LogFAQs > #949360369

nobody has talked about this game since it came out so I'm going to

I was excited going in, because the series really intrigues me. I was super hyped for the first only to be completely disappointed, but was shocked at how good WD2 was. Silicon Valley was a blast, the characters were fun, and the gameplay felt like what was originally promised.

WDL isn't going to win anybody over with its general gameplay. It definitely suffers from "Ubisoft disease;" it's an open-world game where you do side quests and mini-objectives to clear territories, climb buildings, fight people in third-person, etc. Most of the gameplay from the last game returns, but now you're in London (which wasn't as fun as Silicon Valley imo but was decent enough of a locale.

The story is decent enough. The side missions are very cyclical and forettable and the main story does the typical thing of having a couple mini-boss questlines to do before you can take on the main boss questline. One of the mini-bosses is really interesting, the others are fine. The best character is easily Bagley, the sentient, passive agressive AI that constantly directs you to quests and mocks you along the way.

None of this sounds like a rave review, and it isn't, but I still absolutely recommend playing the game, and that's for one reason: the gimmick. It's hard to recommend a game for its gimmick alone, but WDL's gimmick is so godamn cool.

The whole gimmick is that any random NPC (not including the story ones) can be recruited to your team. This includes enemies (though if you've done enough harm to them they will become unrecruitable). That sounded interesting to me at first, but it's so much cooler in action. Every single person in the world has a name, a job (which they will go to), abilities, family members (that also appear in the world), and a bunch of randomly generated personality and backstory factoids. Every time I recruited a character, all these little pieces (in addition to their different voices, speech patterns, unique weapons, disadvantages, etc.) really made every character feel unique, despite ultimately being randomly generated code. I would find myself writing stories for the characters in my head, becoming more and more developed as I played with them. On my team I had a lovable asshole bare knuckle boxer, an ex-military contractor who would gamble my savings but was a beast with a rifle, a ladies man bouncer with a motorcycle and a studded bat, and a useless old woman who had no abilities and would alert nearby enemies by farting randomly and I'm not sure why I had her drafted to my team but it still crushed me when she died.

And that's what made it even more powerful. The game has a permadeath option, and it's not like the normal rpg permadeath where dying means starting over, it just means that when a character dies, they're dead for good. They're off your team, and you can never play as them again, and while ideally there's literally an infinite number of other potential characters to play as, goddamn does it hit hard to lose a character you've come to love because you ran into a gunfight you weren't prepared for or pissed off some people you shouldn't have.

And what makes the game even more wild is that these characters all continue to live in the world after you've interacted with them. Characters you've recruited can still be found going about their lives when you're not playing. Helping a character will make it easier to recruit people who are their friends or family, while hurting or killing someone will get you new enemies you weren't expecting, and if you wrong a person enough, they'll remember and actually start to hold a grudge against you. One time I was fighting a guy who hated me and I didn't know why. I checked his bio to find out that I had hospitalized him three times prior, either in fist fights or gun fights or hitting him with my car.

And as you see people in the world, even if they're not your character, you still start to wonder about them. Hey, that street performer carries a banjo on him, but also has a concealed revolver. That internet celebrity has a fancy car and will get recognized in public and gets a discount in stores, but also has a death wish? That court reporter has a news drone but also has a grenade launcher? Why does he have a grenade launcher???

tldr: the bones of the game aren't anything special but goddamn is it flavorful

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Khal Kirby, warlord of the Super Star Khalasar
PSN/Steam: CheddarBBQ https://goo.gl/Diw2hs