Fallout (PC) - Reviews

(3.8)

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19.2.2019

Fallout is a mixed bag for me; as much as aspects of it – the bleak, foreboding atmosphere for one – are timeless other elements definitely lag behind and drag it down as a whole, so that as much as I’d recommend it in the final analysis, that’s a recommendation based more on upon the world you carve your story into than anything you actually do gameplay-wise.In case you’ve woken from a lengthy coma and the first thing you’ve done is inexplicably check out reviews for old CRPGs, the basic setup for the Fallout series goes something like this: after nuclear war generally soured everyone’s prospects for maintaining healthy outdoor lifestyles, a select chunk of the human race was sealed away in underground vaults.Over time, and for a variety of reasons, some of these opened up; in the case of Fallout 1, the reason your vault door creaks agape is because the computer chip in your water purifier is fried, leaving the whole vault with a scant 150 days of clean water left before no one has anything to wash their balls in. fearing a vault full of sweaty ballsacks, you are ejected into the irradiated wasteland to procure a new water chip and save everyone from a slow, lingering asphyxiation at the wrinkly hands of unwashed ball musk. You’re given a hint that one may be found at a vault to the east, but beyond that, you’re pretty much left to your own devices to infer the information you need from the world around you. One point of immediate contention folk may have with the game is the timer you’re under. In truth, it’s very lenient, but there’s no way you can really know what that means until you play the game for yourself. I got the chip with over 100 days left, and I wasn’t exactly sprinting for it either – I took my time and did a few sidequests here and there, but…yeah, until you sit down after the fact and can actually contextualise how much time that 150 days actually is, you do feel a little under duress. Still, there is ample time to take in the world around you. This is – by incalculable light years – the part of the game I love most. It’s a world somehow simultaneously sun-baked yet dingy and rusted; shanty towns sat in a scorched desert, built for utility as opposed to décor. Markets and commerce continuing in the heart of gutted cities, merchants sheltering in the shadow of wreckage. Vaults deserted but for the mutated beasts picking the last scraps of carrion off corpses long since dead. For all the primitivism of the engine at work here, the pixels are superbly detailed and flawlessly evoke a world clawing itself back from the brink. I might be alone in this, but I think the graphical style has aged nicely - about the only thing I’d fault it for is the tendency for items to blend in to the background unless you position the cursor over them with surgical precision. The soundtrack too – Jesus Christ, what a soundtrack. It’d be awesome for the ominous swell of the necropolis theme alone, but even as a total package it’s such an oppressive, uneasy body of music. It’s never brash, opting instead for more subtle, often droning soundscapes which add an unreal, engrossing edge to the aged, degraded environments you find yourself in. The story you weave through this brilliantly realised place is variable, and even if the choices you make aren’t always as open-ended as you might hope, they do add up to give you a plethora of differing endings if you should happen to play the game differently. It does go beyond what amounts to a hunt for plumbing supplies, and you get the option to influence the world around you through your interactions with different factions you meet on your travels. It’s great insofar as it gives you more to do, and allows you more options in putting your stamp on the fate of the wasteland, but a lot of the side quests are a bit less fleshed out than I thought they would be. For example, early on, you’ll find a place called “Junktown”. There’s an ongoing powerstruggle between what I suppose passes for the mayor and an unscrupulous casino boss – you get to choose who you side with and as a result what ultimately becomes of the town. The thing is, it’s essentially a binary decision between two characters who you spend so little time with that they barely pass as characters. One is quite clearly a bad guy, and the other isn’t – it’s not a problem you become invested in half so much as it is an early opportunity to choose what you want your karma to look like. I couldn’t tell you a thing about what these characters are like beyond what they are (mayor and casino owner). And that goes for a lot of the game – there weren’t any characters that I found as enveloping as the atmosphere was (but for one or two, maybe) and whilst the writing itself was generally pretty good, with some excellent individual dialogue moments, I didn’t really find myself invested in anyone besides, perhaps, my dog. Who was killed. Horrifically. I have given up trying to explain to my partner why I keep crying in my sleep.Which brings me to the flaws I had with the game, and I do want to make it clear that I really, REALLY like this game, and so whilst I might mention a lot of stuff here, none of it ever came within spitting distance of the perpetual role-playing boner I had whilst playing this. Even so, this game was infuriating in places – take the combat for example. It’s a turn based action point system; everything you do within combat consumes these points, once you’re out of them, it’s someone else’s turn, so on and so forth. At best, it stretches to the level of unobjectionable busywork, at worst, it’s outright soporific. On paper, it promises to allow for tactical depth – do you fire twice, doubling your chances for an all-important critical hit, or do you retreat for cover to use a stimpack? (for example). In practice though, the game rarely facilitates this type of tactical play. Most of your engagements are a laborious back and forth between you and your target taking potshots at one another until RNG dictates one of you bite it first, because you often don’t have the cover to duck behind even if you have remaining time units to reach it after taking a shot. Often you’ll just fire and end your turn. If you’re fighting a melee enemy, the sum total of your grand strategy is: fire, then move back a few steps. Rinse and repeat. Functionally, your grand plans for engaging deathclaws are the same ones you’ll use for rats. Even if you do find yourself in circumstances where you can use your brain in combat, it can still turn into a drawn out affair, even with the combat speed ratcheted up to its highest. There’s a bit in the game where you can – if you choose – liberate a town from the ravenous clutches of it’s supposed protectors. A huge battle erupts, in which the beleaguered townsfolk throw off the crooked talons of their oppressors. It’s stirring and evocative; or it would be, if you didn’t have to sit there doing nothing whilst every single one of 20+ NPCs takes their turn, one after the other for minutes at a time. The RNG can irritate too. I love Xcom, so I know well how capricious a mistress RNG can be, but here, because there’s only you and the game is done If you die, it can really turn into a pain in the balls. The thing is that because every turn stands a chance of getting a critical hit, it means that you can be playing well and simply get unlucky and die instantly with nothing you can do besides hope you saved within the last 10 minutes. I do get why they went this route, combat would be even more like busywork if you were guaranteed a hit but it leads to situations like the following: there’s a mission where you have to clear out a mother deathclaw. It’s a melee enemy, so you fire and move back. Try force it to use action points in movement it could otherwise put into attacks. Thing is, it has enough hit points to be able to sustain a lot of firepower, so the battle turns into one where you both stand a half decent chance of a critical hit because you’re both attacking a lot. It killed me twice, then I killed it, using identical technique, but this time, the dice rolled in my favour. There’s no strategic depth to a victory like that, and it means that your success can hinge more on prior preparation (i.e. equip your best armour and guns – not exactly deep) and luck than any in-battle stratagems you may have had in mind. On the plus side, I do love some of the death animations. Also, on the subject of superficial depth, there’s the character creation sheet. You’d think from a glance that it held a wealth of roleplaying potential for you to be any type of character you want, and you wouldn’t be wrong precisely, but the way the game world is designed means that a great deal of otherwise coherent character builds don’t work well within the context of the game. Your charisma stat for example has barely anything to do in game. Most of the perks available (you can apply two at the start of the game) are pretty “meh” apart from a small handful that are good enough to be basically mandatory (Gifted raises all 7 of your base stats - what the game refers to as the “S.P.E.C.I.A.L SYSTEM” – by another point, and is likely the best perk in the entire game for literally every build). Even the skills, whilst there are a decent amount of them, aren’t as versatile as might be thought – spec into small guns early on, energy weapons from mid-late game, and put a few into speech, a few in repair, and you’ll be fine for 90% of what Fallout 1 will throw at you. In a nutshell, the game isn’t variable enough for the majority of character builds you might want to make to be competitive compared to what boils down to a silver tongued gun nut. There are other issues I have with the game, but few that I would say actually impacted my enjoyment the way the combat did; the UI is a little on the clunky side, admittedly, but I wasn’t too concerned about that. You will have to take your own notes too because the game – even when it does record a quest (for many quests it doesn’t even do that much) – will not record any details about that quest. Find vital info about a quest in progress? Better hope your writing is neat, because the game isn’t bothered about any of that. I knew that going in, so I was fine because I kept a notepad on hand, but if you don’t you’ll likely find sections of this to be an opaque, exasperating slog as you trudge all over the place because you can’t possibly remember everyone you need to talk to and everywhere you need to go and everything you need to do once you’ve got there. As a final aside, there’s one or two moments during the game where you can irreparably screw yourself if you make the wrong choice. You should be saving often anyway, but still, old school design sensibilities that don’t hold your hand are all well and good until the game starts punishing you for screw-ups that you had no earthly way of knowing were screw-ups until you actually screwed up.So yeah, when I say Fallout is a mixed bag, I do mean it, but that said, if I were asked whether or not I recommended it, I’d steal your kneecaps so you couldn’t stand up until I saw you play it. It gives you such a compelling plot within a game world that hooks you from the outset and never lets go until the last chapter in your character’s story is written, with an almost unparalleled atmosphere even 20+ years on. Clunky combat mechanics be damned, in the grand scheme of things Fallout is a mesmerising experience if you find yourself in the market for an old school CRPG. It’s no wonder this series has progressed on to being a multi-million selling behemoth of a game franchise when it’s baby steps were this accomplished. So give fallout a shot; it’s unabashedly a game of its era, but the ambience of the wasteland has no sell-by date, and if you can stomach some of it’s missteps you’ll find an absolute wealth of enjoyment here.