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6 Dec 2015 - 25 July 2016
A family lucky enough to have gotten to a Vault before the bombs fell is cryogenically frozen and awakes to the late 23rd century. But as they awake, their son is kidnapped, and they are helpless to stop the villains. Can the mother find the son and rebuild civilization?
You would think that after a certain number of years, people would rebuild civilization. I know it would take a while, and it wouldn't be easy, but you would hope that there would be some kind of government in place, that people would build up some infrastructure, rather than substince farming and only pulling together to fight back raiders.
So I'm glad that the devs introduced the idea that someone's been actively stopping them, all this time. I'm not entirely sure about why, but I can at least understand that the failure to rebuild doesn't lie entirely with the regular people after the apocalypse. There are folks who do, in fact, actively want to try to build something that will outlast them, and for some horrible reason are being stopped.
What I don't get is why the Institute does it. It's never explained, or maybe it's only explained if you choose to join up (which I never will). If you don't believe people can rule themselves, then, fine, rule them yourself. Establish a monarchy, or a dictatorship, or a feudal lordship, or something. But keeping them down for no reason other than you don't have a better idea? I don't get it.
That's all plot and dressing, though. The actual gameplay - well, that hasn't changed much. The fights play out the same way they have since Fallout 3: skill shot to shoot someone in the head if you can, then switch to VATS for some solid shots (assuming your character is any good at that sort of thing), then skill shots to finish them off.
There's some good varity of enemies: super mutants, ghouls, radscorpions, and then a variety of disgusting flying bugs. Behemoths are challenging, at least in the first half of the game, before you get overpowered. Deathclaws live up to their name.
The power armor is a game-changer, though. Things that you can't stand up to on your own melt like butter when they can't get a solid hit through your power armor. I really didn't use it enough - I had something like 70 power cores by the time I finished, which is just too bad. But, arguably, it makes the game a little too easy. It's already a little easy when you can build your own companion to lay down absurd amounts of fire. Adding a few moments of virtual invulnerability as you tackle the deathclaw while in power armor is just silly.
It's nice to see basebuilding added on top of everything else. Skyrim touched on that with the house you could build, but that was more just pointing at a blueprint and saying "build that." This lets you get your hands dirty in constructing every part of the base, from the walls and turrets down to the generators and power conduits.
I could get lost for hours building a settlement, and there are a lot of unrecorded hours of me doing little else but clearing the land and building a place for settlers to call home. All told, I think we made beds for somewhere around 300 people. That's almost enough for an entire town, were they all bunched up together. Maybe someone will eventually name a town after our character, and we'll have a statue in what used to be the Commonwealth.
There's so much to the game, and so much to talk about. Factions? Sure, let's talk about the factions for a little while. Yes, the Minutemen can be annoying, but they're also pretty much one of the only forces for good for miles around. The Railroad may be a close contender, but remember that there are some elements of that faction that want to extend citizenship to Protectrons, for crying out loud. What's next? Toasters? Demonstrate sentience to me and I'll treat you like would any other person, but Protectrons?
The Brotherhood of Steel are basically fanatics, little better than the Children of Atom (and just as violent). They're also fervently against everything that the Railroad stand for, so, you know, don't bring one of them into the Railroad safehouse if you know what's good for you. Diamond City is OK, I guess - just people trying to live - but their companion settlement in Beacon Hill have gone and made deals with raiders. Raiders, mind, think nothing of putting a grenade in your pocket just to say "hello."
So there's not a lot of nuance to go around. You could play as an evil character, if you like, but raiders are still going to try to murder you every chance they get. No chances of making friends there. So you might as well just play a good guy and get along with the Minutemen, and tell the Brotherhood to go hang.
The downloadable content has some good stuff in it, but some bad things, too. The Automaton DLC adds the abilities to build your own companions, and that's what I ended up doing because it's so nice to not hear them prattle on and just carry your extra possessions. Far Harbor adds a whole new area, but the old area still requires your attention pretty frequently, so it can be annoying to switch between them. Still a good story addition though.
That's it for the DLC that's solid. The other ones are only so-so. The workshop ones - Contraption, Vault-Tec, Wasteland - add some things to the build menu, but nothing else, and nothing all that great, either. I've seen better additions to the build menu from mods.
Controlling your own vault sounds horrible - vaults, after all, are reknown in the lore for being the testbed for unethical experiments are horrible living conditions. Thankfully, you can elect to do only beneficial things to your colonists, so mostly it just adds things to the build menu without making you feel like a monster. The vault they give you, though, is difficult to build effectively in as a "true" vault, and there are a lot of open caves that are extremely difficult to make into anything else.
In the Nuka-World DLC, you have to unite a bunch of raider clans together. It's really designed for a character with an evil side; you can play as a good guy, but expect to have a lot tougher time. That probably won't fit very well, thematically, with how you play the rest of the game, but it's there if you want.
Overall, though, the entire game is solid from beginning to end. It's always a little silly when there's a horrible life-changing main quest that the protagonist ignores for months because of all the other things to do, but that's just the nature of open-world games, I think. Not sure what you could do to change that, and I'm not even sure it would be a good idea to do so.
I've heard it said this is the best game of the year, but the worst Fallout game. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I understand the sentiment. I think it's a solid modern RPG that maybe gets wrapped up a little too much in new mechanics than gameplay, but the gameplay is still pretty good. If you liked Fallout 3, you're in good hands.