Fallout 4: Review – Where does it end?

Depth and imagination bring the world of Fallout 4 to life.  It’s large and well planned environment, and amazing amounts of customization out weigh the many minor issues you may find in your journey across the wasteland of Boston.

Time for a shave!

The Good:

Fallout 4 feels enormous.  Not just in the generous map size, but in the sheer amount of things you can do throughout the wasteland.  It would be quite easy for you to simply go out and explore, and never do any quests at all and still feel quite accomplished in your chosen path.

After customizing either your male, or female character, you get a short prelude into the world that was.  It’s high tech, high tension cold war atmosphere filled with advanced tech, but still locked in a 50’s style environment is a ton  of fun.  Every character in the game is also fully voiced, regardless of their importance.  They will even try to say your chosen name so long as it’s recognized by the game.

It’s not long before everything goes downhill and you are thrust into a nuclear destroyed future, alone, confused and missing your young son who is stolen away from you by raiders.  From here it’s up to you to decide what you want to do.  Whether you follow the story, do some random quests, or simply ignore all story and just start shooting things, there is always something to do in Fallout 4.

The main story will push you to go and find your lost son, finding clues and new friends along the way.  These friends will join you on your adventures if you choose, and have a few benefits.  Alongside the extra fire power, each companion you find will also add unique skills, and a perk once your relationship is solid enough.  For instance if you’ve chosen to ignore increasing your lock-picking skill, Cait is a great companion to have around as she can open up locked chests and doors for you.  Your loyal dog Dogmeat is able to hold down enemies to give you time to use your V.A.T.S. targeting system to target individual limbs on your enemies.

Shoot it in it’s face!!

If you’ve played Fallout 3, then combat will be familiar to you, but the combat is based around similar FPS games, so new comers should fit right in easily.  Combat can be approached in several ways, either through stealth, melee, or taking advantage of your V.A.T.S. to target enemies.  V.A.T.S. allows you to slow down time and individually target enemies and limbs to cripple them, or engage in gruesome slow motion kills as body parts explode off of your enemies.  It’s a huge amount of fun and the fact that time sill continues as you target takes away the feel of invincibility you got in Fallout 3 when time fully paused using this system.

The stealth systems are workable, but I never quite found it that much fun, as compared to just running in guns hot and firing away, or using V.A.T.S. to slow time.  Either way fights are challenging, and you will die often if you take on enemies who are too high in level or too numerous.

As you embark in battles and exploration, you will scour the corpses and environments for scrap and salvage, along with weapons and armor.  Scavenging in the wasteland is of dire importance in Fallout 4.  Early in the game it’s an absolute necessity.  Salvaged items can be either consumed if edible, or broken down to their components and can then be used in crafting.

So many things to tinker with.

You will spend a huge amount of time crafting and building in Fallout 4.  Every piece of weaponry and armor you collect can be customized.  This adds a great deal of depth to combat as you can build equipment to suit your every need, or your play-style.

To be very successful in Fallout 4 you will also have to build up various settlements throughout the world.  These settlements are unlocked early in the game and you can acquire more by completing quests in the areas surrounding farms, or other central locations to align yourself with the settlers there.  Once allied with them, you’ll have to take time to build them up and protect them so that they grow larger, and help you with your resource collection.  This is a great added feature to the game, and allows you to add your mark to the desolate wasteland.

Every action in Fallout 4 gains you experience.  Whether you’d like to do all the quests, kill all the enemies, or simply spend your time building up settlements, you’ll continue to earn experience and level up.

 

The Bad:

Though there is a ton of things to do in Fallout 4, outside of quests, there is very little information about what you need to do.  As you explore, your quest log will load up quickly, and though each quest is searchable on the map, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish which ones are side quests, or part of the main story line.  If you are someone who want’s to power through the main story line, you’ll have to keep track of which quests you need to do next to do so.

There’s also very little explanation of some of the concepts of the game.  For insatance as you build up your colonies, there is no mention about how to link the resources for each of these sites together.  I personally only found out how to do it by watching a friend play the game, and had been missing out on having all of my resources connected to make building up settlements faster.

As you find new companions throughout the game, it becomes increasingly hard to keep them organised.  There doesn’t seem to be any utility to tell you where your people are unless you keep a list of where you’ve sent them.  I for instance have no idea where I left my dog and have to search through more than a dozen settlements to find if I want him to accompany me on a quest.  Also, beyond the first few times with a new companion, you may not know what their particular perks will help you with.

Finally a reason to go get my armor!

Power armor is available in the game, and gives you extra strength and endurance, but it became rare late in the game where I felt I needed to use it.  I seldom felt like taking the time to go all the way back through a couple of loading screens to collect my armor to come back and fight a tough enemy or boss.

When it comes to the main story, there is little urgency in completing it, and considering it’s your son you’re looking for, my character never really seemed that concerned about finding  him.  Although I understand that Bethesda wants you to play the game however you like, it seems strange that my character doesn’t really care if I spend weeks building up a settlement while unknown fiends have run off with my only child.

 

The Ugly:

Unfortunately, like with most Bethesda product, Fallout 4 comes with a variety of graphical and gameplay glitches.  For the most part these glitches are minor and don’t effect the gameplay, and are often good for a laugh, but every once in awhile this is not the case.

In one case at my largest settlement, I decided to store my extra weapons inside a cupboard in a house.  When I returned one day to the settlement a cow had somehow found it’s way into the house, and was unable to fit through the door, essentially blocking me from accessing my inventory.  Even after exiting the game and coming back, the cow was still there, mocking me.

Man, I hope he’s house trained…

Other occasions found me getting stuck in the environment during massive fire fights, resulting in my untimely death.  Other combat issues like feral ghouls launching at you, and passing through your body to the other side, resulting in you having to quickly twitch around in order to hit them, or aiming straight down to make impact with them.

These along with various other clipping issues, and weird graphical issues throughout my experience made me occasionally want to rage quit the game when things didn’t go my way.

In the end:

Fallout 4 has a lot going for it.  There are countless things to do and see.  The environment is large and beautiful and whoever designed the map should earn an award. The open world, and customization choices mean you can play Fallout 4 however you like.  There are no rules or obligations for you to play any particular way, or even complete quests to have fun.  Adversely, with such a rich story and history, it’s unfortunate the game doesn’t really push you to want to complete the main quests and discover the mysteries of the wasteland.  This, along with a variety of glitches and exploits mean that Fallout 4 is far from perfect, but it’s rare that these issues will interfere with you having a blast blowing limbs off of super mutants or raiders the like.  The sheer amount of funny, awesome and interesting things to find and do have stopped me just before rage quitting from some silly glitch more than once.  Fallout 4 is definitely a great addition to the franchise and I am sure to spend many more hours in the wastelands of Boston.

As always, thanks for reading and make sure to like and comment below, and let me know what you thought of Fallout 4.  Follow me on Twitter @micbemac88.

Get the game here!

Review: Evolve

Evolve is a truly “evolved” experience, pun intended. From the makers of Left 4 Dead, and Left 4 Dead 2, Turtle Rock Studio brings us a new genre of game with a focus on 4 on 1 combat. Although that initially sounds hard to balance, the developers have done a good job of creating a game that can sway in either direction based off of skill and not just numbers.

Landing on the planet Shear, Evolve’s primary gameplay revolves around a group of 4 player controlled hunters in search of an elusive, and also player controlled monster. The 4 class based hunters, which include fairly standard architects but with very unique abilities, include the medic, trapper, support, and assault classes. Each class has a unique set of skills and abilities which in tandem with the other hunters play a key role in both finding the beast hiding amongst Shear’s creative landscapes, as well as a variety of firepower and buffs to help take the aforementioned creature down before it can reach it’s third evolution and force a gameplay change where the hunters are now on the defense. This is where the core gameplay of Evolve shines. Early on the monster, either the hulking, grounded Goliath, to the flying electrically charged Kraken, or the stealthy Wraith can be easily cornered and killed by an experienced hunting team, however, a monster player with the right skill and patience can evade attack early on, and consume local wildlife in order to evolve and gain more health and abilities, in order to eventually gain enough strength to destroy it’s target, a centrally located power station, or the hunters themselves.

This slow shift of power throughout a match of Evolve, gives a very unique cat and mouse chase while both teams try to gain an advantage over the other. This gives a fun rush of adrenaline as you corner a level 1 monster and take him down, or adversely your patience pays off and you evolve to a level 3 monster and rain havoc on a group of hunters. The one restriction to this gameplay is a somewhat overwhelming reward system which forces you to play through each character and gather points in each weapon and ability before being able to unlock more hunters and monsters. Though this is generally done quickly as the hunters and you are usually using most of your skills throughout a match, leveling your monster requires more patience as you may be forced to use tactics you are not comfortable with. Great at taking down hunters with Goliath’s leap smash? Well too bad, you still have to level up your rock throw you always have trouble aiming before gaining access to Kraken. Depending on how often you are able to play, this slow release of new unlockables feels like it limits some of the game’s creative tactics as not all options are available to you early on.

Graphically the game is impressive on both consoles and the PC. Character models are solid, and the monsters’ rippling glowing skin, and earth shattering attacks are both fun to use and visually entertaining. The variety of terrain and fauna found on Shear adds not only to the visual but the gameplay as well, as several creatures and plants are hostile and can attack and kill both the hunters and the monster if you don’t mind your step. These additional features can also be used strategically to set up traps.

Although the game is obviously made for it’s multiplayer emphasis, it offers a single player mode, which allows players to get some practice in as either their monster or hunter of choice, and the AI is convincing enough to offer some challenge in the offline modes. There is also a surprising amount of extra modes beyond the basic hunt available both online and offline. This includes a find and destroy mission where hunters are tasked with locating 6 monster eggs and destroying them, while the Monster player defends, a tower defense style mode where the monster is given minions to attack a fortified base defended by hunters, as well as a 5 game series which gives the winning team new perks between each match that will greatly affect the gameplay moving into the next round. All of these extra modes give a lot of replayability and require the use of different tactics which keeps the game fresh.

Overall Turtle Rock Studios has provided another great multiplayer experience which benefits from its unique premise and setting, and with the promised regular addition of new hunters and monsters to play with should provide players a long term payout.

Overall 8.5/10