Are you a fan of Fallout? Are you a fan of the 80s? Are you a fan of roguelikes? If you answered yes to at least two of those, Wasted: A Post-Apocalyptic Pub Crawler is probably a game you want to know about.
Wasted is a game I can only describe as very, very, very strange. It’s also very fun, and in some ways not so fun. It sets out to create a post-apocalyptic world with lore, functionalities, and inhabitants similar to that of the Fallout franchise. The biggest difference between the two is that, while Fallout takes place in a sort of permanent 50s era, Wasted explores the idea of nuclear war destroying the world in the 80s. This leads to a vastly different style and overall feel to the game. Instead of seeing people in more classic American attire, you’ll be encountering NPCs sporting florescent clothing and wild hairstyles.
There isn’t much of a story or end goal immediately made clear at the start of the game; if there is one, I didn’t get far enough for that to be clear. The most precious resource in Wasted is booze. You play as what’s known as a Waster — a person who explores the wasteland searching for fresh alcohol in the hopes of getting, well, wasted. You start off at a place known as The Cooler, which is where you’ll be searching for your booze. The game sort of implies that there are more dungeons to explore later on, but I can’t be certain as I didn’t manage to progress very far in my time with the game.
You start the game by creating a character for yourself, and you’ll immediately be able to see how wacky the art direction is. I was initially opposed to the art design in Wasted because I thought it was ugly as sin. However, as more time passed, the more it grew on me. The one thing I don’t really understand about this character creation is that, if a character dies, they’re dead forever and are replaced by a new character that you don’t get to create. As Wasted is fairly challenging, death can come quick. So that begs the question: why spend the time creating a character you like only for them to get erased? It’s not necessarily detracting from the experience; it just seems a bit pointless to me.
As I stated before, Wasted is a roguelike. Roguelikes are RPGs characterized by dungeon crawling through procedurally generated levels. This means that every time you enter The Cooler, everything will be totally different, thus adding less repetition to the game. The goal in each Cooler run is to collect items (guns, armor, food) and, most importantly, booze. Finding and drinking booze will give you permanent buffs\de-buffs to your character. The benefits of booze is determined by how many levels down you are. The lower you are in The Cooler, the fresher the booze is and the better effects they have.
Booze found on the first level is typically not beneficial at all (decrease your aim by 10, for example). So you must be asking yourself: why drink it at all? Well, this is where Wasted shines most, in my opinion. In order to exit The Cooler, you must either die or drink booze. If you enter The Cooler, you cannot go back outside. If you go down a level, you cannot go back up. Drinking booze makes you pass out and appear back at your home base. This puts things into an entirely new perspective for the player. You don’t want the bad booze, but sometimes you’ll need it.
A mechanic in Wasted is the presence of the S.O.B., the Syndicate of Buzzkills. If we’re thinking in Fallout terms, you could call them this game’s version of The Enclave. The S.O.B. are bent on purifying the wasteland of Wasters. If you spend too much time on one floor of The Cooler, a “Purifier” will appear at the floor’s entrance and slowly make his way towards you. The Purifier is an extremely powerful enemy with heavy armor, lots of health, and a chain gun (see this review’s featured image). Taking them on is a nigh impossible feat, so running is the best option. The game adds a music cue to warn you of The Purifier getting closer as well, so you’ll always know your approximate distance from him.
This is why the negative booze you find is sometimes so necessary. I had quite a few instances where the Purifier was too close for me to make a break for the exit, so I had to drink booze in order to escape. Littered around The Cooler are also smaller containers of alcohol that you can drink for temporary, random buffs\debuffs. This, again, adds a nice risk vs. reward aspect to the game.
If you do die, you’ll spawn back at your home base as a new character. Inside your home, you can store food, money, weapons, armor, and all sorts of things so that it isn’t as difficult for your new character to get going.
One thing that Wasted does exceptionally well is writing. The game is chock-full of puns and 80’s slang and references. My favorite two nods to 80’s pop culture are The Safety Pants, which have a description that reads “You can leave your friends behind…” in reference to the song Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, and the slogan for the Courier faction, which is “If a problem comes along, you must ship it,” in reference to the song Whip It by Devo.
Aside from that, the game is just hilarious all around. Most of the weapons’ names are puns or stupid jokes. Some examples would be the “Duzi,” a play on the Uzi submachine gun, a rifle called “The Fullbucker” (I’ll let you think about that one) and, my personal favorite, the Die Pistole. Die Pistole is German for “The gun,” however the game’s description of it says it’s German for “Die pistol.”
It’s little, stupid stuff like this that makes Wasted all the more enjoyable. There are many more ridiculous and entertaining things and people to find, but I’d rather let them go unmentioned. Finding these dumb jokes is part of the fun.
Unfortunately, Wasted has a couple of glaring issues that hold the experience back much more than I could’ve imagined.
Let’s start with the smallest problem and then the biggest problem. The smallest issue of the issues I do have is the physics — they’re kind of broken. It’s not a huge, game breaking problem, but I noticed several times that I would take damage just by walking into a container. Heck, I’ve seen enemies die by walking into ammo boxes. It’s not game breaking, as I said, but it’s certainly irritating to lose health for, well, nothing.
The biggest issue I take with Wasted — and the issue that stops me from fully recommending the game at this point — is how unbelievably cheap it is to the player. This is due in part to one mechanic: Knockback. Knockback is a fairly self explanatory mechanic. Certain weapons are powerful enough to stagger you if you’re hit by them. Likewise for enemies. Not a huge deal at first. Getting hit by a melee weapon typically knocks you back a bit. However, let us take into account the Spewmen. Spewmen are pretty much the Supermutants from Fallout. They’re large, mutated buff dudes who talk funny.
Spewmen are typically armed with Klashes — powerful rifles that resemble AK-47s. These rifles are powerful enough that they cause knockback. Not a big deal, right? Wrong. Spewmen often spawn in pairs. They are very tough, and the Klash is a fast-firing weapon that does a lot of damage. Now, imagine a scenario where you’re faced by two of these enemies, and they fire at you one after the other, consistently causing knockback. Knockback keeps you from moving and even firing your gun completely. Are you seeing the issue yet?
What I’m trying to say is that most of the time I encountered Spewmen, they would essentially put me into a long range Street Fighter-esque juggle. I would get fired at by one guy, then as soon as he’d stop firing, the other would typically fire. This would almost always continue until I died. This happened more times than I can count, and 80% of my deaths were caused by this ridiculousness. The Spewmen are apparently too strong to be staggered themselves, so even if you do shoot them, they’ll typically just brush it off and resume putting you into an impossible choke-hold.
In short, my biggest issue with Wasted is that all of my deaths felt unfair. That is never a word I use lightly to describe game mechanics. But I never once felt like a death was entirely my fault. Let’s compare this to Dark Souls, one of my favorite games.
Dark Souls is excruciatingly hard, but its mechanics, level design, and enemies are fleshed out and balanced so that, if you die, it’s almost always because you messed up. With Wasted, I never got that feeling. From the absurdly broken knockback mechanic, to getting killed by a barrel that exploded on the other side of a room, to opening a door only to get blasted away by a shotgun trap directly on the other side that I had no way of knowing about — it’s a mess.
One time I got killed by a common enemy because I wasn’t paying attention to my health. That’s the only death I can recall that I brought upon myself. If you have systems set in place where the player can frequently die because things that are completely and totally out of their control, it’s no longer a challenge. It’s unfair.
I kept saying “I didn’t get far enough into the game to know this or that” because as much as I tried, I kept getting killed in the cheapest of ways. I want to progress in Wasted and I want to enjoy it, but there are some mechanics that are so fundamentally broken that it makes it difficult for me to continue, and that makes it difficult for me to recommend buying the game until these issues are addressed.
As of right now, the game is getting a 6.5 from me. I really did enjoy my time with it and Wasted was originally going to be an 8. That’s how much this overall cheapness detracted from my experience. If these issues are ever addressed, I will gladly bump the score up, but right now I just can’t justify it.
Don’t get me wrong, Wasted is a good game and it has great potential. I really do love what I’ve played so far, but the more I play, the more the cheap knockback mechanics and lack of control over your own life anger me and drive me away from it. I may have to stop playing until these issues are (hopefully) addressed.
Editor’s Note: As of June 11th I noticed that the developer, Mr. Podunkian had stated on the steam forums that he was listening to everyone’s input regarding things like cheap deaths and the knockback mechanic. I’m happy to report that almost every issue I had with Wasted has been completely fixed. The physics issues still persist, but that’s pretty much it. I’m glad to see that the developer cares so much about people enjoying the game, and fixing it where necessary to increase said enjoyment. At this given moment, I would happily reward the game with my original 8/10. I highly recommend Wasted without a doubt, now.
A PC copy of Wasted: A Post-Apocalytpic Pub Crawler was provided by Adult Swim Games for the purpose of this review