Recent reviews by Fazana

My favourite fashion game.

yeah I like it

guide murder and abuse simulator 2011.

Solid, colourful game with loads of great design and gameplay choices.

I've beaten the game once now, so I believe it's nigh time for a review.

If you've actually lived a somewhat undeprived life and have played a Bethesda game before, you'll come into Fallout 4 knowing what to expect. You're expecting bugs, big, small, funny, wierd, you name it. For a Bethesda game, it's actually pretty well polished, and I haven't personally come into contact with many bugs, most of which have been related to the dialogue, where somebody would continue walking while talking and it'd break the appearance of the conversation. I've also seen floating corpses flying through the air occasionally, but nothing really bigger than that.

As for the gameplay itself, if you're comparing this to Fallout 3 or New Vegas, you're in for a treat, because they have done absolutely everything they could to try improve the first person combat. F3's felt okay, it wasn't horrible, but it was really subpar compared to what we're used to today, it really felt like I was just playing a slower version of some 1990's shooter. Fallout 4's shooting mechanics feel a lot better, a lot smoother and just look better. If there's a game I could compare the combat to, I'd say Borderlands. It's definitely a feel for Borderlands, so if you like Borderlands, then that's 1 point to why you should get this game.

Fallout is also an RPG, you kill things, complete quests, whatever and gain experience and level. In the previous Fallout games, you had skills which were used to do all sorts of things, like pickpocketing, lockpicking and hacking terminals. Your speech could be used to persuade people to do things for you, or to convince them to do otherwise of what they were going to do, speech was a very very helpful skill in the previous games. However, in Fallout 4, skills are gone, completely, bang, gone. (Also traits, but meh, who cares about those?) If you've played Fallout before, you'd probably get a little worried as this would change things up completely, and this means all those skills are now dependant on your perks which you get while levelling. It's not so bad, it actually works very well, and it definitely doesn't need the existence of skills to accomodate. Unfortunately, speech isn't so lucky in that regard, and while there are plenty of speech checks, it's based on Charisma, and is RNG, so you can just save scum until you pass the check, which is dumb, unlike NV, which required you to have a certain speech skill to work at all.

On the topic of talking, they changed up dialogue a fair bit, it's a lot like Mass Effect's dialogue system, where you pick a response, and your character who now has a voice says the thing and you get some fancy camera angles and character gestures instead of just you facing some derp face and listening to them talk with almost no movement, making conversations a lot more interesting and less inclined to just skip through. (In my case anyway.) When this was first shown, people were worried that due to the 4 option limit and the rough sum up of what you're going to say, there might be some misunderstanding and less branching in conversations between people. From my personal experience, the whole guessing what you're going to say isn't as bad as it looks, and I have had the right idea of what my character is going to say.

On the topic of dialogue, now the playable character speaks, this changes things up a bit, because it's a first time in the Fallout series. I liked the fact I could talk, but I felt it made who your character is quite linear. Voice defines a person quite well, and Fallout's always been a game about you and how you want to be, and I feel it's less apparent here, and while you still have free reign on what to do, you don't really have free reign on your characters personality and intelligence. It's basically "Be nice, be an ass or be sarcastic".

The story for the game is pretty simple, gotta search for your child. (which is a role reversal for 3, where you had to look for daddykins) Stuff happens and you get roped into things, that's how it always is. One of my biggest complaints about Fallout 3's story was how it went, and it was very linear and very very out of character for some people. It was basically the "Brotherhood of steel who are the good guys and we fight for truth and justice!" vs the "I'm really evil hahaha bow down before me! By the way did we mention we're bad guys? Enclave" and it just didn't work for me. In Fallout 4, without going into spoilers, I'll just say, don't expect the Brotherhood to be much different. They're better than they were in 3, and have gone to getting technology, but they're still our little angels of the wasteland who must help everyone :3 instead of the group who feel nobody deserves technology except them and they're willing to go to basically any lengths to make sure that happens. Overall, I felt the story wasn't great, a lot of recycling happened. A lot. It's a lot better than 3's though, so if for some unfound reason you liked 3's story, you will absolutely adore 4's.

In conclusion, I'd definitely give Fallout 4 a 9/10, because it's a huge improvement to 3, the difference is light and day, it really is and while the story doesn't quite reach to me, the game itself is just great, definitely one of my favourite games ever.

On a side note, the graphics are great, I personally don't know what people are talking about when the game looks subpar to other games, and people keep feeling the need to compare it to Witcher 3, which has a completely different kind of environment, Fallout 4's world is so alive and almost every object there is has its own behaviour and can be moved, it's really really dynamic. The shaders are top notch, they look great, and the game runs great on basically any system running Nvidia, and even with gameworks turned on (Which is godrays on high and TSAA) it looks and plays great. Don't listen to those requirements on Nvidias end, they're way way off. The only problem with graphics is the models are lower poly than we're used to and texture quality is a little all over. It looks alright in some places, but it looks below average quality in others.

Run, don't walk to buy this fantastic game!