dual choice you have is to help Highpool or Ag Center; there are a couple reasons why helping Highpool is better). When people who got clever with earlier versions about how to get through certain areas (different ways you can try to get one of the better rad suits to get to a new location, which weren't really cheats, just clever or patient thinking), making their adventure their own, the developers actually patched the game to make those clever alternate ways nonexistent so you would be forced to get through the game exactly the one way they wanted you to. If I hadn't read some of the developer talk it wouldn't have annoyed me so much and I expect if I were playing it with fresh eyes I'd like it more. But I still think there were some sections I wish you could skip or have better options for playing through differently. I also feel like some of the "mature" elements and some of the humor were very juvenile... a 13 year old's idea of dark and gritty... look, dead, mangled prostitutes and a quest for kitty litter! I also agree the games try to manipulate you into being terrible, or no matter what you do people suffer, so it doesn't give you much impetus to keep playing.
I never finished the second game... I've played it through twice to where you raid the crazy evangelical gang's compound, and both times I got frustrated on how to proceed and gave up. I guess they just want you to kill everyone, but it seemed like there was supposed to be a peaceful way to help the prisoners escape through the secret tunnels but I couldn't figure out how. How did you handle that area of the game?
My frustrations with 2 led me to not bother with getting 3. It sounds to me based on what you said for the most part many of the things I didn't like in 2 were even worse (even if there are more "choices" it sounds like they once again are fairly meaningless), so I appreciate the review to know not to grab it and try it later.
Oddly enough, the original Fallout started off as the intention of being the original Wasteland 2, and there are references to Wasteland throughout the Fallout series, including of course the many references to Desert Rangers in Fallout: New Vegas. They ARE in different universes (Fallout has an alternate history; Wasteland is supposed to be our history until the 1990s), but ultimately I think the entries in the Fallout series, both the Interplay-made ones and the Bethesda-published ones, are the better spiritual sequel by far. I don't know if Fallout really has a future with 76 being mainly a debacle (although it has its fans).
I would love to see more turn-based post apocalyptic games.