Wasteland

About

Wasteland is a 1988 CRPG with deep stat-based progression and brutal combat. Players lead a squad of four Desert Rangers navigating a post-nuclear wasteland, solving problems through stats like strength or intelligence or by blowing things up. Recruit up to seven NPCs with unpredictable loyalties, each adding distinct playstyles. Every choice matters in a world that remembers your actions, a rare trait in 1988 games that required copying the disk to preserve progress. The game rewards tactical thinking, bypass a locked door with lockpicks, a crowbar, or a LAW rocket, but expect permadeath if you fail. The game's reputation leans on its unrelenting difficulty and graphic combat descriptions like "reduced to a thin red paste." Its story pits rangers against an AI building armies of cyborgs to replace humanity, culminating in a nuclear showdown. Though released on DOS and C64, its influence lingers, modern remakes and spin-offs keep its core loop alive. A relic of early RPG design that still challenges players to think creatively in a world where mercy is scarce.

Storyline

In the year 2087, a remnant of the U.S. Army called the Desert Rangers is based in the Southwestern United States following the global nuclear war of 1998. A team of Desert Rangers is assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in the nearby areas and, throughout the game, explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. The player's party begins with four characters, and through the course of the game can hold as many as seven characters by recruiting certain citizens and creatures of the wasteland to the player's cause. Over the course of the game the player's party discovers evidence of a larger menace that threatens to exterminate what is left of the human kind in the game's region and eventually the world. The menace, a pre-war AI computer that is operating from a surviving military facility; Base Cochise, where it is constructing armies of killer machines and cybernetically modified humans with which it is attacking settlements. Its goal is to replace the current 'flawed' population with genetically pure specimens. With the help from a pre-war android named Max the player recovers the necessary technology and weapons in order to confront the computer at its base and stop it by making the base's nuclear reactor go critical.