Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4
This review will avoid story spoilers.
In many ways, Fallout 4 is exactly the game you expect it to be. If you've played any of Bethesda's other flagship open world RPGs, you have a very good idea of what to expect from this one. Fallout 4 is a positively massive game that provides you with both a compelling central narrative and a sprawling map to explore to your heart's content.
With a game this ambitious, bugs and oddities are inevitable, and Fallout 4 as it exists on launch day has plenty. But, critically, none of the technical issues present (at least the ones I experienced while doing my review) are game-breaking or even that serious. As long as you have the right mindset there's nothing stopping you from enjoying hundreds of hours of game play in Fallout 4 right now -- and when the official patches and unofficial mods start coming out, this game-of-the-year contender is only going to get better.
I played Fallout 4 on Normal difficulty for around 40 hours over a period of a little more than a week, using our Jackhammer desktop PC and the MSI GT72S Dominator Pro laptop. I completed one of the possible branches of the main story (more discussion of that later, spoiler-free I promise) and experimented with many of the different subsystems and sidequests present in the game.
War Never Changes
Let's start by talking about what Fallout 4 doesn't do differently than the games that game before it. At its core it's much the same as New Vegas and Fallout 3, with its hybrid system of RPG/FPS combat and a huge map full of quests, secrets, and loot. If you played the previous two Fallout games and liked them then you'll like this one too, though if you didn't enjoy the core gameplay of those titles Fallout 4 probably won't change that. The combat is a little more robust this time around, with the addition of a cover system that kind of works some of the time, if you're careful, and the shooting feels tighter and more accurate than it did in New Vegas, but beyond those tweaks not much has changed in the heart of the game.
What HAS changed however, and changed for the better in almost every case, is everything that surrounds and supports Fallout 4's explorey-shootey guts. Most important of all the new additions is the game's crafting system, which encompasses weapon and armor tweaks, cooking, chemistry, and a whole settlement management sub-game tinged with shades of Rust or Minecraft.
Crafting is almost entirely optional, of course, which is for the best. Not everyone will enjoy how complicated things can get when you're trying to mess around with light boxes or advanced gun barrels. But even if you just engage with these new systems on the most superficial level, they have an amazing impact on the whole game.
By requiring specific components to build settlement improvements and gun mods, Bethesda has managed to make you WANT to go out into the wasteland looking for junk! You'll never have enough gears to build all the machine gun turrets you want unless you actively go looking for them, for example, and this new requirement provides a constant motivation for scavenging that enriches Fallout 4 immeasurably. With previous titles this kind of system was left up to modders to create, but now it's part of the official game, and it's a much better title because of it. Fans of old-school Hardcore mode will be sorry to see that Fallout 4's hardest setting doesn't require you to eat, drink, or sleep, but in practice the resource management in the crafting system actually provides a very similar kind of experience.
The other changes we see in Fallout 4 are less revolutionary, but generally feel like improvements all across the board. Companions can't permanently die, which eliminates the need for a lot of save-scumming. The level-the up system is more streamlined, with each advancement allowing you to pick a perk or improve a core attribute. The elimination of the classic skill system might disappoint some traditionalists, but character advancement in Fallout 4 feels every bit as open-ended and flexible as its ever been.
Combat is better than it has been in previous Fallout titles, though it's held back a bit by the fact that grenades and the new cover system both seem a bit inconsistent and awkward. You get used to these quirks over the course of the game, but it's nowhere near as tight as it could be.
On Normal difficulty I advanced at a steady pace of one level per hour of playtime, which perfectly fed that classic Fallout urge to keep playing long into the night, because once you have just one more perk your character will be unstoppable. I didn't die often on Normal difficulty, though early on the game I encountered a frustrating number of "instant death" scenarios from traps or well-fired rockets. Once I was past level 10 these became rarer, and my combat deaths felt a lot more fair.
Do Synths Dream of Nuclear-powered sheep?
The way the main story is structured in Fallout 4 is a bit different than what we've seen in the previous two games in the franchise though, like many things in the game, it's a well-thought-out evolution of what has worked before. New Vegas experimented with competing factions fighting for control of the Wasteland, but Fallout 4 fleshes this idea out and makes it the driving force behind the game's core narrative -- while also providing factions that are a heck of a lot more interesting and easier to root for than Caesar's Legion.
It's a sign of the quality of quest and story design present in Fallout 4 that the "story" quests often blend seamlessly into interesting stuff you'll want to be doing anyway. I stumbled upon the Brotherhood of Steel early in the game by following a radio signal, and scored a sweet weapon for helping them kill some ghouls. Then I overheard some people in Diamond City talking about the group known as the "Railroad," and I decided to follow the Freedom Trail to go check them out. I didn't know it at the time, but these two factions play huge roles in the game's core story. I didn't seek them out because I was rushing to finish the story -- I found them naturally by following interesting breadcrumbs.
Fallout 4 has a great central story that borrows heavily from the works of Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner most notably, but also the lesser-known short story Second Variety). It deals with themes that we've seen previously in Fallout, once again asking you to help determine who should control the post-apocalyptic landscape, but it also presents some new questions about science, life, and moral responsibility that make for some compelling choices and plot twists.
There are interesting stories both big and small to be found spread throughout the world of Fallout 4, and it would take many hours to see them all -- as well as a couple of playthroughs. Though there's no level cap and the end of the game's central story doesn't end the game, you'll have to choose a particular path to follow sooner or later, and your choice will make other paths inaccessible to you.
Sights, Sounds, and Bugs of the Wasteland
Fallout 4 isn't a visually stunning game, though there are moments when the devastated Commonwealth can be quite beautiful. The Creation Engine powering the game has been upgraded since the days of Skyrim, but it's no match visually for a game like The Witcher 3. Human faces in Fallout 4 still don't look quite right a lot of the time, and NPC hair has a particular tendency towards a plastic look.
Despite these shortcomings, Fallout 4 does some impressive things visually, especially on High and Ultra settings. Mutated animals and ghouls in particular look suitably horrifying, and radioactive storms occasionally sweep across the landscape, bringing a dramatic green tint to the world as a fog of fallout settles over everything. Lighting was one of the areas upgraded in the Creation Engine for Fallout 4, and it absolutely shows. The game also does a much better job than New Vegas of providing towns and cities that feel populated and real, though this aspect isn't a huge step up from what we saw in Skyrim.
Audio in Fallout 4 is stronger across the board than graphics, with almost universally strong voice acting, a wonderful dramatic score, and a pair of radio stations accessible throughout the game world (with others limited to localized areas). I would have liked a wider selection of radio stations and music to choose from, but the songs that are in the game are all fantastic.
Over my 40 hours of playtime I experienced two hard crashes while playing Fallout 4. Beyond those issues most of the technical problems I encountered were in the form of NPC bodies stuck in walls or floors, dialogue options failing to load properly, or weapon graphics taking several seconds to load. These problems were frustrating when they happened, and will hopefully be reduced by patches post-launch, but thanks to a generous auto-save system and plenty of quick-saving on my own, I never lost any significant progress, and reloading an earlier save fixed every issue I encountered.
Outside of the world of technical bugs, I also found a few rare parts of the game to feel off and a little weird. This is particularly true of some epic battles between rival factions you will witness (and participate in) over the course of the game. Depending on how you play, it's very possible to be involved in a battle where both sides think you're on their side -- and neither will shoot at you unless you start shooting first. This means you can wander around a literal war-zone without a care in the world, calmly observing as gunfire and death rages around you, until you choose to actively get involved.
No, Fallout 4 isn't perfect. It's probably the least buggy big huge open world game Bethesda has ever released, which is saying something, but it's still an audaciously ambitious title with a lot of roughness around the edges. With some of those previous games, buying the game near launch was a recipe for frustration; it was better to let the patches and modders fix it up before experiencing it for the first time. Fallout 4, however, is a fantastic game as it exists right now, and the technical issues don't even come close to providing a reason to wait to play it.
To get the most out of Fallout 4, make sure you check out the five things we wish we would have known when we started.
