PC Advisor

Reviews
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GAME
Fallout 4
Contact
• fallout4.com
System requirements
PC; Sony PlayStation 4;
Microsoft Xbox One
If you want to know what Fallout 4
gets right, look no further than its
predecessor. Or any Bethesda game,
really, but Fallout 3 is the most
pertinent. As you emerge from Vault
111 for the first time, momentarily
blinded by the harsh sunlight and
clad in familiar blue-and-yellow
jumpsuit, there’s that familiar sense
of possibility. You check the map,
walk for a minute, check the map
again, and then you estimate how
long it would take to walk across
the whole thing.
It’s an intoxicating feeling, and
makes up for a burdensome main
story. Fallout 4 has some interesting
ideas, but it’s mostly a convoluted
mess. There’s a chance, if you
join more than one of the game’s
factions, that you’ll find yourself on
missions where everyone is shooting
everyone – except you. For some
reason they all assume you’re on
their side, playing double- and even
triple-agent. Even if you’re in the
process of explicitly betraying one
group. This isn’t a one-time thing.
It happens repeatedly.
Fallout’s slice of 1950s suburbia
is more than just a backdrop – it’s
a character. It tells you stories, if
you’re paying attention, such as two
skeletons, holding hands on a bed
with a 10mm pistol lying between,
or office memos and earnings
reports that, when pieced together,
form a compelling thriller about
surreptitious backroom dealings
and corporate espionage. You
basically play a post-apocalyptic
archaeologist, who is trying to
piece together an idea of who
must have lived there, before the
bombs fell, while Bing Crosby
croons at you in the background.
Huge world to explore
Although Fallout 4 is much bigger
game than its predecessor that
doesn’t make it better. In Fallout
3 there are around 150 named
locations in the entire game,
most separated by expanses of
wilderness. And nearly every
location (minus the subways) existed
for some reason, be it a quest or a
unique piece of loot. In Fallout 4,
however, only around half of the
locales have some sort of interesting
facet to them. The rest are repetitive
combat arenas and glorified postapocalyptic
spelunking.
We could direct blame at a
number of new features. The sheer
scale of the game, for example.
It’s big and padded with ‘Content’,
meaning a lot of locations seem to
exist just to exist – to let you shoot
a few more ghouls and pick up some
hair pins and other extras.
But that points to another issue:
the lack of unique loot. There are
very few unique weapons in Fallout
4 – after nearly 10 hours of play we
found a grand total of five. Even
boss enemies, who you’d expect to
have a unique weapon or armour,
often reward you with trash items.
This was done, we suppose, to
convince players to use the new
Crafting system. Found a totally
boring, generic 10mm pistol? Now
you can break down all the trash
items in the game into components,
which allows you to add a scope, a
larger magazine or what-have-you
on to basic weapons. And then you
can name it and make your own
custom weapon.
There are some unique pieces
of gear in the game, but far less
than before, and as a result there
are entire locations in Fallout 4
that exist solely to replenish your
supplies of RadAway and Stimpaks.
Crafting also has the unintended
consequence of forcing you to use
the same weapons and armour.
This then is Fallout 4 – a bunch
of systems that seem interesting
at the beginning, but kill the
experience stretched over 100
hours. You’ll take over Settlements,
for instance. These are custom bases
of operation, where you can put on
your carpenter hat and build new
houses, furniture, fences, and so on.
Initially, we spent an hour early on
in the game building a fence around
our first settlement. But then Fallout
4 unlocked two settlements. Then
three. Then a dozen. And with each
unlock, we became less and less
64 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews February 2016