The Wastes

Simulates an average day in Hastings. 10 / 10.

I'm finally happy to shift my review from negative to positive! I've played this game on and off since it first came out in 2018. I bought it because I stumbled upon it online and thought it looked interesting, I played a handful of multiplayer matches with several other players, and I had a blast. However, since then, the player base of this game dropped to a literal 0 players. I fired up this game tons of times over the years to discover completely empty servers, which disappointed me greatly. The game had bot support, but they weren't very smart. I ended up leaving a negative Steam review explaining that the game itself is fantastic, but it's impossible for the game to deliver what it sets out to with a player base of exactly 0 players. Since then, the developer has promised an update focusing on single-player content, and boy have they delivered! Just seeing the promotional material for this game made me feel like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for leaving a negative Steam review. I knew I had to revise my review as soon as I could get my hands on it. They released a beta just this past Sunday, and I finally fired it up for around an hour to give it a whirl. While it's not perfect and it has lots of room to grow, it adapts the game play already present in The Wastes into a singleplayer/coop context extremely well. Here's the features that make it for me: - The beta of this new 1.3 update actually has a free shareware version out now You can go to https://www.vera-visions.com/twtest.html to download the shareware version of the latest beta to give it a go! It's the exact same game, only with a reduced sample map set and mission set out of the full product. This means you can try the game out immediately without spending a dime, or you can play it with friends who don't know if this sort of game is up their alley and thus might not want to pay. This is the version I played for this review. You can also access the beta from the Steam version of this game by going to the "Betas" tab on Steam. - The new "Invasion" mode allows you to load into any multiplayer map alone or with friends, pick whatever loadouts you want, and attempt to survive waves of AI "Loonies" coming after you. Scavenge the maps for supplies to survive and continue the fight, or for power weapons to gain the upper hand. This mode is fun, and although the concept is fairly simple, I found that the battle can still get fairly intense real fast if you get ambushed inside of a tight building or if a horde of them descends upon you outside. - Play through various "Missions" across different levels. These are challenges filled with various enemies, supplies, weapons, and objectives. You can play these alone, or with friends in multiplayer. There are only two, but I've played both of them and they're great. In these missions, supplies like ammunition and health are typically very scarce, and the enemies pack a punch if you let them get the drop on you, forcing you to slink around, check your corners, and try to plan engagements to give yourself the best upper hand possible. - A "Mission Editor" that allows you to create your own missions by loading up any multiplayer map, and placing things like player spawns, enemy spawn points, weapons, supplies, various objectives, and even vehicles in different parts of the level as you see fit. You can create whatever kind of missions you like within the 5 included maps. Remember how I said the default missions were tense experiences where you're always short on supplies and one mistake means death? If that's right up your alley, you can easily craft more missions like that in a snap, and if you don't like it, you can make your own missions where there are ammo boxes and health kits all over the place and you just have to fight tons of enemies if that's more your speed. I can imagine a LOT of potential with these sorts of missions. - If just making missions on the existing maps isn't enough for you, this game is built on some cocktail mix of the Quake engine, and the developer has released mapping tools for the engine that this game is running on, so you can make your own maps for this game very much like how you can make maps for Quake. With the features this engine can support, I can imagine someone being able to make more advanced missions for this game by making custom-built maps with some features and intended progression and arenas using the mapping tool, and then kitting those maps out in the mission editor. - The developers of this game host a free optional service called "FragNet" that easily provides port-forwarded servers for this game. If you start a multiplayer match for this game and make it public, it get's shifted to FragNet automatically and listed for people to join. You don't need to pay a fee for FragNet or make an account of any kind to use it, and you can also set your game to "Private" to disable the public listing. This means you can set up public multiplayer games without port forwarding a computer and running a server program on it. It's very convenient to use if you just want to get a quick coop match with friends. On the contrary, if you would like to host a server for this game, you can ignore FragNet and host a server for this game just like you would a Quake or Counter-Strike server. - You can customize your character's appearance by switching between player models, and you can choose between several different "Sprays" or provide a custom one of your own. - You can customize your character's stats regarding traits like movement speed, the recoil and spread of your weapons, the damage your melee weapons do, or the amount of harm it takes to make your character croak. I haven't seen it make a massive difference to the point of one choice or the other being overpowered, but it's just enough that it enables you to enact different strategies with different configurations. There's certain kinds of map parkour tricks you can only really do with a high agility character, but they're a little bit sparse. A high endurance character can take noticeably more harm before croaking, but not so much more that he's unfun to fight. An efficient character experiences less recoil from guns and also has reduced spread with guns of all kinds, including shotguns. - On top of all of this, the game includes the same PVP multiplayer modes it did prior to the 1.3 update and that most players have come to expect from PVP FPSes, such as team deathmatch, free for all, and capture the flag. - Oh, all this, and did I mention the game has cars in it? If shooting people with your buddies across missions or engaging in multiplayer deathmatch somehow wasn't cool enough for you, you can drive a badass car with a machine gun mounted to it across the barren hellscape desert to lay waste to raiders, loonies, and whoever else gets between you and your survival. - The engine for this game has both aged like a fine wine and is fairly well optimized, so it runs great even on older computers using integrated graphics. The new update even includes a slick flashlight and shadow system that wasn't present in earlier versions of the game, yet it still runs very well even on older hardware. The game as it stands right now holds a lot of potential, and I hope the developers continue working on this game to add more features to the Mission editor, as well as to possibly release or support an official map editor for this game in particular. I feel this game really is finally on it's way out of a low point and has so much potential for a community to develop around badass post-apocalyptic deathmatches, slick missions and maps, and all kinds of mayhem in between.

Underrated

Shock da loonie

Bought it because of the good old The Wastes mod from the HL days. Good for LAN play, don't expect any online servers.

This game is definitely worth the money, hear me out. The Wastes is a retro-styled first person shooter, based in an apocalyptic setting. It's your run of the mill "arena/deathmatch boomer shooter" with some nice twists and additions. Players can fight each other in a variety of modes such as CTF, Deathmatch, and Elimination, all sporting unique names. Players can setup loadouts before spawning, with a secondary, primary, melee, and throwable, with a variety of shotguns, smgs, ARs, all fitting for an apocalyptic theme. There are also grabbable weapons scattered on each map. In addition, there is a small stats system, where you can put attribute points into stuff such as damage resistance, melee damage output, speed, and weapon accuracy. But you only get a certain amount of points, same for each player. On the other side of things is Co-Op based modes, players can participate in a 10 wave survival mode called Invasion, or you can CREATE your own missions and play them online with other players cooperatively. The mission editor is a huge key feature. The developers are pretty active with the community on IRC, and definitely will respond to feedback and questions if you have any. If you like retro themed shooters, or something a little more fast paced, I highly suggest grabbing this game for you and a few buddies, unfortunately the game is pretty small playerbase wise, as it's a niche title most havent seen or heard of. Lots of guns, gore, and good times for sure with this one. I'll leave the rest for you guys to see yourselves. Happy Fragging!

A very decent tribute to the old goldsrc mod. It's still in developement but stuff is getting done. 8/10 so far

Why haven't I come across this hidden gem sooner?! I can't even find it when I search for it on the Steam Store. Wounder why? Definetly bridges the gap between the original steam and the WON version and continues progression. The only thing I think is missing is the guns from the WON version are not all there but in their place original additions that work all good. Single Player! Wow, the first multiplayer title I know of to offer a single player mission generator and/or mini campaign. Keep developing this piece of history!

Gotta love an old-school FPS.

A competent arena-style FPS single/multiplayer game inspired by shooters and GURPS RPGs of that era. The Wastes is an arena FPS that isn't afraid to throw vehicular combat into the mix, with more weapons than there are people to use them. The Wastes has bots for offline play, and they support most game modes, but they do not drive vehicles.