YMMV / Wasteland 2

• Alt Itis: Being able to create four characters from the get go encourages players to get creative with their teams. Even with subsequent playthroughs, one or more of the characters used to complete the game can be used to mentor newer ones as an Experienced Protagonist.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Matthias has only 75 hit points, compared the the Mooks he surrounds himself with, who typically have around the 400 mark. A single shot from a rifle is usually enough to bring him down. Of course, since he's been assimilated by the Cochise AI, he's not really the Big Bad anymore.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Making an entire team using assault rifles, sans a token sniper for some extra long range coverage is by far the most efficient playstyle imaginable. It's also the text-book example of Boring, but Practical. And for reasons listed below, it can break the entire combat system, since AI will always start with clear disadvantage. All sort of melee and short range weapons become ridiculously useless when faced against an ARmed squad.
• Demonic Spiders: Lobbers are always the most dangerous humanoid enemies. Their grenades do a lot of damage to characters that are bunched together, they destroy your cover, and they seldom ever miss. If they're not taken down ASAP, they will be a lot of trouble. Thankfully, due to Artificial Stupidity, they're also likely to kill their own people for you.
• Disappointing Last Level: Many feel that by the time California is reached, the game starts to suffer from a combination of this and Ending Fatigue. Much of the California questline involves a glorified Fetch Quest for rad suit components, and many of the sidequests in the area can be broken very easily, making it feel as though the game is railroading players towards certain outcomes and decisions. It is then followed by a long series of combat sequences, a plot twist that was only barely foreshadowed, and a series of Fallout-style ending slides that, at the time of release, often displayed the wrong outcome.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Gamma Ray Blaster in the non-Director's Cut version of the game. It's an energy weapon with a huge base damage potential with both single and burst fire capabilities. The kicker is that it has an Armor Threshold value of 2^note Energy Weapon damage is reduced against enemies with armor that's lower than the threshold, and is greatly increased against those that exceed it. In California, where enemies typically have armor values of at least 6, one burst shot can kill most anything in a single turn. And you get while you're still in Arizona!
  • The Combat Shooting skill. While it's a secret and only one character can learn it, it guarantees that every attack that character makes will score a critical hit.
  • Ability to initiate combat in real time and then perform your turn. With proper timing, it's entirely possible to set up squad in good positions and then give them all order to shoot at once a single target, entering combat manually after the shots are fired. It gives access to all Action Points in combat and is not a bug. In fact, AI is perfectly capable of turning this against players, so it should be approached with caution.
    • This unfortunately tends to break the game in ways beyond making it easy. Being able to start 99% of combats with a free opening salvo means that most fights will start out at long range, which limits the usefulness of the 6 weapon skills that focus on short to mid-range combat. Not only does that mean that melee/short-range weapon users will have to spend their first round either waiting for the enemy and/or running towards them, it can also put a bulls-eye on their backs as the AI will often focus on the forces closest to them. So, combatants from both your side and the Non Player Characters will tend to get gunned down by entrenched gunmen as they scramble out in the open just to get in range. And this is why we don’t see melee-dedicated combatants in actual squad warfare.
  • Rushing Rail Nomad Camp from the very start gives access to Ralphy, who even at worst can be used as a damage sponge. At best, he will be one of the most useful recruitable members of the squad. There is also Scotchmo, who at this point of game is insanely useful, saving a lot of points on Lockpicking an Cracking. And even if you ignore them both completely, there is a handful of tier 2 caches, providing tons of equipment, among them Farsight - an unique sniper rifle on par with tier 3 guns. All of which without a single fight.
    • In the same vein, rushing Prison grants a FAMAS rifle for free. Normally when the FAMAS finally shows up, it's completely outclassed by other weapons. At this stage of game however it will be able to kill most of enemies with burst mode or seriously harm them in semi-auto.
  • Quirks from Director's Cut are either utterly useless no matter what or ridiculously powerful if used right. Things like Brittle Bones^note +2 Action Points, -50% combat speed, a perfect choice for snipers and heavy gunners, Delayed Gratification^note -1 Skill Point until level 11, but then +1 from then on, netting in total 20 extra points by the end of the game, Disparnumerophobia^note +1 to all Attributes on even levels, and you control when to level up, virtually making it a permanent bonus, Psychopath ^note +4/+2% hit/critical chance for each successful hit, counted separately for every bullet in burst, making it fantastic for SMG users, at a price of base -10/-5% hit/critical chance, which is offset by just raising combat skill by 2 points or Twitchy^note +20% combat speed for -10% hit chance, allowing all melee fighters to cover truly absurd distances and again offset by skill itself are already powerful on their own, but when combined with perks of specific skills, they lead to absurdly over-powered builds. And in case of Delayed Gratification, they can allow to obtain few additional perks or build new skill from a scratch.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has garnered a surprisingly large Russian fanbase, to the point that the Russian localization had to be given an increased focus during development. This is likely due in part to the fact that Russian Formula 3 Racer Alexey Chuklin donated a large sum of money to the game's Kickstarter.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Given the events of Wasteland 3, Angela Deth's murder of Samuel Haas goes from bad to worse as it becomes an early indicator of her screwed moral compass. The fact that the end of the game frames her disappearance as a tragic loss also counts, because (depending upon your actions) a whole lot more innocent people might still be alive had Angela not survived the helicopter crash in California.
• Misblamed: A sizable chunk of gamers - and publishers - assumed this game to be yet another Fallout rip-off, never noticing the "2" in the title. It reached the point that Brian Fargo had to address this during the Kickstarter campaign.
• Obvious Beta:
  • One big complaint about the game is that, despite having been in a semi-open beta for months before release, the game still launched with a number of Game-Breaking Bugs and poor combat balance. Many of these have been fixed with patches, but a number of fans remain disillusioned by it.
  • The PS4 version is prone to crashing when loading new areas. If you are particularly unlucky, it will crash when trying to quicksave.
• Player Punch:
  • Go ahead, pick in the very beginning of the game which settlement will be completely destroyed and its population killed. Oh, and don't forget this choice will also have a great impact on all other communities in Arizona. And no, you can't save both. The wasteland is harsh, Ranger. Live with your choices.
  • No matter how hard you try, you just can't save everyone. Some deaths are scripted. Some are inevitable. But the most gut-wrenching ones? All the dead bodies during random encounters, making you feel guilty for arriving just few minutes too late to save the day.
  • All the people you helped in Happy Valley are dead by the end of the first part of the game, killed by Red Skorpion Militia. Even women, children and farm animals were slaughtered, all because of one man cared more about dogs than people.
  • Doctor Tidemann, the one you could cure from his cancer, is scripted to die regardless during Matthias attack on Ranger Citadel.
  • Having Rose or Lexcanium in your party during the final battle results in the Cochise AI assimilating them and turning against you. It's pretty jarring to have to kill party members that you may have been using for a large majority of the game. The same goes for VAX which some players took great pains to keep it alive during the whole game, only to be force to gun it down when it goes rogue.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Wasteland 2 was ported to PS4 and XBOX One. That version of the game was called "Wasteland 2: Director's Cut", and was also released for free on PC for everyone who bought the original game.
  • Sadly, that "Director's Cut" version of the game didn't add any new content and came with numerous new bugs which didn't exist prior (including some game-breaking ones, such as a door in the Ranger Citadel which would not open if you decided to Examine it instead of trying to open it directly, and several bugs concerning companions, who would disappear entirely is you decided to dismiss them, and who would lose their perks), memory leak issues, and downright terrible performance on consoles. While players liked some of the new changes (namely some weapon balancing and the inclusion of perks and quirks), the other problems made the game barely playable for most while waiting for a much necessary patch. Said patch was released November 5th 2015 on PC, with the console version following quickly after.
  • The console version usually runs well enough after patching, but the controller interface remains awkward. Actions that would take a few clicks with a mouse often require several steps of shoulder button, trigger and D-pad with a controller.
• Quicksand Box: There are enough side missions and quests to forget what was your purpose of visiting each location and what the overall assignment was.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Using explosives like grenades and rocket launchers was made much harder than it needed to be. When using such a weapon, the player gets a targeting dome that is supposed to reflect the area of effect. However, it is ridiculously easy to accidentally move the targeting "dome" a fraction of a hair too much, and have it suddenly move to target a completely different area instead. Perhaps that's the reason why the AI frequently hits its own units with explosives.....
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Director's Cut is considerably tougher. For starters, Rangers do not receive full heals on level-up, instead only getting a small bonus, and status effects and the new precision strike system rebalanced combat considerably, towards the more difficult end of the scale. In addition, all the weapon classes have been rebalanced, so while pistols are a more viable weapon for your Rangers to use (instead of being completely useless), that means that raiders wielding pistols are now much more dangerous.
• Tough Act to Follow: Easily among the toughest in gaming history. Wasteland was a Trope Codifier and Genre Popularizer that was considered absolutely legendary following its release in 1988. This, combined with its wildly popular Spiritual Successor series, the nostalgia factor, the record Sequel Gap, and the hype around a Kickstarter-funded RPG, caused expectations to reach such monstrous proportions that it was almost impossible to fully satisfy them.
• The Un-Twist: When Matthias and Dugan reveal that they were allied all along, it seems like the developers treated it as more of a Wham Line than it actually is. Throughout the game up to this point, you can't even attempt to maneuver one side against each other, and they both were hostile to the Rangers. It's implied that the threat of Dugan's robots attempting to exterminate humanity would drive more recruits into Matthias's Children of the Citadel, but there is little to no discussion of this choice from any of the people you meet, and the Children you can talk with all seem to have chosen that path out of a desire for augmentation rather than fear of the robots.

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