Fallout 4 Review

War. War never changes, and Fallout 4 desperately wants you to know that. You would hope that given the number of times you hear the signature line at the most cliché of times they’d do a pretty good job of walking you through why that’s a line worth repeating. Fallout 4 chooses instead to awkwardly, drunkenly stumble back and forth across the line of comedic and serious narrative much the way they drunkenly stumble across the gameplay finish line. Thankfully the core gameplay is still strong enough to keep most people happy, but Fallout 4 left me feeling like Bethesda doesn’t know which direction they want to go in with their franchise, or that they even care.

Fallout 4 starts on a really strong note. The opening screen sets a very serious and determined tone with the title track and follows that up with a powerful cutscene giving some context to the world pre-war and the events leading up to the fallout. I was honestly a bit surprised by this and it excited me in that it set my expectations for a more thought-provoking, adult stab at the post-apocalyptic world. That continued through most of the opening sequence with good feels cranked up to maximize the bad feels after the bomb drops. Up to the point in which you finally get your hands on your first weapon and set out on your journey, things were handled well aside from some painfully obvious plot points. Past that, however, is where the drunken stumble quickly takes over.

Let’s talk about the gameplay if you played Fallout 3 then you know what to expect from Fallout 4 with relative accuracy. There are some changes, many for the better, and some changes that will please some and displease others. Combat is identical aside from VATS no longer freezing everything in time. Instead, it simply slows things down drastically to some sort of Michael Bay level action sequence. I actually enjoy this change and it keeps the game feeling fluid when you do choose to rely on VATS which is likely to be often. Of course, I can’t not mention the Fallout fanboy life-ending, erection-inducing Power Armor, though it might have been made too powerful for its own good. I will say that VATS felt somehow gimped in comparison to Fallout 3. I have absolutely no conclusive evidence for you, I just felt that no matter the perks or the situation, my percentages were often confusingly low. I could be not three feet from a Super Mutant while wielding a shotgun, and sure I could just aim and shoot but I want that Michael Bay explosion of blood and gore as I separate its head from its body. Much to my surprise, despite holding the gun mere inches from its head (which is the size of a small vehicle) I have a 35% chance of hitting him. I proceed to miss both shots only to simply shoot him out of VATS and end the fight in a far less impressive fashion. Incredible.

Fallout 4 also introduces a fairly large and new crafting system as well as a settlement-building system. You can now, with the help of perks, upgrade weapons and armor (including your power armor) as well as craft food items to aid you in any number of combat scenarios or otherwise. You can also role-play Bryan Cranston and cook wasteland meth and other drugs just in case you need an edge in battle or in case you need to stay up for a week straight building defenses and planting fields of tato plants for your settlers.

Yes, indeed, someone at Bethesda thought that it was necessary to have a settlement-building mini game in Fallout 4. It’s not that it’s a truly horrible idea, and no it’s not forced upon you in any significant way, but the implementation is horrendous. Somehow when this idea was pitched to be included, nobody thought that a building sim that is restricted to a first-person or limited-person view would be perhaps a little more than clunky. The snap function is awkward at the best of times, the rules for what can go where are vague, and the restricted view from the ground makes everything that much more painful. Thankfully, I played on the PC and so with the console option to turn no clip mode on, I could do what you should have been able to do by default: build from a bird’s eye view. All of this is kind of rubbed in your face with the complete and utter lack of any meaningful tutorial system. I really do feel for console players who lack the patience to battle the building system. This isn’t to say you can’t hack your way through building some spectacular stuff if you have the patience (and probably a PC to be honest). Once you do build your giant phallic symbol for the gods both old and new, you may or may not choose to help defend your settlements when they come under attack by raiders and the like. Along with making sure your settlers have sufficient food, water, and shelter, you also build defenses to keep the baddies at bay, so you’ll often not be needed for much anyway. In general, it felt like more of a shoehorned bit than a really meaningful addition to the game, but I’m sure the modding community will do interesting things with it over time.

The new gameplay theme of Fallout 4 is centered on what to do with all that junk lying around the wasteland. In Fallout 3 the most I did was collect guns that were matched to my equipped weapons, allowing me to repair them on the fly in the field and save me caps in repair fees. In Fallout 4, Bethesda set out to make nearly every single item you come across useful in some way or another. Most of the time it all gets stripped down for materials that you end up using for crafting or settlement building. This time around, however, weapons do not require repairing and so any spares you find lying around or strip off of a newly limbless corpse are used for their components and/or materials. This is all quite interesting, and not always entirely necessary by any means, but a lot of the depth of Fallout 4 involves this junk and as such I found myself roaming from point A to point B with my eyes firmly locked on the ground in search for another piece of scrap metal. Indoors I was occupied with shelves and desks and at some point, I began to feel as though I was missing out on my actual surroundings. For those able to resist the loot urge, this junk focus is likely not going to hamper you in any way, but for many people, I wouldn’t be surprised if they feel similar to myself and get fatigued. I’m definitely all for the quest to make items in games worth more than their weight in gold, but I don’t think Bethesda quite got all the way there on their first attempt. I do applaud them for the effort, though.

Other great improvements, though I almost say that with my tongue in cheek, are the visuals and the audio. I was and still am a pretty huge fan of the Fallout 3 soundtrack, more specifically the Galaxy News Radio soundtrack. The selection of music suited the wasteland perfectly and so when I heard that Fallout 4 was being treated to a multitude of new radio hits, I was pretty stoked. Similarly, I was excited when I found out that we’d be getting a real lighting system this time around. In case you forgot, Fallout 3 didn’t actually have shadows, as crazy as that sounds. What little shadows the game had were just drawn into the textures and nothing more. Outside of the new lighting system (which is questionable depending on what you have God Rays set to), you’re going to be looking at a pretty average game at best. Textures are incredibly low res by and large, and animations are classic Bethesda fair which is to say they’re horrendous. In fact, Fallout 4 is one of the best examples of Bethesda just not bothering to improve in any truly appreciable way.

The soundtrack may be larger, but you have to jump through hoops to get to hear that expanded list. You’ll think you’ve never left the sweet sounds of GNR behind because you’ll be listening to a large selection of the Fallout 3 list from hour one. Unfortunately, the radio host is no Three Dog. Instead, we are treated to the soul-crushingly bad Travis who as far as I can tell still belongs latched on to his mother’s left breast. Apparently, there is a mission that you can complete that will give Travis a backbone and expand the music set list for your listening pleasure. Sadly, in my 82 hours of game time, I never came across the quest and instead got to listen to the same handful of songs and listen to the same handful of reactions from Travis. “OR WE’RE GONNA DIE...HUHUHUHHUUHHHH.” – Travis 2287. Why Bethesda decided that the first bunch of songs you should hear over and over again are those you’ve likely already listened to for a couple hundred hours is beyond me, but then again a lot of things in Fallout 4 are beyond me.

It’s time for some honest, unfiltered words. Why after 13 years are we still subject to the dead horse that is the Gamebryo engine? No, the “Creation” engine isn’t new, it’s just a rebadge. This is the engine that was in charge of driving Morrowind. Just let that sink in. Sure, it looks decent but the endless bugs that we’ve experienced for over a decade are still there and even on my very high-end rig can’t always push 60fps at 1080p (much like Skryim). There’s virtually no excuse to be getting the same bugs in Fallout 4 that we got in Morrowind all those years ago but yet there they are. On top of that, I don’t understand why the animations still have to look like Terrance and Phillip. When I watched the E3 trailer reveal on my livestream I told everyone to just wait for a salesman and wait for him to look like a talking trash can. Lo and behold, Bethesda delivered. I mean I’m a Canadian, but please.

I don’t care how big the game is, because honestly, Bethesda isn’t alone at this level of scope anymore – not even on consoles. Any excuse the behemoth that is Bethesda could conjure up in response to criticism could simply be quelled with the words, “But The Witcher III…” The real answer is that they know that their fan base looks at their games now and when they see how broken they are, they largely laugh it off and say “Oh Bethesda, that’s just a feature!” They have managed to find immunity in their mediocrity and it saddens me as someone who has so much love for their older games. They know that the modding community will fix most of it for them too, and now that mods can come to consoles they have even less to worry about. It’s absolute madness. Honestly, if people weren’t so interested in my opinion of Fallout 4 I’d not have bought it. Not because I don’t like the franchise, but because I’m watching Bethesda crap all over their fans and their fans just soaking it up.

I don’t know, they just made so many strange and honestly ridiculous design choices that baffle me. I remember streaming my first or second session and I was in a situation in which Dogmeat literally disappeared after having been swallowed up by the pavement or running off somewhere for no reason (I’ve experienced both). I was over-encumbered and hoped to give him some of the junk, but I couldn’t find him. I wondered out loud why there isn’t a dog whistle, or the ability to whistle for your dog in the game. I mean they have marketed the game so heavily around Dogmeat being your companion and you can’t whistle for him. As it turns out, not two weeks later it was revealed that Bethesda had a whistle in the game and then deactivated it in the code. What?! Thankfully, as usual, a modder found this and solved the problem.

I think that despite the many oddities of gameplay and design choices I still would have enjoyed Fallout 4 more if there were more intriguing characters. After the 80+ hours I spent in the game, I came across maybe two or three characters that were remotely interesting or made me feel invested. Of that small group, only one was a main character and the others barely had any dialogue. It wasn’t that many characters were completely awful, it was more that they simply didn’t stand out or worse yet just didn’t have much to say. It felt that Bethesda attempted to simply hit a lot of the usual character archetypes and left it there. That by itself is pretty damaging to my experience with the game given the rest of the offering was also thin.

I feel as though my view of how Fallout 4 pushes itself along is perhaps too deeply rooted in my want for a far more serious tone, but between the gameplay and the characters you’ll meet along the way I couldn’t take any of the major plot points seriously – they were too encompassed by light-hearted faux 50’s comedic relief and often weak delivery. It’s difficult to tell you exactly what I mean without spoiling, though people who watched my live streams of my play through will know, and those who have already played the game will likely understand. All I can say is that when Bethesda wanted me to take something seriously, I was hard-pressed to given everything else, gameplay and story both.

Of course, outside of what I’ve already mentioned I could probably write a novel on the little things that crop up and wear on you after a time. The inventory management for junk and other items is clunky, as is the Pip-Boy although most people are likely just used to that now. The armor system is ridiculous in its line between what can and cannot be worn under a set of armor. Distant LOD textures will sometimes just not load which allows you to roleplay Chris Angel and walk through walls (or more aggravatingly fall through floors). Walking into any room while above 60fps will result in the laws of physics being thrown out the door in the form of items just flying everywhere for no reason (which can kill you). For some people, corrupt save files are still a very real thing. All enemies have the most bafflingly insane accuracy with grenades and the like, often planting one at your feet from well over a hundred feet away but are incapable of hitting you with a sniper rifle from the same distance.  AI pathing and general intelligence haven’t improved in any capacity which is to say it’s still pretty awful, and Dog Meat displays this wonderfully in his ability to walk over landmines, through trip wires or laser grids, or simply just get lost while stuck on a rock somewhere, and the list goes on.

There are of course good things to say as well, they just unfortunately don’t stack up to the bad. Bethesda has a great eye for hiding Easter eggs throughout the Commonwealth that will get a laugh or make you think. I thought it was particularly clever that the fallout happened on Halloween and so you will see Halloween decorations on your travels in stores and the like which helps in no insignificant way frame the interruption of a way of life and the instantaneous nature of it all. If you are partial to the comedic side of the game then you’ll likely appreciate some of the truly eccentric characters you can come across that aren’t part of the main quest line, and perhaps enjoy offing a few with the satisfying weapons you will get your hands on along the way. The limited cutscenes are also really well done, despite some cheese, though their wonderfully warranted, serious tone, fights with the 50’s comedy shtick as I’ve mentioned before.

I’ve said a lot of negative things to this point, and I wish I could say it was my usual cynicism and I imagine many people will disregard much of what I’ve said in this review as such, but I think I put enough time into the game to say it’s more than that. In most cases, if you played Fallout 3 and enjoyed it then you’re likely to enjoy Fallout 4 as well, though your mileage will vary. Even as broken as it is the game is at its core still solid enough to get the job done but that’s about it. Nothing is likely to surprise you, not the gameplay and especially not the story. It is what I can only describe as the most “whelming” game I’ve played in a long time.

Buried under miles of nonsense and unimaginable mediocrity still lies a franchise that should be great. As with Skyrim, and Fallout 3 before it, modders will take an extraordinarily average game and make it truly worth playing. As it stands, Fallout 4 is a game that will mostly be enjoyed by fans and tolerated by the rest. I wouldn’t recommend paying full price for it unless you are incredibly interested as there are far better games available today. It hurts me to say that about a Bethesda game as I’ve put thousands of hours into their franchises but it’s the truth. I wanted so badly to love Bethesda games again but unfortunately, Fallout 4 is the first true example that, “Bethesda. Bethesda never changes.”