Wasteland 2 (2014)
Wasteland 2 is a 2014 role-playing (rpg) video game made by inXile Entertainment and Deep Silver.
Generations after the bombs, the Desert Rangers keep a rough order across the irradiated American southwest, and you lead a squad of them out from Arizona to learn why one of their own went silent. inXile revives the 1988 game that Fallout grew out of, all squad-level tactics, skill checks, and moral rot. You pick through radioactive ruins, arbitrate between desperate settlements, and watch small choices harden into consequences you cannot take back. The writing runs dry and bleak with a mean streak of humor. This is a game about scarcity, and about who gets to decide who lives.
Quick answers
What is Wasteland 2 about?
Generations after the bombs, the Desert Rangers keep a rough order across the irradiated American southwest, and you lead a squad of them out from Arizona to learn why one of their own went silent. inXile revives the 1988 game that Fallout grew out of, all squad-level tactics, skill checks, and moral rot. You pick through radioactive ruins, arbitrate between desperate settlements, and watch small choices harden into consequences you cannot take back. The writing runs dry and bleak with a mean streak of humor. This is a game about scarcity, and about who gets to decide who lives.
When was Wasteland 2 released?
Wasteland 2 was released on 19 September 2014.
Who made Wasteland 2?
Wasteland 2 was made by inXile Entertainment and Deep Silver.
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Explore Wasteland 2 guides
Wasteland 2 in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead
- Companion guide: Post-Apocalyptic RPGs: From Wasteland to Fallout and Every Ruin Between
A few thoughts on Wasteland 2
Fallout is the obvious next stop, since this is the series it grew out of. For post-nuclear reading, Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz watches civilization crawl back over centuries, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road strips survival to a father and son. On the stereo, Deltron 3030 scores a ruined future in the same key.
Post-apocalyptic classics about rebuilding after the bombs fall
Wasteland 2 is the game Fallout grew out of, all irradiated ruins and Rangers trying to hold some kind of order together. The Road and A Canticle for Leibowitz are the literary bedrock of that same genre, civilization rebuilt slowly and painfully from ash. The Scorch Trials and Old Man's War push the same scarcity and desperation into their own wastelands.
Aggressive, dystopian music for a scavenged wasteland
Wasteland 2's writing runs dry, bleak, and mean, the kind of tone that wants a soundtrack with teeth. The Prodigy's Fat of the Land and Deltron 3030's sci-fi grime both hit that same scavenged, aggressive register. Blade Runner's score supplies the dystopian hum underneath it, Muse's Black Holes and Revelations goes for the same apocalyptic scale, and Neil Young's Living With War keeps the anger pointed at something real.
Coming-of-age under scarcity, where trust and morality erode fast
Wasteland 2 keeps asking who gets to decide who lives, and the answer changes with every desperate settlement you meet. Lord of the Flies stages the same collapse among children with no adults to stop it. Shatter Me's oppressive regime and the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas's complicity both test what people become under pressure, and Project Hail Mary asks it again alone in deep space.