I originally played this game for the first time in the beginning of 2016 around March and subsequently spent the next two months on this, obviously not 24 hours a day playing, but when ever I had the time. Even after all that time spent exploring I still feel like I probably missed about half of what there was to experience in the game, it's massively huge. Fallout 4 was absolutely worth all that time, it is a deeply engrossing nuclear apocalyptic story, with an amazing rich detailed world. To give you some context to the scale and time the developers spent on Fallout, there are over 120,000 lines of spoken dialogue in the game; talk about focusing on the quality of the story.
I decided to give myself a little refresher of the game this week, seeing as I played it over two years ago, and almost found myself wanting to restart and play it from the very beginning, yes, it was that fun a game. Luckily I decided against this. Mainly because I need the time to explore other games to review for this blog, but I'm definitely going to save this for the holidays. After two years Fallout is still an amazing looking game, and still competes with some of the high end games that have been released this year.
The look and feel of the world is very much a mash up between the TV series Mad Men and the 80's cartoon The Jetsons. The game starts with your character in the bathroom, just getting out of the shower and looking into the mirror. This is where you begin with the character customization. I got lost spending hours tweaking everything from gender to eye color, to facial scarring, everything. Once you are done and you have explored the house a bit and met your spouse, newborn baby and your robot butler, Codsworth, the door bell rings. You meet a representative from Vault-Tec to discuss your recent nuclear bunker purchase and admittance into Vault 111.
Almost as soon as the conversation is over, the nuclear alarm goes off, and you and your family are running toward the bunker just on the outskirts of town. When you get to the vault, there is a huge crowd of people outside the fence trying to get in but they are being kept out by guards in mechanical armored suits. You and your family safely make it inside and are then escorted to a a medical testing area, but it turns out to be cryogenic chambers, and everyone is tricked into being frozen alive.
You then witness your spouse being murdered by the two strangers and your son, Shaun, being kidnapped, but before you are able to escape, they put you back to cryo sleep. Your character then wakes up a short time later as the life support system malfunctions, where you then discover you are the sole survivor of Vault 111. Distraught with the death of your spouse, the only concern now is to find the kidnappers who took your son Shaun.
After getting your bearings, finding some useful salvage and gear, which is what this the whole game is based on, you eventually are able to escape the vault. When you make it outside, it is a completely different world. The nuclear bomb destroyed everything, the world is now a wasteland of destruction. Everything that was once colorful and new is now covered in rust, broken and wasting away. You make you way back to your home to find Codsworth still functioning. He informs you that it has been 210 years since entering the vault.
"Brothers and sisters, the road behind has been long, and fraught with difficulty. Each and every one of you has exceeded my expectations by rapidly facilitating our arrival in the Commonwealth. You have accomplished this amazing feat without a hint of purpose or direction, and most importantly, without question. Now that the ship is in position, it is time to reveal our purpose and our mission. Beneath the Commonwealth there is a cancer... known as the Institute, a malignant growth that needs to be cut before it infects the surface. They are experimenting with dangerous technologies that could prove to be the world's undoing for the second time in recent history. The Institute's scientists have created a weapon that transcends the destructive nature of the atom bomb. They call their creation the "synth", a robotic abomination of technology that is free-thinking and masquerades as a human being. The notion that a machine could be granted free will is not only offensive, but horribly dangerous. And like the atom, if it isn't harnessed properly, it has the potential of rendering us extinct as a species. I am not prepared to allow the Institute to continue this line of experimentation. Therefore, the Institute and their "synths" are considered enemies of the Brotherhood of Steel, and should be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly. This campaign will be costly and many lives will be lost. But in the end, we will be saving humanity from its worst enemy... itself." - Elder Maxson
The game has multiple different story directions you can go into, all depending on which of the factions you end up siding with. That is just the main story, there are also so many side quests that you can literally get lost for days on end, which is what I did on numerous occasions. You basically are a compulsive hoarder in Fallout, as anything and everything that is junk is usable in some way or another. The item construction system is insane, every single weapon on item can be upgraded and improved or dismantled for part to use in other things. Then there is the building side to the game, each settlement needs to be inhabited with people to gather resources. These folks need to have basic shelter, a place to sleep and proper defenses from the creatures that lurk in this nuclear wastelands. My advice from the get go is to pick up and keep everything, which you can dump in storage at your settlements, to be used for construction later on.
Fallout 4 has something for everyone, it's like the developers combined several different games into one epic game. There is so much going on in the game that at times you forget where you are and what you need to do first. This was probably the biggest issue I had with the game. You tend to feel a bit overwhelmed at the start, much like learning a brand new program. Once you figure out how to navigate your trusty Pit-Boy, which is an oversized wrist computer that keeps track of all your missions, as well as your inventory, map and character upgrade interface. As you progress through the game you meet a variety of different people, some end up becoming a companion, who is a welcomed help during a gun fight. The first companion you get, and was also my favorite was a German Shepherd named Dogmeat, an exceptionally good dog.
Like the Wolfenstein and Dishonored series, their games have a very distinct look and feel, mainly due to the visual art style, Dishonored is probably the best example of this. This game was released in November 2015, so definitely not the new kid on the block, but has been tried and tested and still ranks in my top 10 games in the last 4 years. As with all award winning games, well most of them, this title is available on all our usual suspects, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows. Fallout 4 is well worth the standard game price tag, but luckily you pick it up dirt cheap, personally I loved it.
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