izigame.me

Got it for dirt cheap on the holidays; still feel ripped off.
Everything from the two trolls who stalk you through the vents to the ear-violating banjo music that gets played on loop during the finale just screams sadism on the part of the writers. Don't get me wrong the DLC has some nice equipment and it lets you skip over one particular part of restrictive writing in the base game (i.e. it lets you avoid the "Side with the Reagan-cult or everyone freezes to death" thing). There's even an optional stealth segment that was fun to play--it made me feel justified in maxed out "Sneaky" on a character beforehand and it was better paced than stealth segments in other games where you have to waste several minutes waiting 5-6 minutes on each enemy patrol.
I didn't find the 'infinite spawn' mechanics *too* annoying. I had the good luck to have a party composition which could handle the fights--namely, having 3 characters specialized for sprinting and close-quarters combat, but I see how some party setups literally cannot pass certain battles--most of the big fights in this DLC include infinite spawning mechanics, but the game does a good job of telegraphing them and letting you prepare for the most part (except for the last fight which is just a big "fuck-you" to guarantee you walk away with a sour taste in your mouth). They're a bit remniscent of the finales from Horde Shooters like Left 4 Dead, Helldivers, or Vermintide/Darktide--same general principle applies of basically fighting a running battle to the "off-switch" which lets you win the fight... or, if you have a sprinter, you get your heavy weapons specialists to hunker down and distract the bulk of the enemy tide while your sprinters slip past with smoke grenades and hit all the levers and buttons to win the fight, which is what I did. The big thing for these battles is to bring lots of mechanical allies with you (deployable turrets, sawbots, etc.) and drop down 4-6 of them in good locations once the fight starts. In fact the DLC even gives you a vendor who has no other job than to keep you supplied with several deployable allies just in case you're underequipped going in. One of the fights even lets you bring the Kodiak armored vehicle into it and really felt like an opportunity to flex what it's capable of in terms of how much raw damage it can send downrange in a single turn. The fights themselves were honestly fine--intense, but winnable. If it weren't for the Unseen voices I might even consider giving this a positive review.
Let's be blunt--Wasteland 3 is a good strategy game but it's not the best turn-based squad strategy game with guns in it. That crown belongs to X-COM 2 by rights. What makes Wasteland 3 shine is its storytelling--so it's utterly ludicrous that this DLC contains a pair of hecklers who chase you through the vent heaping nonstop verbal abuse on you for each and every decision you've made through that whole playthrough. For those of you who've played far enough in base Wasteland 3, it's being forced to listen to a running commentary of Troi and Brandy--except they also throw in roasts and also stoop to just slinging profanity at you when that fails, and you don't get the option to swat them once they cross a line. The Unseen voices are miserable hypocrites and will go through logical backflips to justify why each and every decision you've made is a bad one and usually throw in a few petty insults for good measure. I thought I'd be able to ignore them, but it's ridiculous how inescapable and ubiquitous their commentary is. It's everywhere, and even if you've been playing like a saint and they run out of story triggers to insult you over, they have a stock list of insults they resort to instead. I guarantee you nobody who plays Wasteland 3 ever has sat down and thought "You know what would make this experience perfect? If I had someone leaning over my shoulder leaning in my ear and contributing nothing but insulting, ridiculing, and gaslighting me over every decision I make." No. You'd have to have an actual dent in your skull to think that anyone would enjoy that. Even if you turn off the voice volume that doesn't stop their text popups from taking up massive amounts of screen space. You're never given an option to hunt them down or even talk back to them, either.
In principle the Unseen voices could have been a good idea: I too sometimes get annoyed by how players go through logical acrobatics to justify making terrible decisions and I like the idea of a running commentary to call out every plainly cruel, selfish, or self-contradictory decision the Rangers have made up until that point, until I realize that they also troll you for decisions you make during moral dilemmas where there is no 'right' answer, or they sometimes resort to troll logic to insult you for what is in its original context the 'right' decision to make. Either these characters are made just to rile the player up for no payoff at all--in which case "fuck you, lead writer" or the lead writer is trying to throw away all the moral nuance up to that point and shove a very, very narrow, bigoted, xenophobic point of view down the players' throats (as in, the Unseen voices insult you for taking pity on refugees and insult you for refusing to murder the enslaved Synths in Steeltown) while ignoring all the nuance of the moral dilemmas presented throughout the game--in which case my response is still "fuck you, lead writer--and your mother, because she failed to teach you to be a better person than this."
The funny thing is that all the other stressful parts of the DLC would be tolerable if it weren't for the Unseen Voices--all the stressful fights, all the infinite spawn enemies, the stacking radiation mechanics--it would all have been bearable if the cadence let the player calm down after a stressful moment or have a natural cadence where players can take a moment to take a breath, take stock of their inventory or get hyped over a good new piece of loot. The Unseen voices manage to take that away--every little reward turns to disappointment, every calm moment taken away because the moment you're past a puzzle or limping away from a rough fight, those two neckbearded baby-lipped bottom-feeding neanderthals will seize the moment to inflict themselves upon you. Kudos to inXile's hiring team; they really knocked it out of the park to find two voice actors capable of getting under your skin. And to make things clear: it's not clever roasting like GLaDOS from the Portal games, where you end up laughing at the setup she puts behind her roasts, or hilarious because she resorts to snubbing you with passive-aggressive subtext despite having the power to splatter you if she actually wanted, the Unseen voices do nothing but subtract from the experience.
So to throw a quote from the Unseen voices back at you, inXile Entertainment: "I hope this sweet, sweet negative review was worth it, assholes. Byeee!"
I don't need my money back, I just wish I could have spent my time doing anything else.