Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout 4 is everything a fan of open-world role playing games could want: big, bleak, and beautiful. With an immense map, a fascinating story, and a wealth of gameplay options to make each player’s world their own, Fallout 4 is easily Bethesda’s most ambitious title to date, and it shows in nearly every aspect of the game just how much attention to detail went into the title.
The game takes place in Boston. You play as a survivor of the last world war, where atomic bombs have wiped out most of human civilization. Luckily, you fled to vault 111 right before the bombs hit, a pre-war bunker that froze you and your family for over 200 years. When you wake up, you emerge out of the vault into a lifeless irradiated wasteland where violent raiders roam freely and survivors cling to life.
It is when you leave the vault where these games truly shine. Although you are given a fairly straight forward objective in the beginning—to find your lost son—you’re immediately able to go wherever you choose in the wasteland, picking up quests and fighting hideous monsters. Although the main quest line only takes about 15 hours to complete, there are easily hundreds of hours worth of things to do in Fallout 4, nearly all of them filled with fully voice-acted story.
That’s not to say Fallout 4 is all story. When negotiations break down, one can always trust the alternative of combat, and what a wonderfully violent alternative it is. What felt like a very inaccurate and stilted first-person combat system in previous games really turns around in Fallout 4. The VATS targeting system also makes a return, slowing down combat and letting you target individual body parts. Though in previous games it felt like a crutch for poor combat, here Bethesda remodels the system to work hand-in-hand with the manual shooting.
Nearly every aspect of Fallout 4 is similarly improved upon from previous instalments. In other Fallout games the maps have felt overly similar and drab (it is the nuclear apocalypse, after all), but now the commonwealth feels vibrant and distinct in all its interconnected areas.
The story, too, is much more engaging than previous Fallout games, and fans of the series will appreciate the ability to choose factions to side with throughout the game, rather than being funnelled down a narrow path like in Fallout 3. The art direction is also superb, and Fallout’s neo-50s aesthetic really shines through Bethesda’s clearly massive production value. Although the game is also rife with glitches, these glitches feel much fewer and farther between than previous games in the series, and only once in the 70 hours taken for this review did the game crash.
It’s hard to figure out exactly what kind of gamer wouldn’t like Fallout 4. It’s easily one of the most impressive games to come out this year, and anybody who appreciates open-world freedom should pick it up. This reviewer, for one, can’t wait to play it some more.
