The Fourth Fallout

Fourty seven hours so far. Fourty seven glorious hours of Fallout 4 so far, with many more to come.

I've been playing since Tuesday morning and I have only scratched the surface of this magnificent game. It's not perfect no, but damn it's good.

Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first. It's beautiful. Simple as that. Graphics, music, voice acting, all spot on. And if for some reason you aren't satisfied with how it looks, you can mod it better.

Game-play is mostly awesome. The controls are responsive and the addition of a sprint button is a welcome change. Sure I have had to get used to a different key layout compared to F3 and New Vegas but that's no cause for complaint. The AI is mostly good, with the occasional silliness. Like a raider getting upset when I stealthily blow his friends head off, only for the raider to shrug and say “I guess it's my imagination”. But these things are more funny than anything to complain about.

What we have here is a wonderful sand box game in the best tradition of Bethesda. Fallout 4 stands proudly as their latest creation in the long line of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. If you don't like action RPG's or sandboxes, this is not your game, but for me it's narcotic. Addicting and sweet.

There are several important changes from Bethesdas previous Fallout titles, some which are familiar to Skyrim players.

First off, the skills are gone. It's all been baked into the perks system, which not only preserves the immersion better but makes leveling up easier. When I say immersion, I mean that since you can't see exactly how good you are at a skill it feels more alive and less numeric. Not that it was ever a problem as such.

As I said, you can sprint now at the cost of action points. Very useful for getting out of trouble. Or into trouble if you prefer. And you can parry with melee weapons as well as pistol whip your enemies.

In the previous titles, radiation poisoning was fairly abstract. You had to get seriously irradiated before you felt any ill effects, but not any longer. Now rads eat up your health bar, so it's definitely in your best interest to keep those rads down.

I'm not going to go too deeply into all the details here, so I'll just quickly talk about base building. I have let's say, sampled it a bit. There are lots of pictures online of some really great fortresses people have built, but from what I have experienced, it's lots of fun, if a bit fiddly. I have grand plans though. Time will tell.

There is more, so much more, like armor and gun modding but I'll let you find out on your own. It's time to talk about the negative.

First off, yes there are bugs. Of course there are. Sometimes my guns become invisible. I have had a sound effect loop endlessly until I re logged. Small things like that. I haven't thankfully experienced any game breaking bugs so far, and most are things that will get fixed in time.

My biggest complaints personally have to do with story. The game predisposes you to be a good caring person. This is no issue if that is what you want to play, but if you want to play a villain, it's a big snag.

Likewise, and minor spoiler here, there is a quest where you support a Brotherhood of Steel paladin in combat. He then invites you to join the Brotherhood. I declined, but the quest won't go away until I accept. At least so far. And to make things worse, his brothers have actually tried to kill me, which doesn't really help either.

So with only 47 hours of gameplay behind me, I'll conclude that this is indeed a great game, a weird and wonderful Fallout game, and a game RPG fans really aught to play.

Until next time, may your week be radiation free! See ya.