Did it not age well? Was it ever good? What's the consensus? I didn't find any recent or general impression threads about the game.
I love Tactics (because amusingly enough it was my first Fallout and it's pretty as fuck) but as a tactical game it's deeply flawed.
As everyone said there are two main problems: one, the basic Fallout combat system isn't that good - even if they tried to spice it up with more fine control - and the RT/TB hybrid system , typical of late 90ies games, is a ungodly mess.
Vehicles are also poorly implemented, despite being
theoretically a great addition (one just has to check how they mangled the tank that requires a
ungodly amount of effort to be practically useless). I have fond memories of using the buggy as a rocket launcher platform, even if it's
incredibly suboptimal. It doesn't help that in typical Fallout way the enemy evolution is, despite effort, incredibly predictable and almost by rote
- Small arms (standard raiders, beastmasters)
- Big arms (Supermutants)
- Energy Weapons (Robots)
Everything else is pretty much suboptimal or useless.
They
tried to spice it up with the Gauss weaponry (included the frankly hilarious Gauss Gatling that you'll never have enough ammo to properly run), but it still feels on rails at times. On-map encounters outside of missions are boring.
I still like it a
lot. Tactics has some very nicely designed setpieces missions and quite the variety of recruits (if you don't go full genocide). You can build some weird stuff and some missions truly feel like "monster of the week" in Fallout form, from recovering the power cell under the tribal village (with the caveat that you're going to melt the village if you activate the security system) to the Beastmaster lair in which you can ally with the Deathclaw Queen to the robot piece recovery quest. Most of them are
clumsy at times but there's enough variety to keep me interested, even if the combat is too chaotic to be properly controlled and ends up often in gunning down foes running at you. There's enough
weird gun porn to make me like it (apparently AK platforms in Chicago run on 7,62x51 NATO) and the graphic design still holds up great, with the bots having that KKND2 feel to them.
It's not a game that will blow your mind nor a great tactical game like, 7,62 HC or the like, but it's a fun romp in the Fallout universe without much lore rape. It feels like they gave a shit and tried their best.