I get it, you're editors and you're defending the article because you were the final pass on this. You have final responsibility.
Unfortunately it's an indefensible position. Meet the standards that the Codex has been building its reputation on tearing down for other sites or accept the hypocrisy of the stance.
VD and Eric are exceptionally qualified to discuss these matters with authority. There are no questions there whatsoever.
Just amend the review to cover these basic aspects. It's pretty simple
I'll take responsibility for this oversight. Don't want to speak for VD, these are my own thoughts:
I just went back and skipped through the original Fallout and Wasteland 2 soundtracks and it's amazing how many songs from the first two Fallouts I recognized immediately after 2 seconds of listening and how few of the Wasteland 2 songs I recognized despite spending dozens of hours with them. Is it my familiarity with the Fallout soundtracks, or did they have an emphasis on character that Wasteland doesn't? Strange sounds, textures, chants, rhythms - elements of new age, ambient, industrial, maybe even indigenous music. Despite being background music, there is a distinct "Fallout sound" to each song, something I've never heard in anything else. By contrast, I feel like I've heard
this song in any number of recent games. Splinter Cell? Alpha Protocol? It wouldn't be out of place in either.
Depending on how you feel about Mark Morgan, you will either like the soundtrack or not notice it. It does what it is supposed to do, and that's take up space. The game is not silent. That's not to say the soundtrack isn't competent or good - it is very good at what it is supposed to do and that is support the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic hellscape. It is never at odds with the game's aesthetic, but there isn't a single moment of music I remember. I've heard the argument for the existence of God that goes, "if He's doing a good job, you won't even know He's there." Maybe we can say the same for game soundtracks. Is Mark Morgan God? You Be The Judge.
The game has very good voice acting and there are a handful of standout characters - the stern and intimidating Kekkabah, the commanding but weary General Vargas, the sanctimonious Father Enola, whose cadence and fervor are reminiscent of southern evangelists. What I appreciate most about the voice acting is its restraint. Its infrequent use indicates the importance of the dialogue or character. It adds depth to characters but never overstays its welcome. I wish more games would take this approach.
I enjoy the game's visual atmosphere and it does a lot to support the game's aesthetic of a world utterly ruined by nuclear war. You encounter burned out cities left abandoned for years, ramshackle cities built from their remains, dying Arizona wastelands, the ultra-modern, maybe even space age Ranger Citadel. I especially appreciate the lush, overgrown Californian cities, retaken by nature. As a DC native, something that bothered me about Fallout 3 was that its landscape was indistinguishable from the Southern California deserts depicted in the first two games. Before the city was built, DC was a swamp. If people were to suddenly disappear, it would once again become a swamp. The uncontrolled vegetation of California was an interesting and welcome take on an aesthetic dominated by tired and sometimes geographically inappropriate Mad Max-esque desert imagery.
With
one exception, the game's portraits are excellent. What's frustrating about them is that they're reused frequently, including some of the portraits selectable in character creation. It's possible to run into NPCs, some of whom are even recruitable, that have the same portraits as your own characters. Players think of the characters they create as unique to the world they exist in. When they encounter another character that is visually identical, the illusion of their character's identity and uniqueness is shattered.
One thing in particular I appreciated was that your characters' appearances are independent of the armor they're wearing. By the end of most RPGs, you've got a team of people wearing ultimate power armor +10 and they're visually indistinguishable from one another. In Wasteland, you set your characters' starting appearance in character creation using a huge variety of wasteland-appropriate clothing - one of my characters wore makeshift body armor, another wore a Clint Eastwood-inspired poncho and sombrero - that can be modified over the course of the game as you run across new pieces of clothing. It is completely cosmetic, but it is nice that you have so much control over your characters' visual identities, that they don't all turn into same thing like they do in so many other RPGs.
