Fallout 4

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, and PC

Played it on: PS4

RATING: 6/10

To be completely honest, it has been incredibly difficult to write this review. I've gone back and forth considerably on this game. Is it good? Is it bad? Do the new design decisions work, as a fan of Fallout? Does it live up to expectation? I can't answer those questions in a straightforward manner because...

Well, the game is painfully average.

I remember the hype surrounding it. Years of rumors, culminating in an E3 presentation that destroyed all competition. Bethesda rolled out trailers for every major upcoming title in its publishing arsenal, including a sequel to Dishonored, which I loved despite the criticism. A reboot of DOOM that actually looked like DOOM, unlike the divisive DOOM 3. And of course at the end, the hour dedicated to unveiling Fallout 4. It all seemed so fresh back then, so amazing to be back in this world of post-apocalyptic 1950's aesthetic. I was so hyped that I pre-ordered the Pip-Boy edition with help from my significant other at the time. It looked like a return to everything I loved about Fallout 3 and a turn from everything I hated about Fallout: New Vegas. Finally! A return to form!

And then I played it.

It was good for a while. At first, I loved it just as much as I thought I would. The story was great, I thought it was fantastic to play from the perspective of a parent trying to find their child. It was way more compelling than the story of New Vegas, that much was certain to me. Boston was a unique location to explore, and the companions were neat. All of them had different likes and dislikes, and finding one that jived with your character was enjoyable. I even liked the crafting for a while. But after I kept playing, the paint started to chip away. That Fallout 3 nostalgia wore off. And I was forced to see what was lying underneath.

The game just doesn't function like its supposed to. It tries to get you to care about certain factions over others, but fails to present any of them in a meaningful way. It does the exact same shitty thing that Skyrim did by allowing the main character to immediately advance in the four major factions without hardly any setbacks or challenges. The vast majority of the characters are weak and forgettable. I only remember about half the companions because I spent the majority of the game with either Nick Valentine as my noir cop sidekick or Piper because she was my love interest. There was no reason to have anybody else, because they were the only two characters who meant anything to my Sole Survivor.

The locations? Largely forgettable as time went on. It becomes extremely difficult to remember what each part of the map is like because it's too same-y for the entire game. There are differences, yes, and they're distinct enough while playing, but it's extremely easy to get lost or turned around in many sections because it feels like a world too populated and overdesigned with things. And because every quest feels nearly identical, there's no reason to learn the world more intimately. New Vegas suffered from a similar issue, sporting a map that was too open in many areas and lacking in substantive explorative content, but not nearly to this extent. It feels like the Commonwealth is a direct response to criticism of the Mojave, and goes so far in the other direction that it ends up still suffering. Every location blends together, every encounter is identical to the previous one, no main quest is even remotely as compelling or memorable as something like Tranquility Lane or anything leading up to the Battle for Hoover Dam.

And what of that big, climactic battle that epitomizes every modern Fallout? The battle for the fate of the Commonwealth... sucks. Most factions struggle to make you care or feel conflicted, so you're ultimately stuck with something functionally no better than the Mass Effect 3 endings. You can either nuke the Institute or not, and then take down the big Brotherhood of Steel blimp or not. That's it. There's not even a reason to care about which outcome is best because none of them are. Functionally, mechanically, they are all the same. This speaks volumes through its silence. The world of Fallout was always meant to be complex and nuanced, but this feels like an amateur attempt to recreate something Fallout-like rather than a meaningful continuation of the universe. The RPG elements are so token, so shunted aside in this one, that it would be a genuinely better experience if they didn't exist at all.

And what about that good ol' boogyman, the Institute? Well, it's probably one of the biggest tragedies in the entire game. So much detail has been put into it, so much love, so many hours crafting a place that's meant to symbolize a new hope for humanity and the only beacon of progress in a dead world. It is by far one of the most gorgeous locations ever crafted in a Bethesda engine. And you know what? It sucks. It's supposed to be a heavily complex question of your character's morality, and there were moments where that came through. The scene with you and Shaun alone on the roof of the CIT, that was powerful. But ultimately, the entire personality of the Institute boils down to, "Screw the outside world, it's too imperfect and we should just live in our utopia with sentient slave robots." None of the characters in the Institute are nuanced or interesting, they're all cookie-cutter cardboard skeletons that repeat roughly the same thing to you over and over again. Granted, there are moments when the nuance of the Institute shines through like a beautiful beacon of much-needed storytelling, where the characters within feel deeply human. But those moments aren't what sticks, and they're a major faction that's introduced far after the main character is likely deeply entrenched with at least one of the other three, which means that there's just not enough time to care about them, not to mention the fact that siding with them is painted blatantly as an evil decision. It's the one major memorable location that left an impression on me, and it can't even act correctly as the crux of the story. What if, in visiting the Institute, you were tasked with assisting a lesson with a group of kids, talking about what the world above is actually like? No, of course it can't do that, because then you'd have too much of a moral quandary with your decision about nuking the Institute because these kids are ultimately innocent and it would actually force players to question what is right. But if the Institute is full of mostly faceless adults who are painted as condoning slavery, then there is absolutely no reason to care even remotely about them unless you force yourself to think about some of the more abstract consequences like a loss of progress.

Let's take a moment to talk about that story, too, and the RPG elements as a whole. Fallout has always been, since its start, a series of RPG games. You make a character, and you have options to play that character the way that you want them to be expressed in the world. Throughout the series, the games have accomplished this to varying degrees, with Fallout having some stumbling blocks but ultimately being a good rollplay foundation, Fallout 2 being by far the best at conveying story and an ability to play whatever character you want, Fallout 3 being at least interesting with its limited options, and New Vegas expanding on 3's design to provide an incredibly deep experience. But with 4, there was no impetus to get invested in a meaningful way. The dialogue system was nice, I definitely enjoyed the experience of playing a voiced protagonist, but so many of the options are completely meaningless, and many of them are functionally identical to the others. The lead writer, (and it honestly angers me to have to bestow that title on this man) Emil Pagliarulo, is an imbecile who does not have any clue what good storytelling is. He has essentially stated that because players will miss certain story elements in an open world game, that there's no point in story effort at all.

Sorry, Emil, but there's a massive crowd of RPG's outside your door, some of which come from this very franchise, that are carrying pitchforks and screaming that they disagree with your nonsense.

Let's take a second to imagine the four factions as something that has huge consequence for the player and the world. Imagine an Institute that was an entire world unto itself, like the Vaults, but better. An entire functional society underground, with bases all over the Commonwealth that you could visit and gain new technology from, that were researching different aspects of post-nuclear life. Spouses, kids, aunts, uncles, entire families that were raised in this environment with an entirely different worldview than the protagonist's. Now, siding with them means understanding their beliefs with the potential of guiding them in a new direction thanks to your connections in the outside world, but also knowing that this society couldn't function without the use of sentient, synthetic slaves. Imagine the Brotherhood of Steel as an organization with forward thinking, if flawed, morality that believes in law and order, but is too entrenched in preserving the past and being unable to change their ideals. Now, siding with them means sacrifice for the greater good with the knowledge that while you're only a cog in the machine, you're contributing to a better society. Imagine the Minutemen as something greater, as a collection of people who want what's best for the Commonwealth and are willing to fight to protect one another from the evils of the wasteland, who concretely believe in freedom and the common good without the strict militarism of the Brotherhood. A people focused on each other and the future, without being hindered by dogmatism and tradition like the power-armored princes. Now siding with them may mean losing the concrete order and technology that the Brotherhood would provide, but ultimately gaining a better society as a result. Imagine the Railroad as an organization growing too zealous within its own mission, coming to believe that synths are inherently better than the humans around them despite how much help you've give them, with slanted comments about how much better you would be as a synth. Given how zealous they're becoming, what if they're the only ones who want this final solution of nuking the Institute because they can't see any other way. What if siding with them meant a slowly creeping indoctrination that ultimately resulted in you switching your consciousness into a synth body, and what the ramifications of that would be both mechanically and story-wise as you choose who to share your secret with. Now every faction matters. Now the choice of who you side with in the end is truly difficult and really does boil down to how your character rationalizes the decision and what they value and prioritize. Now it's an RPG.

It's this fundamental misunderstanding of what they think players care about that forms so much of the foundation of why Fallout 4 ultimately fails to deliver as the kind of game we were promised. Remember when Todd Howard said in the E3 presentation that Codsworth had a list of hundreds of the most popular names that he would use directly to address the player? That's what we expected. We expected Codsworth to matter for more than eight seconds, for one. But we expected this to carry over as a design philosophy. Not just that it was neat that our servant robot knew our name, but that we would matter, and be deeply entrenched in the entire composition of this world. But that's not how it feels. The RPG elements are so light, so non-existent for the vast majority of game time, that this bombshell drop of cool design back at the E3 presentation is meaningless after the first two hours of the game. That is bad design at its finest.

And while I'm here, why, oh why, DO I GET POWER ARMOR SO EARLY?!?!?! I actually have no problem with how power armor operates in 4, I especially enjoy all of the customizations and variations I can have with the different collectible sets. It felt very Tony Stark to have this big room in my house dedicated to all my different suits of power armor. And it was even nice to finally feel the weight of putting on gear like that, something that wasn't present in previous titles. But being handed a suit of power armor at level 3 in the very first town? That is not how you pace a game. You don't trivialize a fight with the game's first deathclaw and hand the player the power of god immediately upon starting. It's not even a piece of equipment one has to really use sparingly, there's dozens of power cores throughout the game that are extremely easy to find. The power scaling only grows more poorly handled as the game progresses because of this, and the end of the game can be spent almost exclusively in power armor. It's incredibly bad design, because it feels less like a reward and more like a crutch or yet another token inclusion because of the way the player is introduced to it. It's very heavy-handed, which explains a lot about how the rest of the game feels as well. Forced.

*Sigh.* But you know what the troubling thing is? I can't fully write this game off as bad and call it a day. The side quests, despite taking place in an awful map, are actually interesting for the most part. Some of them were far better than the main quest. I did deeply care about taking care of jobs for the Railroad, for one. Letting me choose my own code name was a fantastic touch, I loved that they called to me specifically as "Fixer," and relied on me to live up to that name as a sort of clean-up crew. All of the synths in the Railroad were great characters as well, they felt like this ragtag group that was Fighting the Good Fight™ despite their clear differences in approaching their overall goals. Desdemona was an imperfect leader, but always felt as though she was trying to do the right thing overall. It was something that the Minutemen desperately needed, especially as a group that was billed from the start of the game as the main faction in the Commonwealth that you're supposed to care about as the protagonist. It's no wonder I sided with the Railroad in the end, they were easily the faction I cared about the most thanks to this characterization. The whole game needed more of that, and it shows a glimpse of what could have been.

A few other locations were also highly standout. The slightly on-edge, grunge feel of Goodneighbor stuck with me for the whole game. I thought the Castle was actually pretty neat, and was easily the most memorable thing for the Minutemen (though that is admittedly a very low bar), and the Glowing Sea, now THAT was some proper game feel. They do manage to stick out in this overall dismal world design, and again show what could have been.

The gunplay is also fairly decent, I have to admit. It takes the FPS elements and pushes them even more than New Vegas, and the care in this part of the game shows. I was never unable to have fun or be challenged during combat. To segue into another element I can't conclude without mentioning, crafting parts for my weapons did take up a large part of my time, and I did enjoy it. Many of the weapons do feel great to use in battle, and all of them feel different enough to justify their existence. The upgrades are the same way, they greatly change the feel and utility of each weapon in a noticeable way.

The crafting overall, however, is the most middlingly mediocre part of the game. In some areas, there's too much of it. There's way too many settlements to even remotely begin to care about. The interface is clunky and organized weird. The electrical system is, in general, silly. But for those two settlements I did built out, it was usually fun to make houses and furnish buildings for my settlers, and to build up enough defenses to keep them safe. Until building houses stopped functioning because pieces were unable to click together and it just wasted my time trying to find parts that worked. The same can be said of the guns, there gets to be a point where there are too many guns to care about so you stop making them better, and there's not enough part variety to make it fun in the long run, but it is nice to have the ability to tinker with weaponry to make better or different versions of what you started with. Eventually it boiled down to a long stock, long barrel, glow sights, a muzzle break, and the best regular receiver for pretty much every weapon I had, but I liked that the other options were there for modification, and that they genuinely did make the weapons handle differently.

Ultimately, Fallout 4 does feel like a game whose heart is in the right place. But it feels as though it's fallen victim to a cavalcade of inherent design flaws that have come to define certain aspects of the series, and instead of improving and innovating, they just left it because the lineage is good enough and there's too much of a precedent at this point. A lot of the problems ultimately boil down to pacing and an inability to convey itself properly. This is compounded by the existence of Emil Pagliarulo, who needs to leave Bethesda immediately, and what feels like a focus not on design quality, but instead on feature quantity. At the end of the day, I wouldn't hate myself for playing more of it, especially because the two major DLC's are pretty fun. But it falls far short of expectations, and it's obvious that there is a rift between what players actually want and what Bethesda thinks they want. Fallout 4 can't be a good game, because it fails to come together as the cohesive experience it should be. And unfortunately, the saddest category of games in existence is the bin in which it now finds itself - the depressing, forgettable world of just being ok.