Wasteland Review

By Kristan Reed Published 26 October, 2007

Mega apocalypse.

Version tested: Retro

Before Fallout came Wasteland - Interplay's masterful first stab at creating a post-apocalyptic role playing game, and easily one of the most ambitious and forward-looking games ever created for an 8-bit system.

Unsurprisingly, it scooped several Game of the Year awards in 1988, and even now stands out as an important landmark in the evolution of the genre, having once been voted the 9th best game of all-time. Hell, co-designer Brain Fargo has even bought the rights back to it, and intends to bring the brand back from its EA-doom. Woo!

Presented in typically lavish EA packaging, this two disk game played up to the still-relevant late '80s obsession with Cold War tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. In the mid 21st Century, nuclear war has turned the significant parts of world into a radioactive wasteland, where mutated beasts and aggressive technology fights for what's left.

As was standard in previous Interplay games like The Bard's Tale, you created a party of four Desert Rangers, and carefully distributed skill points as you saw fit. From there, the vast, intricate, fascinating game world was open to your grizzled band to explore; encountering all manner of mutant filth and curious characters - some of whom you could actually recruit into (or fire from) your party, bolstering your numbers up to seven in total. Unlike other RPGs, these mercenary recruits could sometimes disobey orders. The cheek!

'Wasteland' Screenshot 1

The core gameplay stuck to the simple RPG rules of being able to move your party around a rudimentary top-down map, with combat encounters resulting in a larger, slightly animated picture of your assailants. As you'd expect, the name of the game was about acquiring experience and cash, upgrading your party, and eventually tooling yourself up to take on the really bad guys.

Rich with a unique atmosphere of devastation and desperation, Wasteland offered a fresh take on RPGs at a time when mythical ancient fantasy was seemingly the extent of most developers' imaginations. It might look pretty basic now (for some reason, the DOS version was much uglier than the superior C64 edition), but it's a testament to the legacy of the game that so many of its ideas can be found in today's blockbusters.

10 / 10

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Picture of Kristan.

About Kristan Reed

Kristan is a former editor of Eurogamer, dad, Stone Roses bore and Norwich City supporter who sometimes mutters optimistically about Team Silent getting back together.

Read more articles from Kristan by visiting the Kristan Reed archive page.

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Comments (9) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • mkreku #1 4 years ago

    Woah!! This is my most favourite game EVER on ANY platform!!

    I LOVE YOU EUROGAMER!! I LOOOOOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUU

  • mkreku #2 4 years ago

    Oh yeah, it was a FOUR disk game, not a TWO disk game. And not only that, you had to have four empty disks to even start the game, as the game copied itself to the empty disks and actually saved over itself whenever you killed someone/destroyed something/completed a mission. That means you could NEVER reload a game since the gamedisk had been overwritten with the results of whatever you wanted to reload from! Cruel but very effective. No cheating in the Wasteland :)

  • mkreku #3 4 years ago

    By the way, guess where my avatar is taken from.. ;)

  • VMerken #4 4 years ago

    A solid, rock hard 10 this (just like Maniac Mansion =)

  • monkie_king #5 4 years ago

    i was too young to understand what the hell was going on with this. i remember wandering around for a bit and finding an old howitzer. when i tried to fire it, it blew up and killed half my party. and i went back to action games, where i've remained ever since =)

  • Atropos #6 4 years ago

    This is one of the greatest RPG:s evereverever. I still replay this once every two years or so, and it holds up amazingly well. The depth of what they managed to achieve, the freedom and the consequences of your actions... unmatched, even to this day. Fallout was great, but this... this was the real deal.

    One word: URABUTLN!!!

  • mkreku #7 4 years ago

    I mean, how can you not love a game that lets you collect STD's from various hookers? :)

  • Tiger_Walts #8 4 years ago

    I guess he meant 2 2-sided discs.

  • krudster #9 4 years ago

    Correct :)