| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| PlayStation 4 | 9.20 |
| Overall | 9.20 |
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The Bethesda game has become a genre unto itself. We all come to expect a giant world to explore, emergent gameplay, a story with factions to join, and unfortunately some glitches. Fallout 4 stays close to the formula and the trend of Bethesda games simplifying the RPG elements while making the action better. This leads to all sorts of mixed opinions, is a game that unquestionably controls better, feels better to play and is the most glitch free game they have ever made a better game when the story and character building takes such a big hit. The answer is one everyone will have to answer themselves but for me I fell in the middle, Fallout 4 is an excellent game but you shouldn't be taking steps back while trying to move forward. Let's begin with what has improved which is the combat. Fallout 4 can practically be played without VATS and it will play like a competent shooter. Enemies will take cover, throw grenades, some still rush you but all in all they do enough to create some great fire fights. Aiming works as it should, you point at an enemy and as long as they are within range you will hit them. They seemed to remove any stat based accuracy penalties when in real time but in VATS it is still accuracy stat based. I think this is the best of both worlds, it allows the real time combat to work as it should while still giving some RPG elements ways to shine. I used VATS as a bonus attack, especially when things got chaotic and I needed to slow down time and asses the situation. VATS also leads to all sorts of bonus damage capabilities because of the new critical meter which fills with each hit. Fill the bar and you can turn any shot into a critical shot for bonus damage, which can be paired with perks that double or even triple the critical damage. One skill allows you to bank criticals so that you can store up to three just for the right moment. My favorite combination was a maxed sneak bonus damage with a critical from my silenced sniper rifle which ended in an instant kill on most enemies. Sniping in general was a blast, I was a sniping ninja doing most of the sniping in real time. Combat feels good all around and the way you can level up certain perks to enhance VATS but not have it negatively affect how real time combat works is the best of both worlds. What is most impressive to me is how Bethesda has managed to create some really great combat areas using the giant world they are known for. Fallout 4 has the most detailed dense world they have ever created, Boston is filled with skyscrapers and crowded city spaces. Navigating ruined downtown Boston feels like being in the ruins of a bombed city and adds a level of verticality missing from so many shooters. I love that ruined buildings provide paths to rooftops, giving an alternative to walking at ground level which can be very dangerous. From rooftops I was able to snipe, observe, and plan attacks on unsuspecting groups of enemies on the ground. I had some incredible fire fights especially when the emergent gameplay jumps in with a random faction showing up whether it's a brotherhood ship raining death from above or a deathclaw wrecking havoc on enemies, the unpredictability of it all makes the world feel alive. It can also be used as a tactic, one of my favorite moments was firing on a giant tank sentry to get its attention and then running full speed from it toward an enemy base then getting out of the way while both sides dukes out and I killed the stragglers. The weapon selection is very impressive building on the cool collection of weapons introduced in fallout 3. I remember the days when the junk gun was super unique, now it's just another gun. One of the best new weapons is a railroad gun which shoots rail spikes at enemies which can rip off limbs and impale them on a wall. There is a huge selection of guns and they all feel great, from the small arms fire to heavy blasts of a shotgun. One of the best new additions is the mods system which allows you to totally restructure a weapon. I would invest in the gun nut perk as fast as you can because the best weapons come from modding. The sheer amount of options is impressive allowing you to turn a normal rifle into a sniper rifle, or a slow firing rifle into an automatic. You can adjust ammo types for better or more effective damage. There is also a bunch of mines and grenades that compliment the guns as well as melee weapons. Now many say the melee build took a huge hit, I never played a melee build and quite frankly playing a game about guns with melee weapons seems stupid to me but hey there's still plenty of cool melee weapons if that's your thing. I also love the new legendary enemies they added throughout the game. Every time you see one you know you are about to get a legendary item as they always drop one. These items come with a random stat added to the weapon which can give you armor that adds plus one to stats like strength and endurance. Or a gun that does double damage to a certain enemy type. It adds an element of the loot genre and the higher the difficulty the more legendaries you see. Really everything about the combat was a blast. Enemies still explode in glorious fashion, slow motion head explosions never get old. Battlefields will come alive with laser fire, cars blowing up, and all sorts of random chaos. Combat is what you are doing almost all the time so it is very important that it feels fun to play, (I am looking at you witcher 3) to the point that this feels like a giant open world FPS more than it does an RPG. Which leads us to the negative which is how the RPG elements seem to have been pushed into the background. Now personally I see no issue with the new leveling up perk system. It's a giant diagram of skills that can be accessed if you have the right amount of points invested in the core stat it belongs to like strength or agility. You simply pick the perks you want and level them up, easy and simple to use, works for me. Some people claim this hurts the building of certain builds, I wouldn't know because I never try for a certain build, I always just build my character in a way that fits what I want to be able to do, like shoot everything I usually end up as a jack of all trades. What noticeably takes a huge hit is the story telling and the way your choices affect the world. Fallout New Vegas had some of the most dynamic storytelling I have ever seen in gaming. Every choice you made had an impact and there was instant complications between different factions. It made the story and the way the factions worked with one another feel real. But that was Obsidian, this is Bethesda and they never really cared about how factions affect one another. Case in point any TES game where you can be the leader of the Mage, warrior and thief guild at the same time. Same issue here, Fallout 4 has four different factions that you can join, and sometimes lead with little to no effort put in. You can walk right into the brotherhood base with your synth companion even though they hate all synths. I understand they have to compromise on the story to make all the game systems work freely, but it kills the immersion. Somehow New Vegas made it work, I don't get why they couldn't take some notes from New Vegas and improve on it. Choice still matters in Fallout 4 but it is done so in the most obvious heavy handed way possible. At the pivotal point of the story when the wanderer must make his choice to align with one faction a giant box appears on the screen and says “This choice will permanently align you with X faction, proceed”; subtle. Individual quests do have multiple paths and endings but once again you can easily predict what outcome your actions will have. There are no unforeseen consequences, this is mostly due to the dumbed down dialogue system. Remember in fallout 3 how you can nuke an entire town about 10 hours into the game and they are forever wiped from the game, there is nothing like that here. One major addition to fallout 4 is the settlement system which allows players to build a town in certain specific areas. Like a small version of minecraft you use specific materials to build the town from houses, to stores, power lines, and stations that aid the player like workbenches. For the creative players it is easy to lose many hours just building a cool looking town. For the more practical players it can be a great way to create a central location with all the resources you need. I dabbled in making a nice settlement or two, a planted plants to have a constant source of food, I erected stores to get additional income. The major issue with this is how the game explains none of the crafting system or any of the economy to the player. I had to use outside guides to understand any of it. Oh and the happiness meter that governs how happy the citizens are is glitched, so there is no way to properly run a town. Luckily this is all optional, it takes nothing away from the game and adds a potentially fun diversion. Difficulty balancing remains a major issue with this game and seemingly all WRPGs, once again the game gives way too much exp if you do the side quests which makes you too overpowered for the main quest. By the end of my game I was essentially the terminator, I would walk in the middle of a battle, bullets bouncing off me as I slowly headshot every enemy and blew their heads clean off. It's not like there are a load of side quests either, to fill space Bethesda decided to add loads of “radiant quests”, which is another way to say randomly generated fetch quests. These are given by faction members and they never end. They make you go to a random location on the map and kill or grab something. It's fine if you are exploring a location for the first time as it gives you extra incentive to explore but in time it will send you to places you have cleared. It's just busy work to earn extra exp and caps, adds nothing to the game and makes questing in general worse than it should be. The actual side quests are not as plentiful as they should be and these too took a step back from the last Fallout. There are still some stand outs like a mission where you take the identity of a comic book hero, one where you must confront a man with alien technology, and a great one involving a wimpy radio DJ. Despite the steps back Fallout 4 is still very much a Bethesda game so you still get a massive open world to explore in a way that no other developer does. The world building is still very impressive with nearly every building having some small story told on computer logs or even just dead bodies from the nuke. No one can match the sense of exploration you get while roaming the world, stumbling on a new location and getting tangled in a new quest. This game has a huge collection of companions to take on your journey and while they don't really add much to the choice aspect of the story (you can befriend everyone and take them anywhere despite them clearly having allegiances, nothing you can do will make them hate you) most have some intriguing backstories and quests. The standout is Nick Valentine, a synth detective who took the thoughts of a former Boston detective and all the baggage that came with that former detectives life. He brings much needed life to this rather boring cast of characters. Fallout 4 is easily the best looking Bethesda game and the most detailed. The ruined cities are very impressive; standing on a rooftop and seeing the sprawling landscape below is a sight to behold. Character models are still robotic, animations are taken right for older games. Unlike the dreary brown of fallout 3 this game is actually colorful which to me makes it more inviting to explore. The sounds and music are nothing special. The music selection of the radio is taken straight from the last game, that just screams lazy to me. The voice acting is mostly forgettable including the main character who speaks for the first time in a Bethesda game; he should have remained silent. As I said before Nick Valentine is the standout and his voice actor nails the noir style detective. Of course this being a Bethesda game one expects glitches, this game still has some but nowhere close to what we have been used to. Fallout 4 is the most stable game Bethesda has ever made, I had like five crashes in my entire play time. The game didn't buckle as time went on and loot was left everywhere like past games. It runs great actually, bravo to Bethesda. (Though that's my experience, I've heard some bad ones) When it comes down to it you need to ask yourself if you want to play another Bethesda game or not. Their games are very formulaic at this point and this one feels by the book, even simplifying the RPG aspects which should be the core of this series. Yes it is by a mile the best playing game they made, it's actually fun to simply kill stuff and explore, but that's not the series main strength. Bethesda games won't ever be great action games, so why focus mostly on that. What sets these games apart are how the RPG elements mix with real time combat and emergent gameplay to create a totally unique experience. For me I still love these kinds of games, I lose myself for over 100 hours, I try to see every location, do every major quest, and I love most of my time with these games and that is why I am still giving it such a high score. But I can see the frustration when a series takes one step forward and a few steps back, Fallout 4 feels like one of those uneven sequels that you can't say is better than what came before. |
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Posted by Dvader Tue, 09 Feb 2016 19:24:05
Recently Spotted:
*crickets*
Yeah this game is not going to be what some people want, it's kind of shifted focus, that shift doesn't make it inherently bad.