Recent reviews by Miles

Despite my few hours of playing the game, I had a decent time with it so far. Gameplay is easy to get into while still leaving options for you in regards to how you want to battle your enemies be it melee weapons, guns, grenades or your own fists. Story-wise, game holds up to that end of the bargain as well with quite a decent chunk.

TL:DR

Good game, but bad progression with few rewards and micro-transactions are overpriced imo as of 11/24/21. Hopefully they do some improvements to it.

Edit: Campaign's made it more tolerable, but still yikes to paying 10 bucks for like 3 cosmetics in a bundle.

Bethesda's first tap into the Fallout Franchise after the success of Interplay's control over it represents itself as an interesting start for the company, but still needed to be ironed out (Clearly, that never really got fixed either. Looking at you FO4 and 76). I will gave the game some credit for being my first Fallout game and what brought me into the series, despite how "Black and White" choices can be in this game compared to the successor that'd come after.

In short, you play as a Vault Dweller nicknamed "The Lone Wanderer" who's on a quest to search for their father after leaving what you once called home without leaving you anything to know of his whereabouts. Along the way, you run into various threats of the ruined world and a few groups you can side with, if you wish. Unfortunately, the game itself has kind of a weak ending, but thanks to Broken Steel, that's replaced with more of the Brotherhood taking action against the Enclave.

Along with the game, you receive Broken Steel, Operation: Anchorage, Mothership Zeta, The Pitt and Point Lookout as your decently sized expansions (Anchorage being fairly short as it is with little to do, but rewards are okay, I guess) to mess around with....or just download mods from Nexus to expand your experience with additional weapons, quests, items and more.

One of the more pleasing parts of this game for me is the music and gameplay. A mixture of Big Band/Swing and Jazz to accompany you as you slaughter off enemies with a various amount of weapons. Depending on your style, you can go from melee to guns small and large with some having unique variants spread across the wastes. In addition, you can use VATS to help you in a battle for critical shots or to just have an easier time with choosing targets instead of just firing with your crosshair over the enemy. Atmosphere wise? Game can get boring or depressing with it's almost greyish-green skies, radiated water and the corpses of what was once Washington DC left in such a poor state, but it works well for how the world has changed since then.


However, let's get to the negative aspects. One of the biggest problems with this game is the optimization and how the company has chosen to treat it as the years have gone by. When I first received it, I had to install a patch that fixed a few things on Bethesda's part as well as allow my computer to be accepted (At the time, it was a cheap computer with Intel HD Graphics) and that dumb Games for Windows Live thing that died out not too far back. With that now out of the way, the game's once again left in a state where patches or just having to download the damn thing to get it to run to the dismay of some people. Also, this game can tend to get weird with bugs and issues that may require reloading, restarting the game or just console fixes if no mod will do.

All in all, when you can get it to work and remaining functioning, it's not too bad of a game. Is it better than New Vegas? I wouldn't really say so, but it's not too far behind it. I doubt the company can ever really redeem themselves though for any future games regarding Fallout, but at least the previous installments aren't removed from Steam.