I was mere minutes away from my destination where five targets I was ordered to kill were hiding…all of a sudden, multiple vertibirds swoop over me, revving up their miniguns to annihilate anyone in their way. I hear gunshots and see clouds of smoke coming from my target’s location, I sprint towards the clouds of smoke and I reach my destination, Bunker Hill. Even two hundred years after the United States was obliterated by the Chinese, it still stood tall serving as a reminder to the historic battle. Once I had gotten closer, I saw bodies, some whole, some dismembered, blood, fire, bullet casings, people running from their homes they set up at Bunker Hill, and three factions all there because of me.
I had previously allied with all these factions thinking it wouldn’t have any consequences but they all came to defend me but ended up killing each other because they’re rival factions. There were robots, men in power armor, people in torn and ragged clothes all fighting for me but none of them had any clue I was partnered with each of the factions. Since they were all defending me, none of them attacked me. I casually strolled through all the chaos only catching one or two stray bullets, people were falling to their knees bleeding for me not realizing I had also betrayed them. Vertibirds were falling from the sky, people were screaming and I was walking through like it was a nice walk in the park on a sunny summer day. Once I had reached the hiding place of the targets, I was ordered to execute my targets. I pulled my .44 magnum from its holster and put a bullet in between each of their eyes, showing no remorse or care. Once the targets were dealt with, I walked outside to the sunny blue sky. Silence. The battle was over, the only thing left were bodies, blood and fire. I just casually strolled away to report my success back to the quest giver. These are the kind of moments created in Fallout 4, you truly create your own story.
Fallout 4 is one of the most anticipated games this generation, people have waited seven years for this game and Bethesda has taken their time to make their most dense game yet. Bethesda has tweaked and added things for a more immersive experience, but in doing so they have simplified or completely removed mechanics that makes Fallout so great. One of the biggest and controversial additions would have to be the introduction of a voiced protagonist, this has its pros and cons. It simplifies the conversations with other characters, the amount of dialogue that must have been recorded must be in the hundred thousands. It’s disappointing that I don’t have as many options in dialogue as I did in Fallout 3 or New Vegas but it’s a worthy sacrifice.
Brian Delaney provides dialogue that has lots of emotion, humor and depth. I truly believe that he is a man who has lost his son and walked out of this vault hundreds of years after the war. His performance shows that he is struggling to adapt to this new world. It adds much more depth than a voiceless man who occasionally grunts in pain. Fallout 3 had a great story, but there wasn’t any emotion coming from your character and it just made it awkward at times.
Something I was sad and confused to see taken out is the fantastic karma system in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. It changed the world around you and had these amazing morally ambiguous choices that could change so much. There’s still a taste of it in Fallout 4, but it’s nowhere near as enticing. Your companions will either hate you or love you based on your actions, some companions have different views so one companion may hate you for joining the Brotherhood of Steel while another one may love you for it. But the problem is, it only changes their opinion. While I care for my companions’ opinion, I want to see the world change. If you keep Dog Meat as your companion the entire game, it doesn’t even matter because he’s a dog so he doesn’t have an opinion on you, he just does what you say. It doesn’t make much sense as to why they would simplify the karma system so much, it worked so perfectly in previous Fallout games.
Anyone who has played Fallout 3 or New Vegas will know that the combat in the game was terrible and you couldn’t kill much without VATS. Fallout 4 has drastically improved the combat through a revamped combat system that is absolutely riveting. You can feel each bullet leave the gun and enter into your victim’s body, you feel the gun shake, it is the best in the series and probably one of the best non-competitive shooters. There’s nothing more satisfying than pulling out a double barrel shotgun and blowing off a raider’s arm or mowing down a horde of ghouls with a minigun. If you’re someone who doesn’t like the changes in the combat system, you can still use VATS which has had some slight tweaks to make it less clunky and easier to navigate.
One of the best new changes is the amount of customization, in Fallout 3 and New Vegas all you could do was change your clothes and change some sliders in the character creator for different hair and preset faces but now you can sculpt your face like clay and get it exactly how you want it to look. You can also customize your armor, make modifications to your weapons and even create your own settlement. When you start the game you’ll be given a default character to work with, from there you can change literally everything about them. Hair, scars, wrinkles, freckles, jawline, ethnicity, nose, ears. Basically if you see it you can change it. You just grab whatever body part you want and use the cursor to sculpt it like clay, you can create one of the most atrocious looking characters or hottest human being alive, it’s all up you and how creative you can get.
The amount of customization for weapons and armor is extreme, you gather parts to make scopes, larger magazines, grips, and much more. Not only does it improve the weapons stats but it changes the look of it, you could get a standard baseball bat and change the paint and add some electric barbed wire and end up with an entirely different looking weapon than you started with! It’s fun and exciting looking for parts for a new upgrade and then taking it back to a workstation and upgrading it and then finding the nearest poor soul to test your new killing machine on.
Not only can you make your character unique, you can make the whole world unique and have this world no one else has thanks to the new building mode. In Fallout 4, you will come upon land that is available to be built upon. You establish a settlement, grow crops, set up shops, decorate it, build defenses, and so forth. This new mode now puts use to all the junk lying around in Fallout games. There’s always just random items lying around and you’ve always been able to take it but you could never do anything with it. Now everything in this world has a purpose, everything you find in the world can be picked up and dismantled for parts to build new items in your settlement. While this is a fun feature, I found myself getting frustrated and confused. There aren’t enough tutorials that teach you some of the more complicated mechanics like powering lights inside a house, I was simply left to just use trial and error and hope I would get it right at some point. It’s also a bit clunky. There were times I would try to plant food in my garden with ample space but it wouldn’t allow me to place it in the ground. Some characters would suddenly unassign themselves from jobs I had specifically given them and in turn my settlement would grow unhappy. It’s also incredibly difficult to make your settlement 100% happy, as someone who only needs 3 more achievements in Fallout 4, this is incredibly frustrating. They don’t clearly say what you need to do to keep them happy, sometimes their happiness just suddenly drops and I have no idea why and I’m just forced to build random things until they start getting happy again. It’s a fun feature when it does work but I found myself hating it more than enjoying it. Thankfully it is optional aside from a few side quests the make you build a couple of simple items.
The reason I was most excited to play Fallout 4 was because I was so interested in the story and I absolutely loved the setting. Boston is rich with history and landmarks it’s the perfect place for a Fallout game. Fallout 4 is one of the most colorful games set in a wasteland as it makes the world more visually appealing than the brown and bleak wastelands in its predecessors. The colors aren’t overdone either, it’s balanced enough so that when you see a colorful area it truly pops and looks gorgeous! Not only is it visually appealing, it’s a world full of content that you can easily immerse yourself in. There’s familiar landmarks like Bunker Hill and Fenway Park which have now been rebuilt to have a small city inside and other small shops and buildings that people who have visited Boston are sure to recognize. In every building and corner, there is someone to talk to, something to take, something to kill. The world is packed and there’s always something to look at or do.
While I love the setting, I must admit the story is weak in places. After a bone chilling opening set before the war that will be remembered by all Fallout fans, you set out into the remains of Massachusetts hundreds of years after China drops bombs on the United Stated to go find your infant son who has been kidnapped. You go on this huge journey throughout the beautiful wasteland, following clues, meeting new characters doing anything to get your son back. This is all great, but once you reach the big twist of the game or the third act, the game comes to a massive halt and never really picks up steam again. There are big moments in the third act but they’ve all been spoiled in the trailers so I wasn’t really surprised or excited when they happened because I saw them six months ago. Without spoiling it, I was incredibly disappointed with the endings. There are about 3-4 endings but they’re all the same situation just with certain characters in different roles. It’s almost has a Mass Effect 3 ending because none of your choices truly matter at the end of the game. Luckily, there are loads of side quests to do that have so many smaller stories so if you are disappointed with the last part of Fallout 4’s main quest there are hundreds of hours of smaller more compelling stories to invest yourself in. In the 130 hours I have played I feel like I’ve barely made a dent into the amount of content there is to play and that excites me because all I want to do is keep exploring and meeting new people.
Overall, Fallout 4 is just more Fallout. It doesn’t do too many new things, and I’m fine with that because Fallout has always been incredibly fun to play and easy to invest yourself in and Fallout 4 just took all the previous mechanics and made them better for the most part. While the story is a bit disappointing, the extra content and side quests make up for it by being more engaging. Fallout 4 is one of the best Bethesda games of all time, the world is beautiful, the combat is the most engaging in the series, and there is so much to do and explore. I can’t wait to see what Bethesda does with their expansions and more importantly, what the community does with modding. Fallout 4 will surely keep fans satisfied until Elder Scrolls 6.
An important issue that needs to be mentioned at the very end has to be the frame rate issues and glitches that plague the game. The Xbox One version suffers from intense frame rate drops that cause widespread stuttering through the experience. I tried to pinpoint the exact reason behind them but they appear at random. A demanding scene featuring multitudes of enemies will run smoothly but then I’m walking around in a desolate forest and the frame rate drops to the single digits. Apart from that, sometimes enemies will just stand there or clip through surroundings. When I started the game, I spoke with my trusty robot companion and he somehow clipped through the roof. I’ve also seen mutated bears hover in the sky and super mutants get launched hundreds of feet into the air for no apparent reason.
Summary
I really hope Bethesda fixes these problems because they detract from the experience, especially the severe frame rate issues. There is a patch available on the Windows version of the title that fixes a lot of these bugs so I’m confident that Fallout 4 will be patched on Xbox One soon. Even with these bugs, nothing is game-breaking and so far I haven’t had to restart any save like I did for Skyrim when I played it on Xbox 360 all those years ago. Fallout 4 is truly a remarkable experience and you need to play it. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up.
Asher and Cade is a shared byline ICXM used for 2 articles co-authored between 2015–2016 covering game reviews. See the individual contributor profiles for the writers behind these collaborations.