Fallout 4 Review

Developed by: Bethesda Game Studios

Published by: Bethesda Softworks

Release Date: November 10, 2015

Available for: PS4, Xbox One,  PC (reviewed)

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Let’s just get this out of the way: Fallout 4 is pretty much a Bethesda game. It has a huge open world, hundreds of distractions in every direction, an assortment of mysteries to uncover, some jankiness, bugs, and a fairly weak story. We know what to expect from one of the biggest names in RPGs right now – don’t we? Maybe not, because buried underneath the familiarity, this is one of the most surprising, entertaining, frustrating, brilliant, and disappointing games I’ve ever played.

In a first for the Fallout series, the game begins before the Great War that turned the world into an irradiated wasteland. I played as one half of a married couple – either husband or wife – and the parent of an infant named Shaun, whose appearance is apparently reflected by how you customize your own but just wound up looking like a 3D scan of a baked potato in my run. Just after a convenient stop from a Vault Tec employee who informed me that I was being reserved entrance in my local Vault [yay!], the news informed me that nuclear war had begun, and that the world was ending. [boo!]

If this sounds rushed, it’s because it was. I was excited to get a glimpse of the world before the bombs dropped, but it was all too brief. I spent maybe twenty minutes in the idyllic, 50’s inspired neighborhood that my character Walker (one of many names robotic butler Codsworth will recognize) was rushed from one plot point to the next, giving me no time to get acclimated before thrusting me out into Iconic Bethesda Moment Where You Walk Out Of A Dark Place Into A Long-Distance View Of The Open World™. While I understand wanting to get players to the meat of the game quickly, I feel like it should have at least been an option to linger before the bombs dropped a little longer; maybe a sidequest or two.

Welcome to Brown Town. Also, everywhere is Brown Town.

But hey, what’s done is done, my wife is dead (this happens so quickly I already forgot her name. Nora? Mona? I dunno), and I lost my son. That’s the hook the main quest tries to dig into you from the start, but again, with zero time to build an attachment to my spouse and my child, I did what everyone does in Bethesda games and promptly wandered off to goof around for six hours in the middle of nowhere. Unsurprisingly, this is when I started to have fun.

Fallout 4 takes place in the ‘Commonwealth’, which is made up of Boston and the surrounding area. Lexington and Concord, Salem, and other landmarks are within “See that mountain? You can climb it” distance, and I found exploring to be pleasantly varied compared to Fallout 3. The map’s about the same size as previous Bethesda games [as best I could tell], though the ocean takes up a decent chunk of it. Despite this, the world’s noticeably more dense than I expected, with marked locations all over the place, and unmarked ones hiding a surprising amount of goodies.

For those who aren’t content with the world offered to them, the game introduces a new feature: settlements. By liberating communities of varying size across the wasteland, I was able to unlock territory that I could scrap parts from, construct buildings, and attract settlers to in an obvious nod to Fallout Shelter. Like the mobile title, maintaining a settlement is mostly a matter of meeting their needs for food, water, power, and defense, with attacks by monsters and raiders occurring if you slack on the latter. While simplistic, it’s an enjoyable change of pace from running and gunning, though I found the tutorials lacking in explaining many mechanics and the difficulty of neatly constructing buildings frustrating. It’s best to dig into online guides if you want to heavily pursue building your own community.

If there’s one huge black eye on the otherwise pretty face of Bethesda games – okay, besides the bugs – it’s that the combat mechanics are usually terrible. From Morrowind’s dice-rolling whiffs to Fallout 3‘s gun combat being so broken that fighting outside of V.A.T.S. was just an exercise in frustration, it’s never really been a joy to actually kill stuff in these otherwise fascinating open worlds. I’m happy to report that isn’t the case here; supposedly, Bethesda brought in developers from other FPSes to help tighten the combat, and it shows. While melee still lacks a real sense of impact, the physics are improved. Gunplay in particular enjoys huge gains over both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, with tight aiming, consistent recoil, and AI that, while prone to making idiotic mistakes, is usually numerous and clever enough to at least pose a threat. On top of this, an in-depth customization system makes modifying weapons a joy. Almost every feature of a gun [and to a lesser extent melee weapons] can be altered, adding improved damage, new functions, or just changing the weapon type entirely.

In fairness, I say this about everything.

It’s a good thing the combat’s so fun, because you’ll be fighting a LOT. As much as I enjoyed the new combat mechanics, they had a hard time staying fresh when literally every location I discovered and every quest I took on involved clearing out anywhere between half a dozen to twenty ghouls, super mutants, raiders, or irradiated monsters. There’s a distinct lack of variety in how I was able to approach most objectives; whether I tried to be stealthy or not, they always ended in bloodshed, and I can count on one hand the number of times I could talk my way out of an encounter.

This is a shame, because talking is a big part of Fallout, and in the latest entry, it’s both more and less emphasized than ever. Much ado was made about the debut of a voiced protagonist for each gender, and an equal amount of suspicion was levied by skeptical fans, who worried that this would mean less dialogue choices and less room to insert a desired personality into their character. In a nutshell: they were right. The male voice, at least, basically only suits a generic white guy, and dialogue options almost invariably boil down to a flavor of:

1.Yes
2.No [Yes]
3.Sarcastic [Yes]
4.[End Conversation]

There are exceptions, and it’s nice to actually be able to hear my responses during a conversation, but I’m not sure it was worth the cost. While I don’t personally miss the ability to be a complete sociopath from other Fallout games [in FO4, dialogue allows you to be, at worst, helpful but kind of a dick about it], I know a lot of people who will, and that’s a shame. The silver lining here are the companions, who play off your choices and make for some fantastic moments. Bethesda did a great job on incorporating almost all of them pretty extensively.

As one might suspect, this has a profound effect on the game’s main storyline, but it’s not entirely a negative one. While I felt pretty railroaded by the plot save for the singular major choice of what faction to join, many dramatic moments had their chance to shine that would have fallen flat in Fallout 3. Without spoiling much, the story of your character’s quest to seek out their child is paced well and a step above usual Bethesda fare, though I hesitate to call it good. It’s an improvement, though, over maybe any of their games since Morrowind, and that counts for something.

CYBERGRANDMA WANTS TO KNOW WHY YOU NEVER WRITE HER

Speaking of bugs from before, the technical kind are abundant, but…well, better. The game’s certainly got a Bethesda-sized share of them, but at least on PC, none of them were ever gamebreaking. For the first time ever with a Bethsoft title, I never had a single crash to desktop, though I did get inexplicable frame drops in the middle of nowhere even on a GTX 980 and an i7 6700k. Outside of this and the occasional physics wonkiness, I didn’t actually suffer much.

Ultimately, articulating my feelings about Fallout 4 is difficult. I haven’t managed to cover everything, despite this being the longest review I’ve ever written for We The Nerdy by a pretty significant margin. There’s the fact that Power Armor is now more like a vehicle than just a suit, and that customizing it as if I’m some greaser mechanic is a riot, and there’s the enjoyable ambient music, done so well I actually found myself forsaking the radio channels – which, admittedly, I was already sick of, thanks to the fact that most of the songs are recycled from Fallout 3. While I’ve clearly got no lack of criticisms, I’m scoring the game fairly highly. From an outside perspective, this might be difficult to understand, but I think most who have played a Bethesda title before know the method to this madness.

Fallout 4 is made up of moments, of complex cogs and thousands of moving parts that, yeah, sometimes grind to a stop and slam you face first to the ground, but more often result in screenshot-worthy hilarity, challenging tooth-and-nail fights, and real, palpable immersion. For every poorly written quest, there’s a cave with an unforgettable vignette inside; for every half-baked romance quest with a companion, tons of witty one-liners and enjoyable exchanges; for every tired raider encounter, an unexpected swamp monster ambushing you from inside a pond. The seams in Fallout 4 are visible as often as they aren’t, and it’s in many ways even less of an RPG than its predecessors, but I had fun playing it, and I would recommend it to someone else, even if not for the same reasons as I would New Vegas or Fallout 2. I’m not quite sure what that means for me, or for the franchise, but while war never changes, Fallout does… and I’m still happy to be along for the ride.