Recent reviews by Psy_Commando -=SF-O=-

First, I'd have left a negative review regardless of bethesda's recent moves..

Fallout 4 is the literal definition of an ocean of content with the depth of a puddle..
It looks big and complex on the cover, thanks to the good level/environment design and gimmicks, but really everything feels lackluster and underwhelming in this game. It also provide essentially no new additions over earlier entries in the franchise beyond gimmicks (settlement building, "heavily" customizable weapons) which matter very little in the end.

The plot is literally and frustratingly so, a rehash of fallout 3's plot, without the enclave, and the fun stuff. and its absolutely terrible.. The characters, locations, enemies, and even most weapons are dull for the most part. And I found characters getting duller and duller the more I knew about them.. Story missions(well sidequests too..) feel like chores/filler and mostly consists of really dull shooting galleries for the most part..
I can't really pinpoint what differs from FNV and Fallout 3, but it seems combat got a whole lot more boring. (Gunplay has improved significantly though! Feels a lot better than in vanilla FNV and Fallout 3.)

The player dialogue is braindead, generic and boring. The delivery of the voice actors does nothing to improve on that. It actually may make things worst more often than not.. It often attempts to be funny and fails very hard at it..
The dialog options are poorly labeled, and miseleading, and even though there are "choices" all dialog paths seems to lead to the same replies/results in many cases.. Its as if, they gave player dialogue choices just for the sake of it.

As for the core gameplay, its very similar to Fallout 3's, with a lot of things that FNV improved on left out, except RPG mechanics have been severly gutted/crippled.
Levelling up doesn't feel good at all.. You don't feel like you're progressing. The perk system is essentially not fun.. A huge portion of the perks are somewhat useless. So you'll often end up investing all your perk points into a few select perks throughout all your playthroughs..

Crafting is a grind. And you literally have to haul all the junk you stumble on to craft anything wothwhile. It wouldn't have been such an issue if the inventory system wasn't as bad as it is right now.. Customizing firearms and energy weapons is literally a gimmick.. You can essentially make tweaks to weapons, so they can be used in other niches.. But in practice, if you say make a pipe rifle sniper rifle, you'll find its a waste of ammo, because the actual hunting rifle is better for the job anyways. Same with say the assault rifle or the combat rifle, the most useful mod for a given weapon is the one that just improve on the base weapon, not those that attempt to change its role.. For instance, a slow firing, higher damage per bullet, long range assault rifle is pointless and wastes ammo.. While if you go all-in on firing speed and damage(you can actually have both..) you get something a lot better. But this has for effect of essentially making a lot of modifications useless..
AKA, a lot of the weapon mods that can be made are just not worth it at all..

Also, you're forced to do base building at least once in every playthrough for a really dumb plot device..

Base building is very bad for the most part.. It doesn't even matter how well you build your settlements, they'll always get attacked and can't defend themselves even if you'd setup an array of 60 rocket launcher turrets.. Plus, often the enemies will spawn inside the settlement's walls.. which means defended choke points and walls were kinda useless in the first place.. Also npcs settlers just don't want to cooperate.. They often bug out and don't do their assigned job..

Considering the price was lowered to something less obscene than the original $80 CAD they were asking at launch, I'd recommend to buy this only on sale, and only if you intend to use mods to improve the experience and plot isn't a big thing for you. Otherwise, you might want to avoid it.

I don't even mod this game or even play it that much anymore, but I wanna demonstrate my complete disaproval with the actions that Take2 took against harmless modders, who actually had principles, integrity and respect for Take2. They blamed them for rockstar/take2's inability to fight cheating online, and for the poor architecture holding their multiplayer together.
Buyer beware. I definitnetly wouldn't fund childish and uncalled for behaviors like this.. That is, if I ever have to make the choice of buying a rockstar/take2 game again..

And well, tbh, this game gets kinda boring, and I never really felt it was still worth the $70 CAD asked for.. Saints rows 3 was more fun than this imo.

Great game!
The animations are kinda weird (squatting zombies XD), and the dodge mechanics a bit wonky at time, and its hard to micro-manage all your characters.

But, the characters are alright and they all have some story to them. Combat is fun, tho a bit clunky. (having to aim with the mouse and also slide it up/down to aim for the legs or torso)
And you have a sort of reputation system and can get characters to hate or like you, and recruit them, or shake them down, or enslave them even XD

The AI has been very smart for me so far! Its rare I see AI characters that can actually overrun me, keep themselves alive, and actually manage a base almost on their own! I was kinda impressed when I saw my farmer dude actually plant corn I had just looted and put in a building. I was gonna do that XD

The soundtrack is kind of all over the place, and kinda breaks the mood/immersion. This kind of game benefits from a more coherent calm/ambient music overall, and some more energic tracks during combat. But the tracks in the game appears to be all from different authors and styles.

Building is pretty limited. But sufficient.
Same with weapons.

And the developper is very dedicated! (tho the game could use a bit more fleshing out on a few elements that feel barebone/unfinished)

To sum it up, I feel like its fun and worth a try!

I think overall its a good game! I got it on sale for $43.

Pros:
* I love the little touches and the refinements and addition they've made to the EU gameplay.
* It reminds me a lot of XCOM: Apocalypse in a way.
* I love what they did with the soldiers customization too.
* The story feels a lot more interesting than the first game!
* And a ton more!

Cons:
* The pacing, It gets a tiny bit too overwhelming at times. But not really always in difficulty. My main beef is the way you're bombarded with notifications on-screen on the world map.. It gets really hard to manage. I think its in part because of the interface.
* The mission timers. The main issue I have is that, they're a bit unfair at times? If you're one tile before the objective when the timer runs out, you're automatically dead. It just doesn't really feels right.. I can't remember any games using timers as motivator that had a really satisfying result with them tbh..
* The game seems to runs like ass unless you run it as "borderless window" instead of "fullscreen".
* The accuracy of the weapons in the game is a bit wonky and not really intuitive.. But it feels a bit better than EU. And a shot's accuracy is explained in details.
* Gatekeepers.. Their splash attack range is insanely large, and they take a lot of punishment.. Triggering them or not can make the difference between failling or succeding a VIP rescue, since their attack ignore accuracy and armor and can kill a VIP almost 2 times over in a single shot, and gravely wound a lot of your troopers at the same time.. And it also resurects corpse so they fight you.. A bit too overpowered...
* I guess the bosses from the DLC alien hunter is worth mentioning. They get a free turn each action any of your soldier takes.. And they got about ~6 times as much health as your best troopers. Literally, their health bar is on several lines because they have so much HPs.. And they tend to spawn on the worst possible mission.. Aka, defending an object, or vip etc.. And they just start pounding happily at the object/vip and you can't even move close because it has already destroyed it before you ended your first or second turn if you're unlucky and it spawns in sight of your starting area..

Though overall, I had lots of fun with this game. And its definitely worth playing if you like turn based strategy games like that!

Out of all the vehicle building games around I played a lot of (Space Engineers, Empyirion Galactic Survival, Starmade) I have to say, this one is my favorite.

You can do so much!
At the time I wrote this review, you could do: Ships, Hydrofoils, Hovercrafts(Well, technically. But there's no hovercraft skirt parts right now, just thrusters and propellers), Submarines(those are a bit trickier to get working AI wise), Aircrafts, Airships, Spacecrafts, Helicopters(Those are tricky to make too), and they just added land vehicles(Still rough around the edges, and not very usable in combat, but some fun can be had with those already).
Or, you can get creative and just abuse the physic engine to make weird contraptions :B

The game relies mainly on AI to control the vehicles/structures you build in the game. The AI is still a bit wonky, especially path finding and collision avoidance, but its possible to minimize the problems using long range weapons and spreading your ships around in formations. However, it'll always find a way to use whatever you give it..
Another nice thing is that, your creation can be controlled in battle using a strategic map view, which makes things much easier.

Manual controls are available, but, right now they're very limited, convoluted, and not very practical for anything that's more than a simple basic ship. And even then, there's some weirdness with it. However, I'm pretty sure the devs are definitely going to fix those in a way or another before release.

The build mode is probably one of my favorite part of this game. I'm talking about Keyboard mode. Its really efficient and handy most of the time. Most people seems to say it has a high learning curve, but personally I figure it out under 2 hours, after watching the video tutorial. And I usually have issues with different control schemes in games. (Actually, the vehicle steering controls are more confusing than this tbh)
Sure its a bit intimidating at first, but try messing around with it, not building anything serious. Your first ship will probably be a complete piece of junk that keeps sinking on its own, or capsizing but try watching getting started tutorial videos by Irelan gaming for example, you'll understand a lot better how to make things work. Or you can also just spawn ships/vehicles from the campaign and take them apart and see how they managed to make them float/fly/etc and work.

One thing I love particularly here is the way you can customize almost every system you build with attachements and extensions. Nearly all systems are multi-blocks. And not just in a quantitative way, like Starmade for example(AKA more blocks == more powerful) Building large systems without powerful enough support systems to back them up will yield a pretty innefective system. It'll still work, but you could do better use of your space.
For instance, you can build a huge engine, but it'll drink so much fuel at mid and low RPMs compared to several smaller engines that turn on and off to meet demands that you'll get a very fuel hungry design with a very weak spot. And well, there's also overheating to take into account, but its pretty manageable, even though radiators are pretty shoddy right now.
Of course, you can do that with way more things than just engines! Weapons systems, propellers, etc.. And probably more in the future. You can build canons from the magazine to the tip of the barrels. You assemble each parts together to get the best out of the space you have, while making sure a single shell won't find a way to hit your magazines and blow everything up! And you can customize your shells, build gauss canons, add timed/proximity detonation and a lot more!

The recent weapon and armor rebalance did a pretty solid job at balancing out the game. AKA you can't sink a big floating metal castle ship armored with 2 to 5m of armor, with an army of tiny ships with 20mm chainloaded AP guns anymore :P
Some things are still a bit overpowered though, and some things definitely need some work. Namely UI, engine and power mechanics, shields, player weapons, land vehicles, space vehicles and the physics involved with going to space.

But, from what the devs teased, there's a lot of great improvements coming soon. And even in this state, the game is a ton of fun. Playing the campaign and designing your ships, or refitting any enemy ships you manage to capture, sending massive fleets against an enemy's forces is already tons of fun IMO.

The devs are overall doing amazing work with this game! They listen to feedback, keeps asking questions and mentioning what they're working on in the forums, and release patches and content regularly. (During early access at least)

After Fallout 3's so-so release (at least I always thought it could have been better, regarding Fallout lore, gamplay and several other gameplay elements, like weapons.. ), I wasn't expecting much from another installement in this series.

I'm glad to say I was mostly wrong !

Fallout New Vegas made tremendous improvements over Fallout 3. Sure all the old bugs since TES:Oblivion are still encountered in this massively modified version of the Gamebryo engine. But, the community fixed the more annoying ones that the devs wouldn't fix!

Speaking of which, when you get this game, you want to mod it absolutely !
Out of the box, the game gets crap performances, crashes all the time, looks ugly, has some annoying quirks. But, with a few select mods to address those things, you can have a mostly vanilla experience, without the nasty parts !

Not to mention tweaking the settings files is of upmost importance !
Out of the box the game ignores most multi-threading features, and this makes the game choke a lot. But once those are turned on, it makes a world of differences!

And of course, if you play this game, you have to disable mouse accel, or you're gonna want to hit your head on your desk repeatedly!

I think those are the ones to turn it off, just go to your My Documents/My Games/FalloutNV/Fallout.ini file and change those :

Find iPresentInterval, and change it to this (disable fnv's terrible vsync and mouse lag):
iPresentInterval=0

Then put the following under "[controls]" if they aren't there already, and just change the value of those already there :
fForegroundMouseAccelBase=0.0000
fForegroundMouseAccelTop=0.0000
fForegroundMouseBase=0.0000
fForegroundMouseMult=0.0000
bBackground Mouse=0

Then, some people recommend to set the Fallout.ini file to read-only, so that its not overwritten automatically by the game. Because it likes to do so when it feels like it..

Other stuff over there : http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_8.html

Must have apps/mods with this game:
- New Vegas Configator (allows to tweak tons of settings not available in the crappy launcher, with explanations!)
- Nexus Mod Manager (manage mods and much more, really simple and useful even with just a few mods. You'll need to use the custom launch option to lauch FNV4GB though, but its really easy )
- FNV4GB (allows the game to use PAE so that it can use 4GB of memory, and won't crash randomly when too much stuff is in the ram.. I recommend to use it even without a lot of mods or texture packs! )
- NVSE (script extender, necessary for most of the things listed below)
- NVAC (crash preventer, recently, it works so damn well, that I haven't had a crash that wasn't my fault in a long long while !)
- CASM (auto-save manager, works wonder to avoid losing progress if it ever crashes)

Suggestions:
- New Vegas Stutter Remover (it can help, or not. its really up to you. But you'll probably have to mess around with the settings file to get it to work. so its entirely optional)

There are many more, but this is just a review, and there are far better guides out there !

I should have written this long ago !
This game is much more complex and rewarding than it looks. And do not play only against bots. If I had played online early on I wouldn't have shelved that game since I bought it on release with the orange box !

In this game, killing an enemy isn't as simple as shooting a burst of bullets at him. Each classes has its own task, counter class, strenght and weaknesses. And this means, teamwork is neccessary to win against a balanced and competent team.

Also, unlocks in this game are random, and most of them are sidegrades of the main weapons. Unlike in most other games where unlocks means insta-win..

The only thing that really pisses me off about this game is the loads of bugs and crashes that it constantly has. Theres also the way it "compensates" for lag. Basically, the laggiest player of the two wins, because he's acting in the past while you're acting in the future.

Think of it like when in Back To The Future, old Biff goes in the past to give his young self insta-win tips for the future. Well in this case old Biff is TF2 and young Biff is mr laggy player. And you, well, lets say you're McFly or something..

Anyways, what happens is this. You see this laggy heavy spinning up his gun. By reflex, you run behind cover. And when you think you're safe, pow !! You're dead, and mr laggy heavy is happy.
What happened is that since he's lagging, his game is several milliseconds late on what's really going on. And to compensate for that, they "rewind" time only for him, on his computer. So they're really experiencing what really happened a few milliseconds ago.

The thing is, whatever that laggy player is doing in his "parralell reality" you will never saw him do it ever, and you will never see it coming. You can't take any evasive actions or anticipate it, It will just happen. And the only chance you got, is if the other sucks real bad, or if you saw him first, and even then its not sure.

So much fun ! I love the music in this game !
Try having a critical hit on an enemy and watch the gory over the top animations :D
Its a little hard at first to grasp how to use the various abilities and items, reading the mannual a little will probably help, like with most games from the 90s.

Try making a character with 1 or 2 of intelligence ! It makes the game much more challenging, and even more hilarious.

Its like the first game, but even better ! Now you're a tribal instead of a vault dweller, which make for some pretty damn funny discussion with npcs !

You get a ton more guns, cities, sidequests and crazy adventures, you get a car too ! And you can shoot kids with a rocket launcher ! You'll get labelled as child killer though. The companions have been overhauled in this game. And you can even get dogmeat back in a speacial random encounter !

And try having a max strength character score a critical on an enemy with a sledge hammer, and prepare to laugh at how far he slides on the ground, before suddenly bleeding out.

Its a great game ! It gets needlessly scary pretty often, mostly when you go in old abandonned buildings or bunkers. Also you may want to inform yourself on those enemies : controllers, bloodsuckers, and poltergeist. Or prepare to have an heart attack ! This game loves to throw enemies at you out of nowhere, mostly in missions related to the main plot though.

Besides that, the game is a big sandbox. Which is great for getting better weapons. You can just raid a bandit camp, take out lone stalkers, or if you're feeling brave, attack one of the big factions to get their often much better gear. But don't charge in with your pistol and only your clothes to protect you. And they will hate you after that !

Also, you don't get a tutorial or a mention how to do that, but you can actually equip artefacts and gain effects, good and bad. just look in you inventory for a serie of square empty boxes and drag and drop an artefact on it. (not animal parts though)