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29 July 2016 - 6 Aug 2016
Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5
After the end of the world, there are still remnants of civilization. You live in the ruins of a once great world, besieged by raiders in a desert landscape. Your home is no more. Gather companions to wreak vengeance on those who ruined your life, and carve a better world out of what is left.
My memories of the original Fallout are hazy, but it's pretty clear that's where this game gets a lot of its inspiration. You're kind of thrown into a world and told to fend for yourself, and by and large it works. There were a couple of times where I was puzzled by what the interface was telling me, but never so far that I wanted to stop playing.
As I mentioned in the videos, my mistake was playing this immediately after I had finished Fallout 4. They are similar only in that they both take place after the apocalypse; other than that, they're not at all similar. But after being able to line up my shots in first person, taking the results of random die rolls to see whether or not my character hit can be a little jarring.
But the game is fun, once you understand that it's a throwback to the older days of RPGs. Roll the dice to hit, roll the dice again to see how much damage you do and where that damage was applied. I think the caravan is certifiable for hiring random strangers to do guard duty, but it's a rough-and-tumble world out there, so you do what you have to do to get a profit.
One thing I wish wasn't in the game is friendly fire. We saw that in the last episode, where a stray shot (or just bad positioning on my part) made a companion hostile to the rest of the party. I know tensions are high and trust had not been completely earned, but it's unfortunate that he had to be put down so that the rest of the party could live. And it's too bad he couldn't be made to understand that it was an accident, could have happened to anyone, and we can probably find a way to heal you somehow ...
Overall, the art is beautiful, and clearly a lot of hard work went into the lore and the dialog. I look forward to playing more of it once I stop thinking about Fallout 4, and start missing the old-school aesthetic of the original Fallout.