91色情片

inXile Entertainment
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

VIDEO games offer something unique among media: choice. Putting aside choose-your-own adventure books, such as the Fighting Fantasy series, or films like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the chance to influence and craft a narrative is something only video games can provide. Of course, there are limits imposed by genre and software 鈥� play a first-person shooter and you won鈥檛 be able to put your gun down and host a tea party 鈥� but for some games, choice is their defining feature.

In Wasteland 3, making those choices is a real struggle. The game is set in Colorado, some 100 years after a nuclear war, and puts you in charge of the Desert Rangers, a mercenary police force.

Your first choice is to design your squad members and, as with many such role-playing games, there is a bevy of stats, skills and hairstyles to choose from. Yet Wasteland 3 goes further. Want to play as a mime artist? You will be stealthier in combat but unable to talk and will have to wear a striped jumper and face paint. Or perhaps you want to boost your toaster repair skill, which lets you鈥� repair toasters. Clearly, Wasteland 3 doesn鈥檛 take itself too seriously.

In the first hour of the game, your squad meets the Patriarch, Colorado鈥檚 ruler. He sets you up with a base and asks you to hunt down and arrest his three rebellious children, who are all vying to take over his empire.

鈥淚 found a cult that worships an AI version of US president Ronald Reagan, embodied in a statue with a death ray鈥�

This forms the backbone of the game, but there are numerous side quests. One early mission saw my team tasked with investigating noises in an apartment. I blasted down the door and was confronted by a group of clones, all vehemently insisting they were ordinary humans as they attacked.

After dispatching them using the game鈥檚 satisfying and puzzle-like turn-based combat, I tracked down the man who made them, who turned out to be a fourth-generation clone himself. Though I learned the repeated cloning was producing more and more unstable results, I was undeterred and decided to recruit him to my base. Now I can make my own clones.

The side quests are fun, but my favourite mission was part of the main story. While tracking down one of the Patriarch鈥檚 children in Denver鈥檚 ruins, I found the Gippers, a cult worshipping an AI version of US president Ronald Reagan, embodied in a massive statue equipped with a death ray. Well, it鈥檚 what he would have wanted.

The cultists asked me to steal a cybernetic transfer module from a commune of robots because they planned to download the Reagan AI into a human body. This sounded like a bad idea to me, but I went along with it and visited the commune, where I found a charming bunch of machines that I felt didn鈥檛 deserve to be harmed.

The artificial hive mind that ran the place reviewed many of my previous decisions in the game and decided I was a friend to machines. Indeed, I ultimately chose to side with them and instead transfer the Reagan AI into the greater machine consciousness. Needless to say, the Gippers weren鈥檛 happy.

This ability to choose my own path means I am getting caught up in Wasteland 3鈥榮 story, though it does come at a cost: the game is extremely buggy and crashes frequently. The developers are working to patch the game and fix this, but it is a testament to how much I am enjoying it that each time Wasteland 3 judders to a halt, I am eager to boot up again and keep playing.