Sunday, January 31, 2016

Review: Fallout 4


 
Released: Nov-10-2015
Price $59.99
Also on: PS4 & PC



Well where to begin? This is a review that basically took me months to get to due to the fact that I had been playing Fallout 4 for months since it had come out.  From Fallout’s November 10th 2015 release to now January 30th 2016 I had been playing and copulating on how I can write a proper review on this game, when everyone else has had a review out on it months prior.   Yes a hard feat indeed!  So here it is my review on Fallout 4 and everything I have played so far in the game which was almost everything.

                1st off I was like most very excited to get into a New Fallout game and again play in that universe of almost limitless things to do in that world.  After playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas on the Xbox360 I always wondered how Tod Howard and Bethesda Softworks could top those games.  And yes I understand they never were perfect games at all with all the glitches they had, plus the semi 1 month game breaking glitch that New Vegas had that kept me from playing it till it was patched. Plus New Vegas wasn’t a Tod Howard game but developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda. When the time came at E3 2015 Bethesda had their own conference saving the basically known Fallout 4 announcement till last, and getting from all gamers around the world a big cheer of excitement of what was to come.

                Ok now enough said about Fallout’s brief history from me, now what is this game about and what did I think about it?  Installing and loading up the basically 29GB game on my XboxOne console made me very impatient like a kid at Christmas.  Staring at the game description which stated Fallout 4’s story being (Taking place approximately 200 years after the Great War, Fallout 4 is set in post-apocalyptic Boston, Massachusetts, now referred to as The Commonwealth.) This meant very little to me telling me things that I and others already knew about the game. Post-apocalyptic Boston CHECK! VATs System CHECK! Large populated world for an adventure CHECK! This is what I wanted and what I got.  Please Note!! If you’re NOT into spoilers then STOP reading NOW! Big SPOILERS Ahead! Ok are you still here reading? Yes. Good. Here we go…
The story of the game starts off before the war and before the bombs fell. For those who never played a Fallout game before your welcome! You start off in the game in front of the mirror of your bathroom which you get to create your in game character.  You can choose to be male or female in the game and change their facial looks; molding them to basically almost anyone you might want to look like! New to the Fallout series is the fact your character interacts with speech not just through the dialog boxes, so this means talking with the NPCs in the game are not just a one way street giving your interactions in the world more color and feeling.   When you’re done creating you’re in game character you get put into the story line as the dad or the mother of the household as you two have a new born baby.  A man comes to your town from Vault Tec offering you a free signup for you and your family to one of their vaults, you basically signup and the man leaves. As you and your significant other tend to your baby your robot butler Codsworth, (Yes you live in a nuclear high tech world where everything runs on nuke tech and robot butlers exist, even though it looks like the 50s!) calls for you as you watch a report on the TV stating that you are at war and getting bombed, stating that everyone should get to cover.  As you and your partner hear this you take the baby and run for the vault you just got WoW! How lucky is it that you have a vault to hide in from the bombs.  You get to the vault with your partner which is conveniently located just behind your local town hmmm. I wonder why they would just let these people build vaults in your backyard like that, oh well it helped this time!  As you’re lowered into the vault a nuke drops in front of you on the other side of town as the blast heads towards you, you manage to get lowered soon enough to avoid the blast.


Ok that was a lot of detail huh? Well it isn’t over yet, I will wrap the rest up faster do to I’m not writing a novel here, and this is a review after all!

So the story continues with you and your significant other entering the vault as your partner holds your child and you all get directed to enter the cryo tubes which some hesitations arise from your character.  After some hustle and bosal you enter your cryo tube to be frozen for hibernation sleep as your partner enters the other with your baby in their arms.  Ok why weren’t you holding your child especially if you had chosen the female mother character? Well I guess it wouldn’t be much of a story if you had the kid.  You eventually wake in a very groggy state to an incident happening at your partner’s tube, in which some men de cryo your partner & baby taking the kid from them. Your partner tries to fight the men as he or she gets shot and dies in the cryo chamber as the men walk off with your kid, but you do get a good look at one of the men as you fall back into cryo sleep again! Oh shit what a bummer!  You wake again not knowing how much time has passed (Even though in the description it stated that 200 years had passed and your character finds this out in the story line) waking to see your half frozen dead partner in the other chamber.  You break free and walk through the eerie unpopulated vault seeing dead corpses along the way. Picking up items that you could probably use and eventually escaping the vault, which is called vault 111.  Leaving the vault for the first time is always an experience of itself opening your character’s eyes to the world for the first time.  Seeing the total destruction that the bombs had caused, this is the world as it is now, and which is your world now. What a welcome.
  This is where you begin your journey into the wasteland, the finding of your son, and revenge for the men who took him.

                Hopefully I gave a good enough description on how this game has started, and don’t forget that I want you to actually play the game for yourselves! Did I just basically end my review with that? Nope there is a lot more in my review here.  

So what’s New in this installment of the Fallout franchise besides the story of course?  First there is my favorite part of the Fallout games which is its VATs system. What is VATs for those who are New to the franchise? Well VATs is The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or V.A.T.S., is a queuing system in the Fallout franchise, inspired partly by the ability to shoot specific parts in the turn-based combat system of Fallout and Fallout 2 had used and updated for Fallout3 & Fallout New Vegas. It is also used for a cinematic combat experience. Understand? Great! But the VATs system in Fallout4 has been upgraded with not pausing time anymore, but by only slowing down time making enemies attack you a lot slower. (Note the VATs system has always been limited in use until it recharges) This helps me out a lot better because I can now wait for an enemy to get closer by moving into a better firing range for more accurate hits and damage to those individuals who cross my path and need to be destroyed.  Another added experience in the game would be the settlement building system, creating bases of operation to call home and store items at.  Which eventually other commonwealth people join to create a community. In order to create these settlements which you can begin to build right from the beginning of the game, you will be collecting items or scrap throughout the game. Most items like toasters, cups, gears, and wood or whatever is highlighted can be taken as scrap to create other items in your settlement via workbenches!  These workbenches include settlement building, chems station, armor station, power armor station, and last but not least weapons stations. Which you can create or upgrade selected items with in your set of skills.

  The other added improvement I had found in the game was the Perks chart, in which as your character levels up you get to pick a perk. This was in other Fallout games but I think they made it a lot easier to view each perk and unlock them as they become available in the game, being able to upgrade a lot of them when you get more skill points.  Finding this to easily mold my character as I see fit.  These upgrades are made when you earn more perk points as you level up!
  There are tons of New exciting things in Fallout 4 mainly is some of the characters you meet along the way, even though you still find yourself talking to mindless looking NPCs in the game as it becomes very noticeable early in the game.  I don’t know if this has to do with the older game engine that Bethesda has been using since Skyrim, which I agree needs a bit of updating.  The in game world and graphics look very good to me maybe not next-gen but still amazing in the size and scope of this game which just impresses.

  I’ve heard from multiple sources that this game has a lot of bugs and slow down glitches in which I’ve only noticed maybe 3 or 4 times throughout the game. These in No Way break the game for me at all, and haven’t noticed anything else since.  Some things that did bug me a bit in the world of Fallout 4 was the fact that sometimes the NPCs were so dumbly coded that when doing an action or sleeping, and you tried to make an action with them they took a long time to complete their action, reposition themselves, and then interact with you it took me out of the game a bit. Making me a bit impatient by spamming the A button a lot on my XboxOne controller.  Another thing that bugged me sometimes was when going to do a mission or in a mission that I found myself lost a lot in the area that I was in and getting pointed around in directions that never got me to my destination. That frustrated me a bit when trying to complete a task and never getting to where I wanted to go, plus the 2D map interface doesn’t help much neither.  And the third and mainly final thing that I didn’t like in the game was when you got up to the crossroads in the game in choosing the faction you wanted to join, it never made it clear enough to when this would happen.  I had found the crossroads part when I joined a Brotherhood of steel mission then saved the game before I took it, so when I want to join another faction I could at any time.  This could have been a lot clearer in the game.

                After the over 97 hours that I have played of Fallout 4 and the completing of one of the main faction story lines, I still find myself continuing throughout the wasteland killing enemies from people, super mutants, deathclaws, behemoths, etc.  There are always things to do in Fallout 4 well worth the money I had paid for this game!
               
                Now finally in conclusion I may have left tons out about the game in general, but you can just purchase the game and find out all this out yourself!  I’m just here to help you on your journey in which this game is right for you or not.  Everything stated here are my opinions and my opinions only you can make up your own damn mind if you want this game.  I think this game has a lot of great story to it; the characters in the game are very unique on who they are and what they are about within their various personalities.  The world is gorgeously destructed and large for hours of mind sucking fun, to the point on when you pick your head up to look at the time hours have gone by!  Note this is a Bethesda, Tod Howard game so yes there are bugs and things that could turn you off if overly picky on your experiences. And yes the ending is an ending in the game, but this time you can continue your adventures and level up to your heart’s content!  

                I as a gamer and the love for the Fallout open world games series can’t wait for the future game DLC that will eventually come, and will continue my way throughout the wasteland always finding new things even long after I completed the game.
As for giving this game a score I created a very easy simple system of (Horrible, Bad, Good, Great).  This is not the best system or even a good system for most but isn’t all the game review systems out there just bad? This is my system and I’ll stick to it! Another one last note I only played this game on the XboxOne and experiences can differ between platforms.  I conclude once again giving my score for this game a GREAT Review, even with its very minor flaws the money to playtime ratio plus the overall fun factor this is still a GREAT game, and should Not be missed by anyone unless you dislike post-apocalyptic, or open world games.



Fallout4 Got a Mr. Mike Score of: GREAT! 
1/31/2016 Review
Played On XboxOne

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