Wasteland was a homange to the Mad Max nuclear winter scenario that might have happened when the Soviet Union still walked the Earth. Wasteland takes you into a post apocalyptic world filled with mutants, scared citizens, and bizarre gruesome events of man versus man, and man versus the elements. If you're thinking this is alot like Fallout, well the two are made by the same company.

In Wasteland, you're basically a team of rangers. You have four members, but can recruit three more from people and creatures you meet. You'll carry mostly guns and ammo, but there's other things you can find along to use. You have skills and experience that increase from combat and usage. Your mission is to uncover the secret behind some disturbances in what was once the southwest US.

You do this by visiting villages and helping the survivors recover their loved ones from mutants, finding stuff for them, or simply exploring some of the strange locales rumored by villagers in the game. These places are usally underground and contain treasure and monsters. Some of the story is told onscreen, but large portions are told in a book that came with the game. The book contains false passages so you can't just read it to figure out the ending. It's also a great way to copy protect the game.

The combat is extremely old school and one of our least favorite things about the game. You basically select some commands from a menu and the characters perform those commands while you read text on one side of the screen. The animation is limited to a few animations of the creature you're fighting. The creatures are nicely colored, but there's really nothing exceptional about a picture with a head moving slightly every few seconds.

The game uses tilesets that you might find in NES games of that era, except their quality is even less than the 8-bit games. Wasteland tries to make up for the lack of graphics by using good colors and giving you nice artwork to look at during fights. The sound is also lacking. Much more than in the Bard's Tale series which uses the same engine.

It's a single player RPG that you'll want to finish at least once. What makes this one of the greatest RPGs of all time is the atmosphere and storytelling that brings you into the game and makes you forget the graphics and repetitive gameplay. If you find this game and don't mind the graphics, it's a real treat from a bygone world known as the Cold War Era.