Fallout 4 Review (XB1)

  Despite further allowing for straight-up first person shooting gameplay, Fallout 4 is a role playing game. To be more specific: it's the new poster boy for modern Western role playing games, where yes, story matters but playing the game is actually enjoyable, the need for mindless grinding has been abolished, and it's meant for players over the age of fourteen (looking at you, Japan...). To get even more detailed: Fallout 4 is a Bethesda RPG, where the main draw is exploring the open world, telling your own personal story, and the side quests and environmental storytelling resonate better than the main questline. Fallout 4 is both Fallout: Evolved and Bethesda: Evolved. As a longtime fan of both the series proper and the developer I can happily say this is my favorite of both sub-genres.

  One of the key elements in my love of WRPGs is customization and player choice. Sadly, this aspect has been minimalized as of late as modern video games continue to genre-blend and borrow from each other. Fallout 4 goes whole hog with it. Taking a bit of inspiration from Minecraft, there are dozens of settlements scattered around the Boston wasteland just waiting for you to occupy, dismantle, and rebuild as you see fit. You can set up stores, hand-build structures, run power grids, build traps and guard posts... it's a completely optional side activity, but one that goes a long way into reaffirming ownership and agency over the setting. There are rules to abide; you have to scavenge the raw materials to build and there's a cap as to how many items can be placed, but within those confines you can really go nuts and let your imagination run wild. On top of that: every weapon and piece of armor you find can be modified to your liking and renamed. Oh, and you can equip your companions with any equipment you like, which will change their appearance accordingly. You can also set supply lines between settlements to allow the sharing of raw materials... Yeah, it's dense and daunting to first dip into, but the payoff is real and satisfying.

  As impressive as the options are on a micro level, the scope of Fallout 4 is just as impressive. The destroyed-then-cobbled-together Boston wasteland is gorgeous. To fast travel around the map is to do yourself a disservice. Not only are there little side stories and one-off locations scattered around, but the variety in environments is truly something else. The city proper is kind of colorful when viewed from a distance, then brown and dirty when navigating the rundown alleys and ruined buildings. The suburbs have their own stories to tell, littered with rusted hulks of cars and the American Dream taken over by raiders or super mutants in a once idyllic cul-de-sac. There's also a large swath of wilderness to be explored, often beautiful and peaceful when Godrays pour through the treetops with only a two-headed, mutated deer or two to remind you of the radiated world you now inhabit. Take a leisurely stroll along the coast and you can find plenty of shipwrecks along the oddly calming sea, a lighthouse, and a spooky/stately mansion. Every time I swore I had the “look” or “feel” of Fallout 4 pinned down and had seen all the game had to offer a giant airship appeared in the sky above Boston Airport or I transported into a sterile, high-tech lab facility underground.

  Fallout 4 is a constantly changing world. Through the choices you make and the sides you take you set in motion chains of events that let interlocking systems rub against each other, playing with and against themselves and in the process you: the player. There are a half dozen or so factions to interact with. Some will play nice with other, most of them are mortal enemies. You can play all sides up to a point, but eventually you'll have to choose your allies. Do you side with the Minutemen, rebels sworn to liberate and protect the Commonwealth? The Brotherhood, whose shock-and-awe airborne tactics and advanced technology will surely give you a leg up in the fights? The Institute seems to have humanities' future in it's best interest, even if they're a bunch of elitists and boogeymen of legend... These are tough choices, and all roads will eventually lead to conflict. War never changes, indeed, and these wars are epic beyond anything seen in any previous Fallout game or any comparable games period. The climax of my journey involved several large scale battles with multiple factions raining hell upon each other, a nuclear reactor exploding, artillery shells bombing an airport, and a dead kid.

  I'm honestly not too sure how playing a non-violent, stealth based, or charismatic/diplomatic character would play out. The Fallout series is known for offering alternative play choices other than all-out assault like my playthroughs tend to be, but combat seems to be essential as far as I can gather (or care). It's a good thing the combat is so fun to take part in. I mostly stuck to melee weapons for my character, and those kill animations are just a delight. I found a World Series baseball bat that randomly sent enemies flying a mile into the sky, and this was often punctuated by a Mysterious Stranger showing up and shooting them out of the air like a skeet shooter. Using a simple combat knife can be fun and brutal, too, as many weapons have unique kills assigned to them. My beefed up super sledge was great for taking out a raider's knee, bashing him in the back, then finishing him with a melon pop that sprayed his brains all over the wall in a crimson mist. I also suped up a Ripper, named it Gunnar Hansen, and quickly found out it was incredibly overpowered as it regularly disarmed opponents, made them bleed out, had a nasty area of effect range, and crippled every body part in a matter of seconds. It was awesome. Many clips were made.

  All of this freedom and choice comes with a few drawbacks. Most notably: the main storyline just isn't very strong. Your (fully customizable) protagonist is frozen in a vault along with his wife and son, a group thaws them out and steals the kid and kills your wife, re-freezes you, then you wake up in the wasteland. What follows certainly has some interesting missions, but the overarching plot is fairly predictable and limp. There's really not much of an excuse to be had why there couldn't be a more engaging main story, but the opening sequence is fairly strong and it's a fine motivator to go out and explore the world at least, which is the game's strength. To further cement how inconsequential the story is: the game never really “ends”. No credits or anything, just a short flashback/voiceover then you're right back into the world. I've played enough Bethesda games to know this is standard, but if you're looking for thought provoking, grand scale narrative you might come away disappointed.

  Another inexcusable black mark is the inventory UI. It's a mess. Vital options are hidden, clunky, and slow. Some armor is classified as “under armor” and can be worn with other pieces on top, while some are full suits that can't. The only way to tell what is what is to experiment, taking off and re-equipping a dozen individual pieces if you pick the wrong kind, so God help you if you're hauling a bunch of extra pieces since the names of some are long enough to get cut off the screen (like “left arm”, “right arm”, etc.). Sifting through your “Misc.” category to find what you want (which can be quest items...) sucks, and I never found the “sort” option to be any help. After hours and hours of struggling to make heads or tails out of the inventory it becomes begrudgingly manageable, but it's never elegant or ideal.

  The biggest disappointment is how Power Armor is handled in the game. Traditionally in a Fallout title getting a suit of Power Armor is a mid-to-late game reward that granted you exceptional defense and Strength you needed to handle the heavy weaponry to take on overpowering enemies. Fallout 4 gives you access to your first suit of Power Armor very early, then litters the landscape with dozens of replacements. Now, I'm not complaining that the game doesn't adhere to some set blueprint that Fallout games are restricted to, just that it's not fun or useful to use Power Armor in Fallout 4. The abundance of suits is offset by the need to fuel them with fusion cores (finite energy sources), but the Power Armor just doesn't seem very... powerful. Being a natural hoarder, early on the extra Strength bonus was good for carrying extra supplies, but once I had my normal armor deep pocketed I actually could hold less while wearing Power Armor. Individual pieces of the armor get damaged and eventually break (and they're not as hardy as you would think), which forces you to constantly repair them at designated stations, burning through rare resources. You also aren't allowed to hack terminals or craft while wearing it, so you either have to get out (and sit through that animation...) or just sacrifice the joy of exploration. Most annoying is the constant, loud “thump, thump” of your footsteps as you walk. I get that you're supposed to feel heavy, but it's obnoxious. I avoided Power Armor for the vast majority of the game as the trade-offs just didn't seem worthwhile, and that's a shame for such an iconic staple of the series. At least the suits look cool, anyway.

  Small gripes aside, Fallout 4 is an astounding sandbox RPG experience. You could live in this post-apocalyptic world for the rest of your natural life, building and rebuilding, exploring, destroying, and creating a virtual life for yourself. This is the pinnacle of player driven, personal storytelling. I've played through countless linear/interactive video game stories that try to shove emotion and themes down your throat, yet I've never had as much of a connection to a companion as I did with Piper; a reporter I met outside Diamond City who traveled the wastes with me for hundreds of hours outfitted in clothes I designed especially for her. We saw some real fucked up shit together. At one point in my journey I lost her, and felt honest real world anguish that I might never see her again. This wasn't achieved by going on some canned companion side quest where I found out about her daddy issues and her struggles to make it as a female reporter in a male dominated society, this was genuine bonding through open gameplay where I heard her quips, watched her drop kick some dudes, and saw her candidly sit down at a pew in a bombed out church and pray. That's the power of player choice and agency in an impossibly detailed and intricately complex world.