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| 30-hour review by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/15/2015, 10:42am PST | ||||
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| It's fun, of course. It's amazingly, overwhelmingly fun and everything else that follows in this review ought to be countered with, "Yeah, but it's fun and you've eked 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 gonna have time to do.
But there's a tacet limit to what could happen and what might happen at all times because this is very much a Bethesda game, and if you've played some you know how their minds work. When you walk into a new area on a quest your job as the Vault Dweller is to murder everybody. There's no chance that the game will team you up with a Raider for a common goal, let you have a conversation with that Raider about mundane things, or even just pass through. No, all the bad guys 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! Your possible companion Cait is fighting in an arena with her manager and they hide while you kill everyone. You can't talk to Cait if there's one last Raider alive in some remote corner of the map and anytime you channel Terror From the Deep I can't think a level was well-designed. Video game creators should all be forced to attend a sporting event in the visiting team's uniforms before implementing such a thing. Take it from me, only half the home crowd wants to kill you. The companions are simultaneously my favorite thing about the game and the most frustrating. There's no penalty to letting Piper be a bullet sponge - if she runs out of hit points, she'll writhe around on the ground in pain, but your companions aren't executed by the same people who are trying to kill you. They 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 and I don't care that much because the voice acting -- at least for Piper -- is great 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, and I'll try to explain why. I'll carry near my max of equipment at all times. And 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. I'm Mike Disney. 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 attuned for some future system we mortals can't envision, but one that Microsoft has pre-given a shitty name to. The local maps, by the way, have been rendered utterly useless. I used the editor to put my office at my house into Fallout 4. This is a thing I did, not a bit. When I hit the "local map" button to view it, it looked like someone took silly string to a Jackson Pollock painting. Okay, this is a bit after all. What the fuck 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 Again, it doesn't 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 most 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 know, now, that New Vegas was the best game in the series, followed by the original, due to the teams and voices used to make those games. I get it now. Fallout 4 is just as much a haunted house simulator as Doom 3 was, it's just that I like haunted house simulators a lot. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey! |
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30-hour review by 12/15/2015, 10:42am PST  Re: interface by 12/15/2015, 11:32am PST I battle to play this for more than 20 minutes at a time. by 12/15/2015, 11:48am PST Re: 30-hour review by 12/15/2015, 3:58pm PST Fallout 4 is more New Vegas than Fallout 3. NT by 12/16/2015, 8:05am PST Good! I liked New Vegas much better than 3. Looking forward to playing 4 NT by 12/22/2015, 9:56am PST It's New Vegasy in the sense that things aren't clear cut and choices are made by 03/25/2016, 5:03pm PDT Pigbald said something useful about this kind of progression a long time ago by 03/26/2016, 11:06am PDT I recently played through Doom 3 and its expansions on Nightmare. by 03/26/2016, 1:45pm PDT Doom 3 was fucking great by 03/26/2016, 5:23pm PDT I borrowed the sentiment, not the specific content. Don't go cyberdemon on me NT by 03/26/2016, 9:55pm PDT |
