Fallout 4 review: War never changes, and that's just fine
There’s nothing quite like listening to “Crazy He Calls Me”
as the sun rises over an abandoned highway. A radioactive scorpion could
attack at any moment, sure, but when Billie Holiday is in your ears,
the end of the world doesn’t seem so bad.
The Fallout games are collision points of two
disparate forces. On one hand, you have a role-playing game set during a
horrific future in which nuclear war has decimated the population,
forcing humans to become scavengers, fighting to survive alongside
mutants and monsters. On the other hand, there’s hope. Hope comes from
trying to not just live in this awful place, but thrive. Hope resides in
Fallout’s 1950’s retro-futurism, an alternate timeline where
humankind was on the precipice of a technological revolution that would
improve life across the planet — only to be squashed by warheads. War
never changes, and hope never really disappears. Fallout 4, the latest game in the series and the first since New Vegas in 2010, shows off this duality more than any predecessor. Fundamentally, it’s not that different from Fallout 3, the game that transformed the series from an isometric RPG to a first-person shooter / role-playing hybrid. Fallout 4
still takes place in a huge open world, provides you with an incredible
amount of freedom with which to customize your character, and throws
you into dangerous scenarios cast with immoral baddies. The game also
features the series’ infamous technical problems, with frustrating
glitches and bugs that often pull you out of the experience at best, and
at worst, lose hard-won progress.
But all of that — the world, the characters, even the bugs — are table setting at this point. What Fallout 4
adds to the series is heart. For the first time I really cared about
what happened in the story, and found myself struggling with its moral
dilemmas. I still spent dozens of hours tweaking my guns and killing
feral ghouls, but this time, it felt like I was doing it for a reason.
Fallout 4 actually starts before the war. You play as a
civilian turned vault dweller, literally frozen in time via cryogenic
stasis, only to awaken hundreds of years later in this terrible future.
At the outset, you have only one goal: find your kidnapped son. This
directive pulls you across the entirety of post-war Boston, an area
known as The Commonwealth, and, in typical Fallout fashion,
into a story that expands to encompass more than just your personal
struggle. You’ll deal with familiar groups, including the
technology-obsessed Brotherhood of Steel, as well as new entities, like
the mysterious and feared Institute. You’ll engage in massive,
multi-faction battles and travel to a literal radioactive sea. In most
games, this kind of epic quest is an assumed part of the genre, even if
it’s not exactly believable or motivated. But in Fallout 4 it makes total sense: who wouldn’t travel to the end of the world to save their child?
Initially Boston doesn’t feel all that distinct from previous locations, like Fallout 3’s
Washington, DC. It’s styled in brown and grey, sewn with burned out
cars across crumbling highways. If you venture into an abandoned shop,
you can bet it’s filled with zombie-like ghouls and lots of useless
clutter. The city’s currency is, as always, discarded Nuka-Cola bottle
caps. But Boston is also a great place for Fallout to revel in
its own particular brand of Americana. It may be a few centuries (and
nuclear bombs) later, but the passion for baseball hasn’t died, and the
region’s biggest settlement can be found in the remnants of Fenway Park.
Security guards are dressed up like umpires crossed with Mad Max, and
the Green Monster helps save lives. Mercifully, serious Boston accents
are few and far between.
Like the repurposed ballpark, Fallout 4 builds upon the
familiar to create something new and strange. Chief among these new
elements is the hardboiled detective vibe: one early line of quests has
you partnering with a stereotypical gumshoe named Nick Valentine in the
search for your son. These were some of my favorite parts of the game.
Most Fallout quests are primarily about going somewhere and
killing a bunch of people (or monsters), but the detective element is a
welcome change to the familiar format. Similarly, Fallout 4’s
narrative has a strong emphasis on synths, human-like androids that were
only briefly touched on in past games. Their inclusion raises some
expected but still fascinating questions about what constitutes life and
sentience, things that will feel familiar to Blade Runner fans.
Neither of these additions are especially original on their own, but feel fresh within Fallout.
They also help contribute to arguably the best story in the series to
date. One moment you’re decorating a small home in the corner of the
suburbs, the next you’re making decisions that will impact what remains
of the world. The Fallout games always give you the option to
align with particular interests, whether it’s a technologically advanced
squad like the Brotherhood or the mysterious Railroad, but it feels
more pronounced and important here. I spent most of Fallout 4
trying to play it safe, working with all sides, but as the climax
approached I was forced to pick a side, and I genuinely struggled with
my choice. This is Fallout, so it’s never really clear who is good and who is bad, and no matter what you’re forced to betray someone.
Of course the main story of a Fallout game is just the
beginning of its adventure. Players will spend dozens if not hundreds of
hours discovering what else the wasteland has to offer. Fallout 4
plays a lot like its predecessors, blending elements of FPS and RPGs
into something that’s not quite either. You explore the world from a
first-person perspective (you can switch to third person, but I wouldn’t
recommend it) and attack as you would in any other shooter. But the
returning VATS system also affords the option to play Fallout 4
like a pseudo turn-based game. VATS slows time, so that you can zoom in
on enemies and determine the best shot to take. Your ability to do this
is limited, and recharges over time, but it’s really the best way to
play since Fallout isn’t the most capable shooter, with its
frustrating aiming. The poor feel of shooting is most obvious when
facing a swell of enemies without enough VATS points to guide your
shots.
For the most part, the moment-to-moment action is very similar to Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
You’ll wander the wasteland discovering new locations, and split your
time between fighting, talking to other characters, and customizing your
own. The streamlined perk system works well and simplifies character
creation. I began by focusing on my character’s charisma, which let me
talk my way out of a lot of sticky situations; as someone who isn’t so
into the combat, this was the perfect solution. Later on I beefed up my
battle skills in preparation for some big final scrimmages.
This familiarity largely benefits the game — Fallout is
beloved for a reason — but it can also make it feel frustratingly dated
at times. This is particularly true with the quests. Generally
interesting from a narrative perspective, a quest’s action is often
predictable and repetitive:
Go to a location
Kill monsters
Collect an item
Return home
After a while killing feral ghouls switched from scary to annoying.
Occasionally the game puts an interesting twist on this structure — one
highlight has you travelling through a life’s worth of memories from a
dead raider — but those moments are rare, and so the quests can often
feel like a list of chores more than anything else. It’s better than in
past Fallout games, but in comparison to recent RPGs like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it can feel archaic.
One of the more refreshing changes is a focus on companion
characters. Hardly new for the series, companions feel more robust and
interesting than in games past. I rarely traveled alone. If you’ve seen
the trailers, you know that you can have a dog or robotic assistant
accompany you through The Commonwealth, but you can also partner up with
other humans. There are a lot of them (though only one can be with you
at a time), and they make the game a lot more interesting. Not only do
they help mechanically — they provide an extra gun and can hold items
for you — but they add narrative depth. I spent most of the game with a
reporter named Piper, and she would often act autonomously; as I walked
around the city buying new gear and supplies, she would venture off and
start interviewing people for a story. Companions will also react to
your decisions, and I found myself making different choices because I
didn’t want to disappoint her.
Unfortunately, the companions are also indicative of some of Fallout 4’s
biggest problems. It’s a huge, complicated game, but it often feels
like an experience built upon a brittle, aging foundation. I ran into
numerous technical problems, from the mundane (characters talking over
one another during dialogue sequences) to the game breaking (at one
point I loaded a save and my character was unable to move at all;
another time I couldn’t bring up the menu). People would block a door so
that I couldn’t leave a building, and sometimes a character I needed to
talk to would refuse to speak to me. I was able to get around all of
these issues by restarting the game — I’d recommend saving often to
avoid losing progress — but that might not be the case for everyone.
The companions, more than any other feature, suffered from these
technical problems. During one early sequence, I had to follow a dog who
was tracking someone’s scent, and he continually got stuck on trees and
rocks, and at one point wouldn’t progress because he was distracted by a
flying mutant bug that was too high for him to attack. I managed get
him back on the trail after I spotted the tiny bug high up in the air,
and shot it out of the sky. Other times, companions refused to follow me
into battle, yet mysteriously showed up minutes later when I took an
elevator to a different section of the level.
These moments really break the illusion that you’re travelling with
something other than a video game AI. The companions also show the
limits of what the game can do. They both add to the game’s realism, and
take away from it. Over the course of the game my character and Piper
ended up falling in love, yet when I took another character out on a
date, I found Piper waiting outside of the hotel room the next morning.
When I asked how she felt about our relationship, she gushed that she
was on cloud nine, the happiest she’s ever been.
The other changes to Fallout are welcome add-ons rather than
huge shifts. Take the new crafting feature, for instance. In certain
areas you can break down old furniture, cars, and houses, and use those
resources to craft more useful items and structures. I spent a few hours
helping a settlement by making beds and water purifiers, and then
keeping them protected with the addition of some well-placed machine gun
turrets. It was a surprisingly satisfying diversion, and as I traveled
throughout the game I was able to convince friends to join the growing
community. But it’s also something that you can completely ignore if you
want to. More useful is the crafting of weapons and food, which really
makes you feel like a proper scavenger. Instead of eating a piece of
raw, radioactive bear meat to heal, you can turn it into a tasty steak.
People often complain about new games not being innovative enough.
More than any other medium, games are judged on their ability to do
something totally new, to take what past games did and make them even
bigger and better. Fallout 4 doesn’t feel particularly
innovative. It introduces a few new features, ones that don’t change it
all that much, and it retains many of the same problems as past games in
the series, most noticeably the frustrating and consistent technical
problems.
But it’s still very much Fallout — a game that doesn’t
really need to change all that much to trigger that familiar mix of
dread and joy. A new location and a much better story were enough to
pull me into this world, and 60 hours later I’m not done with it. There
are settlements I still want to finish building, and crimes I still need
to get to the bottom of. At some point I plan to ignore everything
altogether, and just wander into the wilderness to see what I can find.
Even if I’m alone, at least I’ll have Billie Holiday’s voice to keep me
company.
Fallout 4 review: War never changes, and that's just fine
There’s nothing quite like listening to “Crazy He Calls Me”
as the sun rises over an abandoned highway. A radioactive scorpion could
attack at any moment, sure, but when Billie Holiday is in your ears,
the end of the world doesn’t seem so bad.
The Fallout games are collision points of two
disparate forces. On one hand, you have a role-playing game set during a
horrific future in which nuclear war has decimated the population,
forcing humans to become scavengers, fighting to survive alongside
mutants and monsters. On the other hand, there’s hope. Hope comes from
trying to not just live in this awful place, but thrive. Hope resides in
Fallout’s 1950’s retro-futurism, an alternate timeline where
humankind was on the precipice of a technological revolution that would
improve life across the planet — only to be squashed by warheads. War
never changes, and hope never really disappears. Fallout 4, the latest game in the series and the first since New Vegas in 2010, shows off this duality more than any predecessor. Fundamentally, it’s not that different from Fallout 3, the game that transformed the series from an isometric RPG to a first-person shooter / role-playing hybrid. Fallout 4
still takes place in a huge open world, provides you with an incredible
amount of freedom with which to customize your character, and throws
you into dangerous scenarios cast with immoral baddies. The game also
features the series’ infamous technical problems, with frustrating
glitches and bugs that often pull you out of the experience at best, and
at worst, lose hard-won progress.
But all of that — the world, the characters, even the bugs — are table setting at this point. What Fallout 4
adds to the series is heart. For the first time I really cared about
what happened in the story, and found myself struggling with its moral
dilemmas. I still spent dozens of hours tweaking my guns and killing
feral ghouls, but this time, it felt like I was doing it for a reason.
Fallout 4 actually starts before the war. You play as a
civilian turned vault dweller, literally frozen in time via cryogenic
stasis, only to awaken hundreds of years later in this terrible future.
At the outset, you have only one goal: find your kidnapped son. This
directive pulls you across the entirety of post-war Boston, an area
known as The Commonwealth, and, in typical Fallout fashion,
into a story that expands to encompass more than just your personal
struggle. You’ll deal with familiar groups, including the
technology-obsessed Brotherhood of Steel, as well as new entities, like
the mysterious and feared Institute. You’ll engage in massive,
multi-faction battles and travel to a literal radioactive sea. In most
games, this kind of epic quest is an assumed part of the genre, even if
it’s not exactly believable or motivated. But in Fallout 4 it makes total sense: who wouldn’t travel to the end of the world to save their child?
Initially Boston doesn’t feel all that distinct from previous locations, like Fallout 3’s
Washington, DC. It’s styled in brown and grey, sewn with burned out
cars across crumbling highways. If you venture into an abandoned shop,
you can bet it’s filled with zombie-like ghouls and lots of useless
clutter. The city’s currency is, as always, discarded Nuka-Cola bottle
caps. But Boston is also a great place for Fallout to revel in
its own particular brand of Americana. It may be a few centuries (and
nuclear bombs) later, but the passion for baseball hasn’t died, and the
region’s biggest settlement can be found in the remnants of Fenway Park.
Security guards are dressed up like umpires crossed with Mad Max, and
the Green Monster helps save lives. Mercifully, serious Boston accents
are few and far between.
Like the repurposed ballpark, Fallout 4 builds upon the
familiar to create something new and strange. Chief among these new
elements is the hardboiled detective vibe: one early line of quests has
you partnering with a stereotypical gumshoe named Nick Valentine in the
search for your son. These were some of my favorite parts of the game.
Most Fallout quests are primarily about going somewhere and
killing a bunch of people (or monsters), but the detective element is a
welcome change to the familiar format. Similarly, Fallout 4’s
narrative has a strong emphasis on synths, human-like androids that were
only briefly touched on in past games. Their inclusion raises some
expected but still fascinating questions about what constitutes life and
sentience, things that will feel familiar to Blade Runner fans.
Neither of these additions are especially original on their own, but feel fresh within Fallout.
They also help contribute to arguably the best story in the series to
date. One moment you’re decorating a small home in the corner of the
suburbs, the next you’re making decisions that will impact what remains
of the world. The Fallout games always give you the option to
align with particular interests, whether it’s a technologically advanced
squad like the Brotherhood or the mysterious Railroad, but it feels
more pronounced and important here. I spent most of Fallout 4
trying to play it safe, working with all sides, but as the climax
approached I was forced to pick a side, and I genuinely struggled with
my choice. This is Fallout, so it’s never really clear who is good and who is bad, and no matter what you’re forced to betray someone.
Of course the main story of a Fallout game is just the
beginning of its adventure. Players will spend dozens if not hundreds of
hours discovering what else the wasteland has to offer. Fallout 4
plays a lot like its predecessors, blending elements of FPS and RPGs
into something that’s not quite either. You explore the world from a
first-person perspective (you can switch to third person, but I wouldn’t
recommend it) and attack as you would in any other shooter. But the
returning VATS system also affords the option to play Fallout 4
like a pseudo turn-based game. VATS slows time, so that you can zoom in
on enemies and determine the best shot to take. Your ability to do this
is limited, and recharges over time, but it’s really the best way to
play since Fallout isn’t the most capable shooter, with its
frustrating aiming. The poor feel of shooting is most obvious when
facing a swell of enemies without enough VATS points to guide your
shots.
For the most part, the moment-to-moment action is very similar to Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
You’ll wander the wasteland discovering new locations, and split your
time between fighting, talking to other characters, and customizing your
own. The streamlined perk system works well and simplifies character
creation. I began by focusing on my character’s charisma, which let me
talk my way out of a lot of sticky situations; as someone who isn’t so
into the combat, this was the perfect solution. Later on I beefed up my
battle skills in preparation for some big final scrimmages.
This familiarity largely benefits the game — Fallout is
beloved for a reason — but it can also make it feel frustratingly dated
at times. This is particularly true with the quests. Generally
interesting from a narrative perspective, a quest’s action is often
predictable and repetitive:
Go to a location
Kill monsters
Collect an item
Return home
After a while killing feral ghouls switched from scary to annoying.
Occasionally the game puts an interesting twist on this structure — one
highlight has you travelling through a life’s worth of memories from a
dead raider — but those moments are rare, and so the quests can often
feel like a list of chores more than anything else. It’s better than in
past Fallout games, but in comparison to recent RPGs like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it can feel archaic.
One of the more refreshing changes is a focus on companion
characters. Hardly new for the series, companions feel more robust and
interesting than in games past. I rarely traveled alone. If you’ve seen
the trailers, you know that you can have a dog or robotic assistant
accompany you through The Commonwealth, but you can also partner up with
other humans. There are a lot of them (though only one can be with you
at a time), and they make the game a lot more interesting. Not only do
they help mechanically — they provide an extra gun and can hold items
for you — but they add narrative depth. I spent most of the game with a
reporter named Piper, and she would often act autonomously; as I walked
around the city buying new gear and supplies, she would venture off and
start interviewing people for a story. Companions will also react to
your decisions, and I found myself making different choices because I
didn’t want to disappoint her.
Unfortunately, the companions are also indicative of some of Fallout 4’s
biggest problems. It’s a huge, complicated game, but it often feels
like an experience built upon a brittle, aging foundation. I ran into
numerous technical problems, from the mundane (characters talking over
one another during dialogue sequences) to the game breaking (at one
point I loaded a save and my character was unable to move at all;
another time I couldn’t bring up the menu). People would block a door so
that I couldn’t leave a building, and sometimes a character I needed to
talk to would refuse to speak to me. I was able to get around all of
these issues by restarting the game — I’d recommend saving often to
avoid losing progress — but that might not be the case for everyone.
The companions, more than any other feature, suffered from these
technical problems. During one early sequence, I had to follow a dog who
was tracking someone’s scent, and he continually got stuck on trees and
rocks, and at one point wouldn’t progress because he was distracted by a
flying mutant bug that was too high for him to attack. I managed get
him back on the trail after I spotted the tiny bug high up in the air,
and shot it out of the sky. Other times, companions refused to follow me
into battle, yet mysteriously showed up minutes later when I took an
elevator to a different section of the level.
These moments really break the illusion that you’re travelling with
something other than a video game AI. The companions also show the
limits of what the game can do. They both add to the game’s realism, and
take away from it. Over the course of the game my character and Piper
ended up falling in love, yet when I took another character out on a
date, I found Piper waiting outside of the hotel room the next morning.
When I asked how she felt about our relationship, she gushed that she
was on cloud nine, the happiest she’s ever been.
The other changes to Fallout are welcome add-ons rather than
huge shifts. Take the new crafting feature, for instance. In certain
areas you can break down old furniture, cars, and houses, and use those
resources to craft more useful items and structures. I spent a few hours
helping a settlement by making beds and water purifiers, and then
keeping them protected with the addition of some well-placed machine gun
turrets. It was a surprisingly satisfying diversion, and as I traveled
throughout the game I was able to convince friends to join the growing
community. But it’s also something that you can completely ignore if you
want to. More useful is the crafting of weapons and food, which really
makes you feel like a proper scavenger. Instead of eating a piece of
raw, radioactive bear meat to heal, you can turn it into a tasty steak.
People often complain about new games not being innovative enough.
More than any other medium, games are judged on their ability to do
something totally new, to take what past games did and make them even
bigger and better. Fallout 4 doesn’t feel particularly
innovative. It introduces a few new features, ones that don’t change it
all that much, and it retains many of the same problems as past games in
the series, most noticeably the frustrating and consistent technical
problems.
But it’s still very much Fallout — a game that doesn’t
really need to change all that much to trigger that familiar mix of
dread and joy. A new location and a much better story were enough to
pull me into this world, and 60 hours later I’m not done with it. There
are settlements I still want to finish building, and crimes I still need
to get to the bottom of. At some point I plan to ignore everything
altogether, and just wander into the wilderness to see what I can find.
Even if I’m alone, at least I’ll have Billie Holiday’s voice to keep me
company.
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