Wow, this review is great.
The original plan was that each of these vaults would be able to stay in communication with each other until the day when they could all emerge and rebuild the human civilization. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen technical difficulties, communication was lost and each vault was isolated from all of their bretheren.
Admittedly, this was one of the problems with Fallout Tactics. They added this concept of a vault network hub, yet something so amazingly critical to the system was never mentioned in either Fallout or Fallout 2. Yet, you'd think that since the vault had locations of a few vaults around them, there would also be the location of the central and most important vault evar in their computer databases. In fact, even the overseer of Fallout never mentions it, when you think he'd be the guy to know about it if there was supposed to be communications between all the vaults through this hub. You'd think he would have said something along the lines of,
Well, go check Vault 15. If they don't have a spare, then use their computers to talk to Vault 0 and see if there isn't another vault nearby that may have a waterchip, since our communications with them was lost a while ago.
In the first Fallout, you're placed in the boots of a member of one of the isolationist vaults. Your vault, in an effort to preserve yourselves and your way of life, chose to seal yourselves in.
Actually, that wasn't a choice at all, it was part of the overseer's orders. Vault 13 was supposedly a control vault.
As the story goes, a vault filled with military personnel opened themselves and feasted their eyes on a world torn with greed and villainy. Once they got their hands on the technology, they set out to destroy the evils of the land.
Which, of course, wasn't the case in Fallout. The BOS in Fallout merely horded technology and slowly reintroduced it when they thought mankind was ready for it.
Too much in the way of good intentions tends to backfire, and the Brotherhood became the bullies of the world, dispensing their kind of self-righteous justice.
Also not seen in Fallout or Fallout 2.
Everything still has a 50's look and feel, and it all is very homogenous. If it works, don't mess with it!
Except the sprites, of course. The tiles in Fallout Tactics were really good, but the sprites didn't follow the 1950s pulp style at all. The robots were anime-ish, there were not-at-all-1950s vehicles for the BOS, and so on. So, when the sprites don't follow the look, it's hardly homogenous. Sounds to me like this guy just glanced over a Fallout fan site to pick up catch phrases and ran with them to make himself look knowledgable.
Basically, they took the best part of the first two games and expanded on it: the combat.
Eh? I thought the best part of the first two games was the ability to pick and choose how you delt with situations, one method being combat. Even if you only delt with things like combat to solve problems, there's still issues with the translation of combat from the first two games to Fallout Tactics.
Even though some of the missions fall on the same criteria as before (kill 'em all) there are many missions that have a specific goal such as rescuing someone or killing someone specific.
Rescuing someone ends up being
kill 'em all except... and I don't recall any assassination missions.
Some missions are a little linear in the idea that in order to achieve your goal, you need to do this, then that, before you can do the other thing.
Some?
There are 3 modes of play: continuous real-time, turn-based, and a hybrid mode of the two
What?! There was real time, turn based with individual character sequence, and squad sequence turn based.
[in classic turn based] Unfortunately, you can't execute some maneuvers such as hopping fences in this mode.
You can't do that in
any mode, because climbing wasn't implimented in Fallout Tactics period.
[In classic turn based] Also, since the maps are so large, it really drags things out when you're moving your squad around the map where there are no encounters.
What the hell? It's just like Fallout, you're only in turn based movement during combat.
The continuous real-time mode gives you all the special movement options and speeds up the gameplay. In this mode, you simply set your aggression levels and a few other options, and your players will do combat on their own.
1.) It adds no movement options.
2.) You have to use the aggressive setting in turn based as well.
In some cases (like when you've got the enemy pinned behind a rock) it's beneficial to be in this mode, so your troop will pick them off quickly as they pop up from behind their cover.
1.) They'll never pop back up, ever. Once they lay down to avoid getting killed, they stay down forever.
2.) Turn based offers overwatch, which would allow you to pick them off if they stood back up during their turn, assuming they would ever get back up.
The third mode, the hybrid, leaves your troops in real-time until combat begins.
Uhhh.. Yeah. This is how both turn based modes are, actually. I doubt this kid actually played Fallout Tactics in turn based, since he has no idea what he's talking about here. He even continues discussing this mode with this:
The major downside of this is that since the maps are so large, you're forced to move troops that may not be engaged in battle under the same turn-based limitations as the ones that are. The only time you switch to real-time is when all of your troops are out of danger. The synopsis is: you're in turn-based mode most of the time anyway.
Damn. Just.. Damn. Sounds to me like this guy marches one or two guys around the map for long periods of time, then runs in to combat and decides to only then advance the rest of the squad.
