Just as a disclaimer, I am only 20 hours into Fallout 4, which might be just too short for a full review of the game. What I’m trying to say is that Fallout 4 is a massive game. Huge. Nearly overwhelming massive. So much so that by 20 hours in, I’m still learning things about the game. These discoveries might be a testament to the horrible tutorial or lack there of but I like to think it’s just because the game is chock full of stuff content, well-designed content at that.
It’s not to say the game doesn’t have flaws. It has a lot. A lot. The voice acting is completely hit or miss. The writing equally fluctuates between well-written developing dialogue and total hogwash exposition shoved in awkwardly. The glitches for me weren’t too bad, but I also was playing on a console and console versions usually are more stable than the PC master race would love to assume. However, there were still a number of irritating glitches like one where if I crouched for too long, I would go invisible and couldn’t check my pipboy. The AI programming is horrendous. The enemies have a complete lack of strategic programming. They just around shooting and charging like headless chickens. The follower AI is equally as buggy. The most obvious problem came when my followers would block stairs and doorways, preventing me from getting through. Perks are logically implemented but are too rare to provide for equal effective leveling. However, these are all small blemishes in an overall beautifully sprawling game.
These flaws are relatively minor in comparison to everything that is right in the game. The graphics are stylized and detailed, not to mention the attention to world building through architecture and design. The gunplay is smooth and effective, as opposed to Fallout 3’s hideously bizarre and bouncy gunplay. VATS has been scaled back although not very noticeable. Instead of stopping time altogether, it’s just slowed down momentarily. However, it’s slow enough where it is basically freezing time.
The most noticeable difference between 4 and 3 is that 4 has less supplies, less support, less everything in terms of resources to keep you going. There are less bullets, less health supplies, and less crafting supplies and everything is more expensive, which helps further articulate the importance of survival in the wasteland and ramps up the difficulty tremendously from Fallout 3.
The story is somewhat flimsy. You start out right before the bombs fall in 2077 and are cryogenically frozen in a vault as nuclear weapons reduce Boston into the shattered wasteland it’s about to become. Your son is kidnapped while you are sleeping, and you have to go find him. As per Fallout New Vegas, the faction system returns if a somewhat abridged version. No longer do you have opinion ratings which determine how loved or hated you are by the different groups in the wasteland, but instead, you more or less pick a side who supplies you and gives you quests as the game progresses, leading to a unique ending depending on who you join. It’s well executed, but the lack of the intense system from New Vegas feels like a retrograde.
There is a new crafting system because every open world game needs a crafting system now. You collect junk in the wastes then break it down to its components. Then, you use it to build structures for your communities or to upgrade your weapons and armor. While the upgrade system is well articulated and structured, the community building is a haphazard affair. You spend hours in first person awkwardly putting houses and building together with virtually no help from the interface to satisfy a few random NPCs whom you have no reason to want to protect in terms of benefit to the player. Also, the crafting system is very poorly explained and you can’t just scrap everything you find, you have to awkwardly drag it back to your base then sift through all of it breaking everything down individually. To say the least, it’s a hassle.
Despite these failures, you feel the size when you wander the wastes or in downtown Boston fighting through every single nest of super mutants and band of raiders. It’s finding a bombed out building filled with dead bodies wasted away to skeletons and poisoned wine casually sitting around the room. It’s building a massive turret to keep your settlers safe after a ghoul attack. It’s barely pulling yourself to safety after having all your limbs broken and finding that one stimpack to keep you going. That’s what Fallout is. That’s how it's meant to be played.
