With the news of Josh Sawyer heading up a new Fallout game for Obsidian in the aftermath of the Microsoft cuts to the Xbox division, I realized I never posted this review of Fallout 4. With some modern editing and ten years of retrospection, I present my take on Fallout 4.

It’s fun, of course. It’s overwhelmingly fun if you can turn your brain off, and everything else that follows in this review ought to be countered with, “Yeah, but it’s fun and you’ve scratched out 30 hours in the limited free time you have, prioritizing it above a lot of other things.” Fam gonna get Cram this Christmas, ‘cos that’s the only kind of Christmas shopping I’m going to have time to do.

There’s a tacit limit to what could happen, what CAN happen and what might happen at all times because Fallout 4 is very much a Bethesda game, and if you’ve played some you know how the minds of their designers work. When you walk into a new area on a quest your job as the Vault Dweller is to murder everybody. Everybody. There is no role playing in Fallout 4. There’s no chance that the game will team you up with a Raider for a common goal, or let you have a conversation with that Raider about mundane things, or even just pass through. No, all the bad guys somehow instantly recognize you as an outsider and will fling themselves over railings and walls to kill you. That’s every interaction. In fact, it’s worse than that: because the enemies don’t turn red on my radar until they see me (but will be impossible to negotiate with) it’s in your best interest to murder everyone first and not ask questions. There isn’t room for nuance. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (a movie Fallout is obviously inspired from) had at least one scene where Mad Max went to the Thunderdome and didn’t spree-kill everyone there. Not in Fallout 4! One possible companion is a woman named Cait. Cait is fighting in an arena with her manager and the two of them hide while you kill everyone. You can’t talk to Cait if there’s even a single remaining, living Raider in some remote corner of the map and anytime you channel X-Com: Terror From the Deep, I can’t think a level was well-designed.

The companions are simultaneously my favorite thing about the game and the most frustrating. Frustrating: there’s no penalty to letting Piper or Cait or whoever be a bullet sponge – if Piper runs out of hit points, she’ll writhe around on the ground in pain, but your companions aren’t targets at that point by the same people who are trying to kill you. (And they are always trying to kill you.) The companions are in no danger in becoming part of a Super Mutant’s meat bag. And half the time you lose the chance to hit your companions with a Stimpak and get them walking around again, resulting in situations where they will be teleported around a local map and you’ll see them sitting on their ass unable to do anything, not becoming normal again until you fast travel. It’s so stupid and goofy. I don’t care that much because the voice acting works so well, and the expressions these characters have make them seem human, vulnerable, charismatic. Unlike Deus Ex: Human Revolution, they don’t all have one of five “poses” and break mimesis when they put their hand on their hip like the last 50 people you spoke to did. I’ve never seen a game present the facial expression where someone’s eyes get wide as they communicate something intimate. But then, how much emotion does a game like Gravitar 2 really allow.

This is all what is meant when people say the engine is “creaking,” I think. It all looks beautiful and the killing is beautiful. But this is a Bethesda game created by Bethesda people and you probably know how their minds work. I got my little brother Fallout 4 and the last Bethesda game he spent any time with was Morrowind. I doubt he’ll have a single complaint with how samey a lot of the interactions are. If you have avoided RPGs by them then Fallout 4 is going to blow your mind.

I don’t like the crafting system at all. I think I started hating it in all games because of this. I carry near my maximum amount of equipment at all times. There’s tons of useful junk for crafting in the wasteland. I’ll randomly happen upon a “crafting station” and I’d better hope that either my dude or my companion is carrying the stuff I need. Oh whoops, if I need silver, duct tape and sugar bombs to mod my gun and my companion has the duct tape, well, I can’t do it. I have to talk to them and trade the junk and now I can’t run because I hit my max capacity and I gotta go back into the crafting station now. And if I don’t have the one item I always seem to lack? Well you can “tag for search” but I do not control what is and what is not on the bodies of the people I kill, right? Tagging it doesn’t help me. And two seconds after I leave that crafting station I’ve forgotten where it is. Setting aside the fact that companions ought to share inventories with players for things like this, all junk should be weightless in my opinion, because this is a video game.

The main quest has me at the point where I need to get radiation suits but I don’t want to. I’ve heard reports that it’s all deathclaws, elbows and assholes if I do that and I don’t want to fight a bunch of deathclaws. I can’t fight them – they drain my ammo and I’ve taken to using some melee weapons to fix that, but ammo for a guy like me in this crazy world is scarce.

TotalBiscuit and/or Yahtzee said the interface was designed by “aliens” and they are correct. It’s like whoever killed Sam Sheppard’s wife: they were kinda a burglar, kinda a rapist, but all they really accomplished was murdering his wife. The interface is kinda for consoles, kinda for PCs, but in the end worse than someone murdering a peacefully sleeping woman alone in her own bed.

The local maps, by the way, have been rendered utterly useless. What did they do to local maps? I used to be able to do things like navigate out of a local area with them. I used to be able to see locations of doors and exits. Now it really does look like someone picked up the telephone while you were logged into a BBS. They serve no function and I am not sure why they kept them in the game and how they got broken. MODS’LL FIX IT

It doesn’t really matter because every hour I’m seeing a new weapon which is the greatest weapon ever. I’m seeing crazy outfits and doing virtua cosplay and chunking people into gristle and ham. Nick Valentine is the best Fallout character of all-time. Watching a dog tear into some dickhead’s arm never stops being funny. I do like that they made Dogmeat a purebreed German shepherd 200 years after a nuclear disaster: any time you can insert social commentary on how even German dogs like to keep their bloodlines pure, you gotta do it.

Fallout 4 is one of the more entertaining games I’ve ever played and I’ll keep buying them on release, so don’t listen to me. They just aren’t deep. I remember everyone posting fun screenshots from Fallout 3, we were all amazed at the crazy stuff that could happen. I don’t know if we really got that with 4.

This was the last single-player game made in the Fallout franchise, I think, as of this posting. They have now released two seasons of a TV show which is overall fine. I don’t think it should have been that hard to have something to co-promote the game, but you see the same thing with comic books. Daredevil will have a new season of television shows out and the writer will have some stupid storyline going where Matt Murdock decides he wants to be a tennis instructor and wears a dark bedsheet for a costume. I don’t even really care about people enjoying the show and then “crossing over” to play the games; what do I care for a corporation. It just would have been nice to have another Fallout game, 2D, 3D whatever.

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Ice Cream Jonsey