Recent reviews by nefkor

Fallout 4 is a good game. It has some very nice features for an open-world style RPG.
Some might even feel it's a great game, and in a way, I can see why.

It isn't a good Fallout RPG though.

I've played every Fallout Computer- and console game in existence (including Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel), and F4 ranks among my least favorite games in the franchise. It took me four deliberate attempts to get into the game and play it for more than two hours before encountering something that majorly annoyed me and made me quit on the spot, not touching it again for months. Once I forced myself to play a little bit longer though (admittedly with the assistance of a few mods), I've now spent 50+ hours with the game and haven't reached endgame yet, so it clearly must be doing some things right. Gameplay-wise I've grown to like this game (for the most part). It's in terms of plot, lore and atmosphere where I'm the most disappointed (though someone not that familiar with the franchise might be able to see past that).

Let's start with the positives:
- the way Power Armor works in this game feels very nice. In earlier game it was basically just like any other Armor, just with the best armor class and a boost to strength. Now, it feels like you're literally entering and controlling a walking tank, and you feel immensely more powerful walking around in one of those hulking monstrosities.
- There are hundreds of things, big and small, to discover, little vignettes and nice vistas alike. Just Exploring the Wastes is as rewarding as ever.
- The Glowing Sea, in concept and execution, is one of my all-time favorite RPG locations!
- Modding equipment. At first I had discarded that, you can easily finish the game without ever utilizing it. But over time, I grew to like tinkering with my guns for improvements, adapting specific weapons for various combat situations, or adding new capabilities to different suits of power armor.
- Combat, another thing I disliked at first but have now grown fond of, has been much improved. Gunfights in particular feel more visceral now, and the new VATS system still is an important (and very helpful) asset without completely disrupting the flow of combat.
- The Far Harbor DLC has the best side Quests and morally ambiguous decisions, a very cool setting and most of the most interesting side characters in the game, and it is highly recommended! Definitely one of the best DLC plot add-ons of all Fallout games.

Things I'm ambivalent about or that don't strike me as positive or negative:

- Building and improving settlements is a nice touch, people who like such things can probably spend hours just with that aspect of the game. However, there is no real reason to do any of this, as it hardly affects the game world. Over time I got really annoyed by the "Settlement is under attack" messages that I started to ignore them, and I didn't notice any negative impact on my gameplay for that.
- The voiced protagonist. On the one hand I really feel that they hurt immersion, especially since the options for dialogue are much more limited now compared to earlier games (more on that later). On the other hand, the voice actors do a very good job, and the flow of conversations feels much more natural and, dare I say it, cinematic that before, which adds to the atmosphere. In my opinion these two things cancel each other out... For the most part
- While I appreciate the idea of a time-displaced person encountering the wasteland in general, Bethesda needs to get over their clichéd "Prisoner Protagonist" archetype, which, in this case, means the protagonist yet another Vault Dweller. Each time they use this trope it feels much more forced. My favorite Fallout RPGs are 2 and New Vegas, and while certainly not the only reason, these two games are the only Fallout CRPGs where the protagonist is something other than yet another Vault Dweller.

Which bring me to the negatives, which mostly affect lore, world(building), setting and atmosphere:

- Locations & encounters conflicting with the overall setting, breaking immersion. The main setup is that it has been 200+ years since the bombs fell. However, many side quests or encounters make it feel like the bombs fell only months or mere weeks ago instead. There are many such places where you feel that two different design teams worked from different Skripts, one following a "200 years have passed since the war" outline and the other assuming that the world has ended only recently: People run businesses in ramshackle scorched buildings without having cleared out any rubble or skeletons; huge swathes of unused resources sit out in the open because apparently since the bombs fell noone had the idea to use them until you came along; several people you encounter have survived the dropping of the bombs and spent the past 200+ years in complete isolation without any mental detriments. [Minor spoiler: the (in my eyes) worst side quest in the entire game has you encounter a (ghoulified) kid that survived the war hiding in a fridge, and has you escort it through a place that had been a poat-war warzone to his parents house, who by coincidence have ALSO survived the war as Ghouls and have remained at their damaged residence all those years!]

- While the mechanics of Power Armor are great, the way you encounter them - sitting untouched on top of long-looted buildings or just standing around in the Woods for hundreds of years - feels cheap and turns a rare, highly advanced piece of military hardware into a mere commodity just lying around. While F3 and New Vegas had made armor parts lootable, you could only use it rather late after specialized training, making you earn the privilege, making it something special. Now, any random shmoe can use it.

- the ability to beat the game your own way, favoring pacifist, sneaky or diplomatic play styles, are gone. Most encounters always end in gunfights, leaving you no option but to fight your way through your quests. This also makes the vast majority of the quests feel the same: just go to location x and end up killing everything in sight.

- While the world feels huge and interesting, there's not much you can do in it aside from killing things and settlement management, which serves no higher purpose.

- Incidentally, if in the past you wanted to side with raiders, organized crime or other "bad", more villainous sides, you could do that in earlier games, but not anymore here. There aren't many moral quandaries, bad guys are almost as always irredeemably bad and in the wrong and will always attack you in the end (& can't even be convinced or scared into submission). A very welcome exception to this is the Far Harbor DLC, but for the main game, well...

- squandered opportunities: Vaults, a robo racetrack or an underground cage fighting circuit can be encountered and have, in the past, led to intriguing discoveries, side quests or Money-earning opportunities. These are gone - when you encounter such locations in F4, you invariably get attacked on sight.

- there are hardly any established settlements in the game (apparently most people just sat around in squalor in bombed ruins for 200 years). If you need more places to trade with you need to build them, but these traders are mere vending machines with no personality, all sharing the same handful of generic dialogue.

- Level caps are gone, you can always improve all stats & abilities with a level-up, making specialized builds pointless, diminishing the role-playing aspect of this role-playing game.

- the most ill-conceived, shoehorned Romance options I've ever seen in any RPG, especially considering your protagonists' main plot motivation!

I have to give it a positive or negative rating so... I guess I give it a thumbs up. If it's your first Fallout game or don't care much about the lore aspects, it's a well crafted open-world game with lots of things to discover. Personally though, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed overall.

It is haunting. It is beautiful. It is horrible. It is terrifying. It's full of hurt. It's full of wonder. It will make you laugh. It will make you sad.
And it's just amazingly well written!
10/10, absolutely recommended!

Cool atmosphere, unique idea: Communicating with an AI thorugh a keyboard interface, piecing together the events bit by bit by reading log entries and parsing through the rooms. A bit on the short side, though... would really love to see the principle expanded upon.