so who is going to review this shit?
Fallout 4: good game, bad RPG
http://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-4-good-game-bad-rpg/
See, I disagree that it's even a good game. It's actually quite mediocre and quickly becomes boring. I was going to write my comments, but decided to turn them into a review - admittedly a half-assed one compared to the effort I'm sure others would put into it.
Lambchop's Ass-Halved Pre-Darth Roxxor, Pre-Pre-Vault Dweller Fallout 4 Review:
Ah, Fallout 4. When Todd Howard first ran for game developer of the year with Fallout 3, he promised to completely soil what was left of the Fallout franchise and he more than delivered. Yellow supermutants, some idiotic plot about Liam Neeson, blah blah blah. We all knew the point was to make Fallout fanboys butthurt and butthurt they were. But the question was: could he possibly make a follow up to that? With the bar set so low, was there a way he could somehow disappoint the new generation of Fallout fanboys he helped to create as well as the old? Well, if the 5/10 MetaCritic User score is anything to go by, he has succeeded brilliantly.
Graphics
Looks vary between decent (overall design of the power armor) and ugly (most of the textures up close). It's pretty clear they just recycled the same old engine again. There are no reflections and the usual bad Bethesda animations abound. Not to mention all the bugs - nothing says immersion like people teleporting around in front of you or floating above the ground while swimming through the air. There are some nice implementations of retro art in the vaults and the power armor though and the game's intro shows off a lot of prewar 50's retro stuff that is kind of cool for the 5 minutes you actually spend looking at it.
Immurshun
Verisimilitude was thrown out the window in Fallout 3, sure, but I've never ceased to be amazed that Bethesda games are praised for their "immersion" when no semi-conscious human will never be immersed in a post-apocalyptic setting with things like never ending pistols, magic potatoes that help you sneak better and the general, glaring stupidity of the plot and characters. The plot, by the way, is extremely weak and takes a lot from a certain 80s movie that feels quite out of place in the Fallout universe. The characters all feel as one-dimensional as if they were something out of a fan fic and aren't very interactive. Find a secret mutant lab? Well, you can't confront it's owner with it. Want to ask personal questions that should be obvious and important to characters? Nine times out of ten, you can't. You just get the standard "here's a handful of lines of dialog and maybe a quest, now go away".
Talky-Talky
The dialog system in general feels all kinds of broken. You can accidentally wander away and you can't skip the bizarre banter lines, so you have to click twice just to initiate a conversation. The dialog wheel is completely pointless and even worse than the Bioware implementation it was copied from. Most conversations are extremely linear and getting mislead into picking an option that meant something complete different than the two-word description led you to believe only adds insult to injury. Since charisma and a handful of perks are the only things that affect dialog now that the skills have been removed, you would think that Bethesda would have had time to improve on the actual writing of the dialog and the characters, but they actually feel more flat than ever.
Walky-Walky
There's really not much that's good about this game even as a "hiking sim" either. At first there seems to be a lot to find, but ammo, crafting components, weapons and armor are all so plentiful, there just isn't much reason to scavenge for stuff. Why every office, hospital and gas station filling cabinet is packed full of ammo and duct tape is beyond me. There's certainly no reason to go looking for an interesting quest, interesting NPCs or interesting fights because there are none. There's not much reason to explore either because the world actually feels quite small compared to Skyrim. This may be because Skyrim's map was a bit larger and also because Fallout 4's map feels much flatter, so it is easier to travel in a straight line from one location to another. For example it takes about 9 minutes to run/sprint from the starter vault at the top of the map directly south to the bottom of the map.
Combat: Unskilled
The removal of skills is one of the big things that even Fallout 3 fans are mad about. Now, when I heard that the skills would be removed from Fallout 4, part of me rolled my eyes, but the other part said, "Finally.". Bethesda's implementations of fighting skills have always seemed very broken to me. Whether it was Skyrim or in Fallout 3, their game clearly wanted to be an action RPG, but the skills seemed to be watering it down, making it less enjoyable as an action game, while the action elements made it feel less enjoyable as an RPG. I assumed that when Bethesda removed the skills, they'd put a better focus on the combat and at least make a decent FPS. I was wrong.
Sadly, combat feels fairly similar to Fallout 3. It doesn't rise to the adrenaline pumping action of a real First-Person-Shooter, instead you are still stuck whittling away at HP bars with your choice of peashooter. The only thing removing skills seems to have accomplished is to rob the player of a sense of progress. The main sense of progress you feel will now come from upping your stats, getting better guns and improving them. Guns are fairly plentiful though and you get a minigun and power armor at the start of the game. The crafting system can really improve your gear though and there are more powerful variants of the power armor you can find.
Crafting, by the way, is something Bethesda actually added to the game and can also significantly increase the damage and utility of certain weapons. You can attach silencers to some guns, change the ammo types of others - there are actually quite a decent amount of options.
Combat: Been There Done That
Enemies are plentiful, but certain enemies seem to pop up over and over making combat monotonous at times. The "feral ghouls" for example are basically zombies and seem to litter the greater Boston area, as do the super-mutants. Combat against the same enemies over and over feels like a chore, especially when the story isn't anything to write home about as it is. Perhaps this was also due to my having killed a deathclaw at the start of the game. Kinda downhill from there.
If You Build It They Will Come
The base building game is very janky and feels tacked on. Often things don't snap together correctly and unless you are very creative and spend time at it, most of the time you are going to end up building things that are half floating in midair or just don't look right. Your bases rarely get attacked, especially if they have a high defense rating, so I really don't know that it's worth spending too much time on constructing the perfect
post-apocalyptic pillow fort base unless you are just bored. Building up the economies of your settlements is a way to make a lot of money in the game though.
Enter The Console
It deserves mentioning that the game's PC interface feels like a console port. From strange, illogical design decisions like having to press different keys to confirm everything to the cumbersome user interface for inventory and stats, everything was obliviously cut and pasted from one platform to the other with seemingly little concern for PC users. "Mods will fix it", I suppose.
So Should I Buy This Schlock?
In my opinion there are only two reasons you should play this game: Either you have some autistic ambition to mod it into something more enjoyable (even though you will fail because autistic people usually end up making mods that are very complex, but not necessarily very fun) or you are bored and really want to play around with the power armor for an hour or two. Even if you do buy it though, I highly recommend waiting until a Steam sale when it's $5. Not because $50 is a lot of money, but because it is far more money than Fallout 4 is worth.
All that said, I really love the game. I had fun and that's what matters. It's one of those games whose whole is greater than the some of its parts. 10/10 GOTY.
edit:
Infinitron DarkUnderlord If you want to, you can use this for the front page since we don't have anything else right now. I tried to make it as neutral-positive as possible.
