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a shitty review of: Fallout 4

Fallout: something I rather enjoy.  When discussing the kings of RPGs for the PC, most of the time you end up at games like Elder Scrolls and Fallout, both Bethesda RPGs, both have parallels that can be drawn between them. Everyone who played both will have a favorite, and reasons for each. Fallout has my heart, and then you can argue for hours and hours which one is the best. 3 has the story, New Vegas has the everything and 4 has the everything else, the first 2 have the old PC charm and other things you can adore about them, but my stalling tactics delay the fact I have decided to commit myself to reviewing 4 shittily now.

Fallout 4 starts with a pleasing view of the pre-war world, with an appealing voice over, some depressing views of soldiers fighting the chinese and whoever else the US have pissed off today. You then cut to a small family enjoying their life. Obviously since this is a Bethesda RPG, the inevitable half hour of creating characters left me with a poor recreation of the Wendy’s Girl and Scott Dawson.

Aren’t they so beautiful.

You then briefly explore your house, get a call from a Vault-Tec rep, who acts as your Vigor Tester or YOU’RE S.P.E.C.I.A.L book,  see your animatronic child, and then watch TV while you’re told nukes have been launched at the US because China. You run up to the local vault seeing a nuclear warhead explode not too far off, and are let in. You get down and see a rare visualization of the Vaults pre-decaying and pre-psychotic social experiments.

(For those who didn’t know, the Vaults in Fallout were never designed to help people survive. They were primarily designed to do psychotic experiments on people unknowingly, and save people second. The US Government never nuclear war, how wrong they were.)

Unfortunately for you, Vault 111 got “Cryogenic Freezing” on the wheel of pain, so you’re frozen inside a capsule. About 200 year later you wake up temporarily to find your husband/wife shot, your son kidnapped, you declared a “backup” and a bunch of dirty scientists doing dirty experiments.

How fun.

A few more years, you break out, fight your way through some Radroaches and leave to find the world thoroughly fucked by nuclear war. The plot then progresses until you start discovering a new threat based out of MIT called “The Institute” replacing people throughout this wasteland called the Commonwealth, then find your son’s kidnapper, then find everything else out about the plot, not wishing to spoil any endings or anything.

The gameplay is same old same old for Fallout. The shooting this time around is much more smooth and enjoyable, at the cost of making melee weapons literally useless. Anyone holding a pool cue with a bit of knife on the end has the life expectancy of a terminal 5 cancer patient who smoked like a chimney, providing you have a shotgun shell remaining. The differences with the combat comes with weapon systems. Your weapons are a blank slate- they can be heavily, HEAVILY customized. The Pipe pistol can be a fully automatic sniper rifle, a revolver type pistol, a rifle, anything that you can stick on. Every gun will have at least 7 different receivers, 4 different scopes, supressors, muzzle brakes, bayonets, everything, meanwhile melee weapons is about 2 per type, and about 10 melee weapons total, while there’s about 50 base guns. It makes it worse, because now you can gunbash, and gunbashing can heavily stagger people, making them very goddamn vulnerable to a double tap of shotgun shells to the face. The guns all feel great to use, so can’t complain on that front. Advice: buy a combat rifle, make a scope for it, and print murder.

On the RPG front, it was weirdly changed. Before, every second time you leveled up, you could pick a perk if you had the requirements and that was that. Now, you get 1 point. That point can be put into a perk, or into a stat. There’s 10 perks per stat, and it’s easier to understand if you look at the chart.

It’s complicated. Some perk give you access to new crafting options, more damage, more ammunition in containers, and one where you gain stats in sunlight, later turning into a plant healing in sunlight.

What else is there really to mention? How about characters. Fallout 4 has a lot of them and so many are boring as fuuuuuuck. There’s the occasional good one like Piper, or Hancock, the weird like Captain Ironsides or Kent Connoly, but 90% of them are basic bitch ass no backstory or anything. The story itself if rapidly told but thin on the ground, unlike Fallout 3 and New Vegas that relied on the main story to link everything else to the side quests. It takes an approach to the main story like Skyrim did, where it’s sort of there but the side questing is about 80% of the game. A better approach? Potentially. 

The base line is I fuckin liked this shit. It was fun.

10/10