Old fashioned destruction in the desert
When I first heard the title of Wasteland Angel, I was intrigued. To get a better feel for what I was about to play I looked up a few screen shots and I was more than ready. Wasteland Angel is riding the recent wave of post apocalypse games that have dominated the market since Fallout 3.
The story follows a woman (who later says to just call her Angel) and her car. She took refuge in a small town in the west after the initial blast took place. Not long after she’s there the town is attacked by wastelanders and among them are slavers. Volunteering to protect the town, she gets in her machine gun armed car and meets the threat. Mostly you spend your time shooting slaver vans before they kidnap all the civilians.
After going through the tutorial to get comfortable with the controls I was ready to blow up a parking lot full of vehicles. The point of the game is to destroy wave upon wave of wastelander vehicles while protecting the citizens of the city. I assumed that it couldn’t be too difficult, I should have planned for some game play difficulties.
Nearly eighty percent of my experience was plagued with unresponsive controls and glitches. By far the most annoying was my bullets going through my enemy. This fun little flaw wasn’t a mere one time occurrence; rather it was frequent enough to warrant me cursing at my game.
All too often I had my enemy in my sights and unloaded my chain guns on them…only to have them pass through them unobstructed. Another irritating issue I had was my cars refusal to drive. Nearly all of my deaths can be related to me hitting the turn button and my car just sitting and burning rubber for twenty seconds. I’ve got a powerful engine, but still.
When Wasteland Angel runs error free it has a nice fun factor. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love driving an armored car and blowing up other vehicles. Though the game gets redundant early on. It’s level after level of destroying wave after wave of vehicles. The only difference is that there are occasional boss battles.
Graphics is one of the bright spots of the game. Wasteland Angel has fairly good graphics, unfortunately there isn’t really a whole lot in the game to enjoy the graphics. All you see is desert, town and vehicles.
The audio in the game wasn’t too bad either. I expected it to be loud and annoying and instead it was subtle and fit the game perfectly. Whenever the main character talks, she doesn’t sound like a screeching harpy. Engine sounds and gun sounds also do a pretty good job of staying in balance with the general audio so no one sounds causes you to be distracted.
Overall I gave Wasteland Angel two GiN Gems due to the amount of bugs I hit as well as the repetition. If the bugs get worked out and you would like a car destruction fix, then this game might be a great way to burn spare time, especially at the price it’s being offered on the Steam download service. And there is a free demo too.