Put on your blue jumpsuit and step out of your vault, Fallout is back. It's still unreal that this game has actually came out. I was in disbelief when it was announced and now it's been out for so long! If you haven't played Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas, then stop reading immediately and play them! But come back and read the rest please.
Plenty to talk about with all the new features and this is a big-ass game. Bethesda know how to make good games and that's why they're my favourite developer. The fifth major installment including New Vegas. An open world game set in a post-apocalyptic future, what doesn't sound great there? Despite the city of Boston being in ruins, there's plenty to explore and many buildings to enter, this is a change from Fallout 3 as you can tell what the place looked like prior to the nuclear war. F3 was a lot more of an empty wasteland compared to 4.
Unlike the other games in the series, this game starts before the bombs fell. Happy families living their daily lives, something we never saw before. Unfortunately it doesn't last long and soon after continues after the bombs. It would've been nice to get to spend time in the pre-apocalyptic world and explore at little at least, seeing as it had never been done. Despite being set in the future, the year 2287 to be exact, it has a 1950s style to the game, giving it an old style-future.
Without spoiling too much, the story is quite similar to F3 in that instead of looking for your father, you are now trying to locate your missing son. The game starts off straight into the customization of your character. The graphics have improved so much, they're not amazing, but they are fantastic compared to the old Fallouts. Your character now speaks, which I love, I hate games that have Silent protagonists. The performance is great but because there is now an actor, the dialogue is a lot more limited than it was, it's a huge loss as the dialogue was stellar in the older games, but we at least get a talking character. Now new factions roam the wasteland, mainly the infamous 'Institute', that has everyone running scared. They are said to kidnap people and create synths, human like robots that don't even know they aren't human. The story is a pretty good one, albeit quite short, but as usual has multiple endings, so you get to choose who you want to side with. This gives the game replayability, so many choices, so many playthroughs.
The game is full of choice and like the others, it let's you choose how you want to play. Third person or first person, I usually play first myself. You can also drift away from the main storyline, you can go off and adventure or go do side missions. The game has no restrictions. There's plenty of new features, you can now have individual pieces of amour to protect yourself, each individual piece has different affects too. Lots of crafting that lets you make all kinds, such as weapon attachments, armour, drugs and more. Power armour is a lot different too, it's so powerful and requires fusion cores to power it, so you can't use it forever. The game took a Minecraft approach in that you can build settlements. I think this is a great feature being able to create your own buildings and such. It's easy when you get used to it, but can be overwhelming at first. I'm not very good at it, I think it's difficult to make things look like a real structure, seeing as my walls are usually floating above the ground, but I'm not entirely sure how to fix it.
There are plenty of improvements in this game and the graphics are definitely one of them. A lot of people aren't that impressed with them, but if you look at the old Fallouts then you'll clearly see. Also Dogmeat looks like a real dog, he looks beautifully real. The game now has weather, it can rain and even have radiation storms. The lip syncing is really well done and actually looks like the people are speaking. There's also dialogue scenes, they're kinda like an interactive cutscene and I think they look better than just staring at the person you're talking to while the background is just frozen. The excellent music is back and fits beautifully in the game, there's quite a few new things to talk about too.
One of the new features is that you can command your companions to go somewhere and pick up items or even search areas for you. There's no level cap so you can go way beyond with your level and the new leveling up page is a thing of beauty. Each perk is accompanied by a relevant picture of Vault Boy and just generally looks more interactive and better fitted. You can romance with your companions now and they're also given an interesting back story that you have to earn the right to listen to. As well, companions have their own skills and you can get them to hack terminals or pick locks if they have the skill, saves you doing it eh. You can also carry on playing after the main story, thank you Bethesda.
Of course, the game has its faults I'm devastated to say. F4 now only let's you have one companion and that's including when you have Dogmeat by your side too. I don't think there is enough missions in the game, the story is short and there aren't a huge amount of side missions. I did everything in this game, to this day I'm certain I never did everything in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas. There's the missions that go on forever but they're boring and if that's all you've got left to do in the game, then it just isn't worth playing anymore. This is a Bethesda game and with that comes bugs, we all know that. But, as it's Bethesda we always forgive them. This is something we have to stop, bugs shouldn't be present in any game and no matter how good these games are, we can't just keep forgiving and forgetting and get what we paid for. NO BUGS! This game is great, fantastic even, but it has to be said, with how good Fallout 3 was back in 2008, I think we all expected a lot more. Maybe our expectations were ridiculously high, but that's the standard Bethesda set. Overall it's a disappointment but it's still amazing and I guess I just expected too much.
Fallout 4 is really here and all the great things are back, the excellent Pip Boy used to manage your equipment and hold your mission info, the V.A.T.S targeting system that slows down time and let's you attack individual body parts and of course, all your old friends, feral ghouls, super mutants and the terrifying deathclaws. There's still DLC to come, so let's hope they keep the game alive and most importantly, fun. Let's go Dogmeat, it's good to be back.
8.9/10
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