On My Shelves: Fallout 4

 

As I had rated both of its predecessors – Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas quite highly, one can imagine that Fallout 4 had a high bar to clear in order to rate as well as the preceding installments of the series.

Fortunately, it clears the bar with room to spare.

Like the rest of the series, Fallout 4 is set in a world where the Retro-Future of the 1940s came true: nuclear-powered cars for everyone, household robots, shining-steel and glowing-tube SUPER SCIENCE inventions brought a true golden age. And it then crosses that with the 1950s Commie Paranoia future, so that ultimately the Final War was fought with nuclear weapons, power armor, and even Giant Robots as well as the more standard battlefield war machines.

And you, the Player Character, find yourself walking the destroyed wastelands after Apocalypse, a 1950s nuclear wasteland After The End. Will you be a monster, or a savior?

Previous installments made the PC – the Lone Wanderer, the Courier, the Vault Dweller, etc. – a resident of the area which had been destroyed two centuries before. In Fallout 3, this was the Washington, DC area, while in Fallout: New Vegas it was the American Southwest centered around the Las Vegas area. In all of them, you're something of a blank slate, given some background and a general "main quest" to follow; Fallout 3 had the Vault Dweller trying to catch up with their father to find out why he'd suddenly left their Vault, and Fallout: New Vegas had the more personal quest of finding why someone had almost killed you for what you were carrying.

Fallout 4 puts a fascinating twist on this concept: your character was a resident of the Boston region before the war; you play through a background section of the game which shows how you end up in suspended animation until emerging two hundred and ten years later, knowing only two things: your spouse (for you were married) is dead, and the people who killed him have taken your son, your only child.

You will find them. And you will decide what price they will pay.

But this central plotline only serves to drag you headlong into the chaotic, dangerous setting of the Commonwealth – the metropolitan area of Boston and environs – where no fewer than four major forces are, or will soon be, vying for control of the Commonwealth and all its secrets: The Minutemen, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Railroad, and the mysterious Institute.

All of the other traditional elements of Fallout are present in profusion: the Zeerust-studded remnants of the Retro-Future, the monstrous mutated creatures, the ability to tinker with and improve weapons and armor, the small bands of raiders or honest citizens who can be foes or allies, and so on. To this, Bethesda added more civilization-oriented components; for example, helping build up the community you start in, and other communities, assists you and others in multiple ways. You're given the ability to help communities get food and water, build better structures, create beds, generate power, and defend themselves, and the communities both reward you and keep giving you more opportunities to assist.

The political tightrope that one ends up having to walk can be quite gripping – although one of my primary complaints is that the storyline makes three of the four factions too inflexible to be reasonably worked with (each in different areas); it is as far as I know impossible to work out a reasonable peace with any two of the three factions other than the Minutemen (who are an exception primarily because you, personally, get to build them back into a significant faction).

For a Fallout game, there's a fair amount of personal interaction – though nowhere near as much as for Dragon Age II or, even more so, Dragon Age Inquisition which I must review later. You can develop relationships with various people throughout the game and these relationships carry different perks with them as well as the personal satisfaction of having achieved this level of connection with the characters.

The controls haven't been changed much from the prior games – a good thing, in my opinion. It does have the same flaw as Skyrim in that while you can go into the water and wander around in it, you can't fight anything in the water, while things can attack you in the water. This could be argued to make some sense if said characters are basically naked but for a knife, but makes much less sense when the character in question is in full, sealed, fully-armed power armor and has melee as well as ranged weapon options.

As with the prior installments, though, some of my favorite pieces of the game have to do with its retro-entertainment features. None of these was more entertaining than the Silver Shroud storyline, where you can – if you so choose – actually take on the identity of the Shadow-like pulp hero in the midst of the Commonwealth!

The DLC (Downloadable Content, or add-ons) for Fallout 4 have also been excellent. Far Harbor is the best – a huge expansion, with its own large, overarching plotline, and multiple sidequests, giving you access to another entire section of the world of Fallout. The others give access to new construction options and usually also include some form of accompanying adventure; the Mechanist plotline was very entertaining.

Overall, this has been one of my favorite videogame purchases. If the chance for heroics (or exploitation) in a Retro-flavored apocalyptic world appeals at all, you can't go wrong with Fallout 4!