Ah, Fallout. My favorite series in gaming. Fallout 4 does not disappoint. They gave the graphics a needed upgrade along with the shooting mechanics. The usual Fallout charm is still there and in full display, lots of beautiful, varied scenery to explore and plenty of fun characters to pal around with. I do enjoy how the companions interject dialogue into even the quest conversations. The voiced protagonist was fine with me, I've never been a fan of silent protagonists. I do however miss the more complex dialogue trees. All in all, I have spent way too many hours playing this game scouring it all and building up the various settlements.

For some of the negatives, I kinda miss the karma system, not enough that it spoiled the experience. I liked being able to choose your side, ala New Vegas, but found the Minutemen story-line sorta lacking, like Bethesda only included it as a last resort story-line if you failed the others. Course after you find your son, I felt the narrative lost a direct focus as you had accomplished the big goal. My big sticking point concerning the story is the ending. I miss the personalized endings for each faction (like Goodsprings, Primm, & the NCR's fate)

And this may be hard to describe, but I think the settlement building system did kill some of the oddity in this Fallout. Where you would usually find wacky little side quests in towns like Andale, Republic of Dave, or Novac instead you just find another settlement to build up. I miss those unique odd missions which have been replaced by MMORPG style "go here, kill this" repeatable missions.

Well, I finished Fallout 4 today. I started playing it in late 2018 and, according to Steam, I played it for 185 hours (although the in-game count is higher than that). So I kind of feel disingenuous giving it three stars. But that still feels right to me.

There's so much in the game and so much of it is just incredible fun. The overall story is pretty good; there's a fair bit of variety to the game. But it inherits a lot of the missteps of previous games while also adding some new ones.

The PipBoy interface is incredible bad; a huge step down from both Skyrim and New Vegas. The whole thing feels like it was just ported straight from consoles with no thought as to how it would work with mouse and keyboard on a PC. The details of the interface are pretty rough too. There's tabs I don't think I've ever looked at, but the ones I use the most (map, inventory) are lousy. The local map is so bad as to be useless and the world map was a frequent source of bugs and glitches. The inventory sorting is just absent; it makes it incredibly hard to find what you are looking for. I can think of so many times I'd pick up a note/holotape and then struggle to find it in my inventory among hundreds of keys I couldn't drop and old quest items I was stuck with.

The new crafting and settlement building both reek of the paid DLC world they came from. They added nothing but tedium to the game and I truly wish neither was there; especially the settlement building and management. If I wanted to do that, I'd play a strategy game.

But still, I had fun. The combat is pretty fun (although VATS was better in previous games and is very hard to use due to its console style). The overall story kept me engaged and had deeper choices than Fallout 3 (although maybe not as deep as New Vegas). The world is huge but large chunks of it were pretty repetitive. Although, again, not as repetitive as Fallout 3's endless subway tunnels.

When I play a Bethesda game nowadays it seems as if I'm trying to ignore 60% of the game in turn to enjoy the little there is to enjoy that is in a dumb sandbox collect-a-thon, it's not the best, but it keeps me occupied and I feel the need to be a completionist... With a few modding tweaks you can enjoy a little more of what there is to disagree in terms of design with Bethesda, like how they made a lot of this game bullet sponge enemies (like radscorpions or Super Mutants), you can put your gameplay rehaul tweaks that allow for realism and better bullet travel, A.I being smarter, stuff like that, and trust me, it really does make the game go from a 5/10 to a 6/10.

It is very hard to enjoy this game without mods if you have standards, I cannot even do minor things without having some sort of mod to fix an issue Bethesda implemented like settlement limitations, or how Bethesda is lazy to not implement a non-forced plot or NON-essential NPCs (while new vegas did and actually put in the effort of making a sandbox game where choices actually matter).

You'll want a lot of mods that give you more freedom instead of the streamlined bull doo doo Bethesda put and thinks was a good idea for some odd reason? But when I'm not ignoring all of the overwhelming clashing flaws of this game, I just think how much I appreciate that New Vegas did everything better with half of the budget and half of the gunplay, I just won't play it again because I'm not the kind to re-play a game more than 5 times that quickly. I have to settle for more to crave that itch and Fallout 4 while it has some moments and okay gunplay brings me pain every now and then I remember I am playing Fallout 4.

This is a game that has the logic and quality writing of a Saturday Morning Cartoon, okay that might be an insult to what children get today, but you get what I mean, the forced plot is just some of the most terrible writting I've seen in video games, everything is a cliché of sorts like the silly detectives, the impossible ways of which the plot progresses like making dogmeat sniff out 100000000 miles a guy.

Every side in the game is massively dumb and the morals seem to be just stretched to a point of which it feels forced of what is considered bad and what is considered good, on top of that the writing is very lazy, there is nothing lazier than robo-racism, and it just makes no sense at all in this game why the institute would have a cognitive dissoance (you guys develop humans, what do you expect? aren't you all supposed to be geniuses?) with them outside of the fact that Fallout 4 needs a "villain" and it has to be as boring as possible. These are kid level ideas of what is bad and good, in well written game you would be able to make all sides set asside their minor differences.

A lot of the characters are nothing, it's obvious they put the attention towards the companions more, but even the companions while charismatic at some times (and sometimes a way to write in the only attempts Fallout 4 has towards political commentary, like how Hancock is a commentary on Anarchism 101 for kids) are just tired tropes or straight up manic pixie girls, they're just a few one liners, you fall in love with them and all they give you is 3 more phrases of "hey ur hot huhuh", they really don't feel that developed, New Vegas didn't have a tacky flirt system but it actually had realistic scenarios for the dialog. Their stories are short and usually "my entire squad died" or the old "MY FAMILY!!". Stuff like that makes me thankful that we live in a world where characters like Arcade or Veronica from New Vegas exist.

It seems as if all of the tacky poorly written one-liner companions and the fact that the main character is voice acted is all to pander to that lowest deameanor demographic of Bioware fans that just eat whatever up as long as they can have some sort of sex with it, even if the exchanges feel really fake or just shallow. It's just this boring romance that doesn't result in much except for a badly written companion arc and a little perk.

60% of my experience with this game is me trying really hard not to nitpick to death, and that's really it, at it's core it's playable and can be enjoyable for the big sandbox and all that, but it really is a huge amount of minor issues that amount to this HUGE sad experience in the end, like you sink in 300 hours just to make sure what you played was bad because the bad aspects perservere and you remember them more.

I could go on about every little minor flaw, like why is there Japanese people in Far Harbor? Like, what sense does that make? Betheseda sometimes forget their source material and how America in this fallout universe is this deeply nationalistic state of sorts, something by the way that shouldn't be glorified in any shape or form but Bethesda forgets that Fallout is a political satire game and often glorifies the GOOD OLD 60s where McCathryism was rapant, and WAR IS ACTUALLY GOOD! Because that's what I got from the impression of the introduction, Bethesda, you missed the whole point, the pre-war was just as bad, if not worse as the post-apocalypse of Fallout.

By the way this game has almost nothing to say about war itself! Fallout 1 and 2 have major themes about war, with Fallout 1 being about collectivism I guess? And Fallout 2 being about AMERICA'S IMPERALISM itself. New vegas is about political systems, Fallout 4 is about... Darn robo-racism and silly sci-fi twists which is mostly riding on the back of the oppressed for lazy talentless writers. This is the least I've felt emotionally invested at all, these allegories do nothing to me, and it's disrespectful to use THE RAILROAD, the actual underground railroad for this artificial false equivalance of robots.

Speaking of emotional investment, it seems as if none of the people are all that smart, is the entire west coast of Fallout dumb? What is seen as smart in the game is sometimes an obvious statement, and not something that makes you think in any capacity, never was there that much of a point in this game where I thought it was clever or that witty, also it just feels as if nobody in the game has that much of a personality besides trope or role, and the worst of all is that you never get on their bad side, that is what I was amounting to with this paragraph, how am I going to care about my choices and actions if nobody cares, some characters are so badly written that no matter what you do, they won't mind at all.

Any and All content Fallout 4 adds to the universe is pointless, it is all this lazy sake for the inputing something trope, and it's just the most generic unimaginative morally simplistic ideas there is in the world, every single idea clashes from how dumb it sounds like how I've said before: why would scientists create humans if they don't want them to be human? The game creates issues where there shouldn't be issues.

Fallout 4 is a lot better than Fallout 3 in some ways (aka the game where both the villains and the heroes want the same exact thing but for some reason they fight each other to achieve it?) but it is simultaneously the best and worst thing Bethesda has ever done, it's the best because it really is the most optimized they have made their old engine work (and it's still terrible), the menus are quicker, the gunplay is better, they might have removed some RPG aspects too much to the point the game feels a bit weird with its scaling and might even be seen as unbalanced, but I guess it's a little better than Skyrim, even if Skyrim feels as if it had more choices every now and then and I actually don't regret going through Skyrim no matter how simplified it was while Fallout 4 gave me a bitter after-taste.

The less Bethesda touches the fallout universe the better, the more mindless and less attempts they make to write anything the better too, they'll just end up making a fool of themselves and write something that is very uncannon to the lore like how Jets were invented, which they tried to retcon in Fallout 4 saying it was created in a Vault, instead of some kid in Fallout 2 starting a drug epidemic. I'm sure you can find a thousand videos out there that are 4 hours in length explaining how flawed this game is, and no, it's not just fine, some of these flaws are painfully aching to the point playing each second of this game you might come faced with something that is just bad. I feel as if I need to take anti-depressants to enjoy the little there is to enjoy of the core gameplay, and not stop the game to write about a new issue.

While most RPG games have a good pacing and are contained, Fallout 4 feels to drag on and on until there is no fun to be had anymore, like New Vegas is enjoyable within a limitation of a 30 level up or a 50 level cap. The scaling is awful, and Fallout 4 has no level cap and you just progress until you get bored of Bethesda scattering random groups of enemies through the world that start to feel very the same and have nothing of engagement because you can just go up to them and shoot them in the head or just unload an entire magazine on them and just hold your mouse button because there's a weird pacing that shifts from "hard to catch up to enemies" and then suddently "no matter what you'll die, you'll pretty much not die". The more you play this game the more you get sick of it.

Bethesda likes to act as if Fallout 4 is an open FPS game with it's linear sequences of enemies at every single second that are just boring but they don't even know how to design a open FPS game that well either, so what they get is this weird repetitive game that doesn't work that well as an RPG game and does not work that well as an Action game. It's not like New Vegas where you can actually strategize and every enemy encounter is engaging. And whatever dialog Fallout 4 has to offer to stop the mediocre combat after combat is just like 4 lazily written typical dialog lines, the intro of New Vegas has better writing than the entirety of this game.

Fallout 4 cannot program choice that well too, a lot of the decisions in the game are dedicated through specific lines of dialog rather than your own actions, for example if a quest tells you to kill someone and you kill them... The quest won't be completed because you have to wait until someone says a line of dialog and gives you the ok, it's like they couldn't program "if character killed = mission complete or over" and as a result a lot of quests become stuck and whenever you play this game, and I hope you're playing it on PC because you have to perform surgery on it to even be able to get rid of these situations or go around it! It's like the entire game you are tugged on a leash by Todd Coward themselves and there's no fun to be had it's just linear as all hell.

Bethesda you talentless hacks, outsource your writing and design to Obsidian. Bethesda is the least professional developer out there to handle a series about choice and war, they end up making games that have nothing to do with war and often sometimes accidentally put American propaganda in position of glorification which is the opposite of what this series is meant to do. I really do feel as if whatever Fallout 4 added and can be seen as okay can just be added as a mod to New Vegas, which is funny because Fallout 4 felt to have taken a lot of it's core ideas from mods.

The 4th Fallout entry is a sprawling open-world RPG that drops players into a post-apocalyptic Boston, offering a vast wasteland to explore filled with factions, mutants, and secrets. The game shines with its deep crafting and settlement-building mechanics, giving players a tangible way to shape their world, alongside a solid shooting system that improves over previous entries. Though particularly speaking, I was not quite a fan of the settlement mechanics, so I tried very hard to skip them as much as possible.

While the main story is serviceable, it often feels overshadowed by side quests and exploration, which are where the game truly excels, so no big news here, this is also the case for most of the previous Fallout entries. Graphically, it’s a mixed bag, some areas are impressively detailed, while others feel dated or buggy. Mods on PC greatly enhance both visuals and gameplay, extending replayability, and the modding community is still strong up to this day. Overall, Fallout 4 is a rewarding experience for those who enjoy exploration, player-driven storytelling, and creative freedom.

This game also places a stronger emphasis on companions, each with their own personalities, moral alignments, and personal quests. Traveling with characters like Nick Valentine or Piper adds emotional weight to the journey, as their commentary and reactions help bring the Commonwealth to life. These companions aren’t just combat support, they often reflect the game’s broader themes and provide some of its most engaging narrative moments, especially when their individual stories unfold over time. Though they for sure don't have the same level of depth when compared to previous entries in the series.

The faction system further expands player choice, presenting multiple groups with conflicting ideologies and goals. None of them will win you over though, the world building is not as rich as something like New Vegas. Aligning with factions such as the Brotherhood of Steel, the Railroad, or the Institute shapes not only the outcome of the main story but also how the world responds to your actions. While these choices don’t always feel as nuanced or reactive as in earlier Fallout titles, they still offer meaningful role-playing opportunities and encourage multiple playthroughs to see different perspectives.

Meanwhile, the returning retro-futuristic radio soundtrack perfectly complements the setting, balancing bleak themes with moments of dark humor and nostalgia that the series is known for. Despite its reliance on familiar Bethesda design conventions, this Fallout entry succeeds in creating a world that feels alive and worth getting lost in. Whether scavenging for scrap, uncovering hidden locations, or stumbling into unexpected encounters, the game consistently rewards curiosity. Even years after its release, the Commonwealth remains an engaging playground for both newcomers and long-time fans of the series.

I was gonna try to complete this one. Honest! It was my intent. But thing is... I kinda don't really want to go back.

I bought this one after the Fallout TV series, and after bingeing some Fallout lore and Easter eggs videos. I was kinda surprised at the extent of world-building and lore buried without Fallout 4. So despite hating it when it released, I picked up a copy for cheap and gave it another shot.

I don't hate it as much as I used to, but I can't say I especially love it either. My biggest problem with this game is the complete gutting and oversimplification of all roleplaying elements - dialogue, character customization, level progression... Technically speaking, it's here, but it's a pale imitation of these things, and a monumental step back in quality from Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

The dialogue system in particular is just... Fucking terrible. There's no way around it. It seems acceptable at first, but you slowly realize: You don't actually have any choices. Every single conversation gives you four dialogue options: Yes, No, More Information, and Sarcastic Jackass. These are your options for nearly every conversation. And worse still, the option you choose effects nothing probably 97% of the time. No matter what you choose, the result of the dialogue will ALWAYS be the same. Speech checks are almost gone entirely, and the few that remain are overwhelming meaningless; usually adding 10% more caps to a payout or some crap.

In terms of what works, the combat in this game is actually fun... With an asterisk. Did you enjoy using VATS in 3 and New Vegas? Well go fuck yourself, because VATS is basically useless now, and you are better off spraying and praying in basically every combat encounter. Nevertheless, the combat IS fun, and even though 90% of Boston's population is Raiders, Supermutants and feral ghouls, it's always fun to hop in a new dungeon, clear it out, and loot whatever's there.

Boston is woefully misused, feeling less like a major American city and more like a small city of 50,000 somewhere in the Midwest. I admittedly have very little familiarity with Boston as a city, but I didn't with DC or Las Vegas either - and those games actually taught me a lot about those cities and their landmarks. What is Boston famous for, according to Fallout? A baseball field, and that's just about it. One that could be literally any MLB team's field. You could tell me this was the Brewers stadium and I would believe you.

The town building thing is pretty good too, even if it feels like it has a massive problem of "quantity over quality".

Overall, I dunno man. I find this one hard to recommend for anyone other than those who absolutely must have every tiny piece of Fallout in their lives. It's a very flat game, and will leave anyone looking for role playing and a good story very disappointed.

These are my thoughts on a 100% vanilla, mod-free playthrough on Series S.

I’m probably going to say something controversial right off the bat: based on my somewhat limited experience with the franchise (played 3 and New Vegas, no experience with 1 or 2), I think Fallout 4 is a great game and a great Fallout game. I absolutely loved my time with NV this year, easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, but in those moments where everything clicked, truly clicked, I loved FO4 even more. Yes, there are some real issues with it when compared to previous games, but to me, the world building, freedom and magnitude of exploration this title brings to the table owe nothing to what came before it. I’m kind of free-styling this and I feel I’ll have a lot to write about it, so the cliff notes version is this: FO4 is a visibly flawed yet fantastic game, let down mostly by its technical hurdles, which render its best mode - Survival - borderline impossible to play in its vanilla state even on current gen consoles. I honestly thought I wouldn't like the game much after all I had heard about it. I was wrong. I loved it, even though it drove me nuts more times than I'd care to admit. If you’re into Fallout, definitely play it if you haven't by now.

So let me start from the very beginning. FO4 has awesome character creation, visually more in-depth than most games I’ve played and, certainly better than Bethesda had ever done before from a technical standpoint. The trait/perk system changes come with some nitpicks, but I honestly loved the freedom to bypass perks under each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. tree and be able to choose whatever I want from the get go provided I put enough points into it. The ‘RPGness’ - or lack thereof - in FO4 is a contentious topic when it comes to build specificity, but I personally feel there’s a lot to praise in its freedom structure. Yes, you can absolutely become a jack-of-all-trades god if you so wish, given enough time and perk points. But you can also build a very specific character for very specific roleplaying purposes. I’ve ended my playthrough at level 67 as an energy weapon-only Brotherhood of Steel sentinel (one thing that enticed me towards BoS this time around was that putting on power armor really feels like you're putting on power armor), and I honestly didn’t feel that was enough to 100% wrap up my build, though it came close. I personally prefer this freer, more shape-as-you-play approach to character building than a more restrictive one. And even though part of me missed the possibilities that came with the traits system in NV, I didn't miss it enough for it to make any dents on my enjoyment.

Specifically tied to this are gameplay mechanics. I could write a small book based on this alone, so I’ll try to condense this as much as I can. The most obvious ones are gunplay and VATS. Shooting is much better implemented here than in its 1st person predecessors. Part of it is natural gunplay evolution in games, but there's also a significant effort in improving what was arguably an underwhelming experience in past FO titles. I would never class it as top-of-the-line, but it’s nevertheless a visible improvement over 3 and NV, and this alone makes the game a lot more enjoyable to play combat wise, especially when coupled with how surprisingly competent human AI is, often ducking, changing position and looking for cover when exposed. VATS now slow down time instead of completely pausing it, and my initial reservations about this change were completely squashed after I tried it. I think it was one of the best changes they made, specifically because it adds an element of danger and urgency to act that the previous system lacked. I heavily relied on VATS throughout my playthrough not because real-time shooting sucked, but because of how great it felt to use it.

Another stellar gameplay mechanic is the upgrade system, and even though this permeates most of FO4’s usable items, from armor to chems, I’d like to focus mainly on weapon upgrades. This is likely the most satisfying, customisable, deepest upgrade design I've ever encountered in a game, and it felt so good precisely because it didn't overcomplicate things amidst its complexity. You quickly get the hang of it, even if, like myself, you started gaming in the late 80s, and once you learn the ropes chances are you’ll be coming back to it over and over. The freedom it gives you to visually and mechanically modify barrels, scopes, grips, suppressors, etc makes the weapons feel like they’re truly ‘yours’. Not having to repair your weapons was a bit of a downer for me roleplaying wise, but when all was said and done, I’d take the tradeoff I was offered any day of the week.

Shifting gears, other things I thought FO4 did particularly well was environmental design, world building and exploration. I loved the visual grimness you get to experience in FO3, revelled in the wonderful exploration of the New Vegas desert, and I think this game combines the best of those worlds in this narrow sense, even if the darker tones aren't as omnipresent as in 3. From the rundown vibe of small cities like Concord and Lexington to the visually foreboding sky of the Glowing Sea (not to mention the ominous foggy world of Far Harbor for the ones with this awesome DLC), environmental variety is at its best here, which along with how the game rewards the player for going off the beaten path, makes exploration truly enjoyable. Everywhere you go there's a terminal chock-full of information that brings cohesion to the world of Fallout, or a note that sends you off on a cool side quest, or a visual storytelling device that paints a picture of what happened inside whatever hellhole you just stepped into. It is so easy to lose yourself in FO4’s world, and it was a funny feeling when I first realised that the sandbox was nowhere near as massive as I felt it was in the beginning. Bethesda’s sense of scale, the initial impact of it, is still unique to this day. I had a hard time ungluing myself from this game, even after playing it for 125 hours, precisely because they’ve made the world so appealing and packed with things to uncover. All of this comes coupled with a jump in visual quality I didn't really anticipate. I had dabbled a tiny bit with the beginning stages of FO4 before this first playthrough, but it was only after I spent more time with it that I started appreciating how good weapon/armor/character models and the world in general looks (as long as you don't look at some of the textures a up-close, that is).

Then, there’s the story (spoilers tagged). This is likely the most contentious point in the entire title, and my opinion will likely be no less contentious. Focusing exclusively on the broader plot and not the storytelling: I liked it. I actually liked it a lot. From the really solid, urgency-filled, dramatic start - getting to experience the moment the bombs fell firsthand, your wife getting killed in front of you and your son kidnapped is as intense as could be - to the eventual revelations and outcome, there was nothing I was really antagonistic towards, aside from some lack of clear effects from some of your choices. It is true that the game pigeonholes you into a specific background, thus restricting roleplaying possibilities in a vanilla playthrough. But at the same time I feel this is becoming a staple in Bethesda’s Fallout titles, which admittedly is kind of antithetical to the stellar sense of exploration their games excel at. It was already the same in FO3 where you had a very clear, fairly urgent goal as well.

Once you accept that, however, I feel the story is still pretty decent, at least nowhere near as bad as I had read. Sure, it lacks New Vegas' obvious consequences stemming from the choices you make, but then again, in NV we’re talking about a non-Bethesda game, and likely the pinnacle of choice-consequence in 1st person games. Obsidian is known for excelling at that, Bethesda isn’t. And when all was said and done, not only did I like the flavour of the main narrative, I thought it was actually a lot greyer than I thought it would be. It starts by nudging you into a very specific emotional tone - hating the Institute for all it did to you -, while also throwing surprising moments your way that make you start questioning that very tone - finding out who Shaun turned out to be or that Danse is a synth for example. And in the middle of this, I like that they actually removed karma from FO4. As it stood, I feel it was mostly a gimmick that didn't really add anything meaningful to the game. And the irony is that not having a morality system allows for more personally conflicting thoughts about what the ‘right’ thing to do is. Here I'll go further and posit that the game weaved this almost perfectly: it was a very well-realised twist to have Shaun be the leader of the Institute because, at that point in the story, chances are you are so against it, especially if you have joined the BoS or the Railroad faction, that you get emotionally torn. The narrative certainly comes with some issues and flaws, cemented by a dreadfully basic, tone-deaf and unhelpful dialogue system, along with a painfully uncharismatic voiced protagonist. But it still managed to keep my attention from start to finish, not only because of the ambiguous turning points present, but also due to the soulful characters you meet throughout.

Now onto the issues, with the absolute main one being, in true Bethesda fashion, optimisation. Even by their standards, this game is awful from a technical standpoint in its vanilla skin. I honestly can’t believe the current state of the game is this, 7 years after its release. Not even going into the weeds of all its bugs, glitches, sound propagation issues and incomprehensible random crashes, FO4 is borderline unplayable in the Boston area. Seriously, what the hell. It freezes and crashes and shits on you every chance it gets, and you can’t go 5 literal minutes without the game kicking you out one way or another. It made it impossible to not use fast travel and save every other minute, and because of that, it made it impossible, without mods, to use what is arguably FO4’s flagship mode, survival. It is clear to me that this was the way such an otherwise accomplished post-apocalyptic experience was meant to be played all along. And you can’t use it because of how technically hideous and unstable the game is. A true shame and a lost opportunity to add weight, tension and meaning to a vanilla playthrough. I had other problems with FO4, but this was such a prominent, ever present one that it made all the other issues virtually irrelevant by comparison. Get your damn act together, Bethesda. Modders shouldn’t be required to fix your games.

It is thus incredible to me how much enjoyment I got out of my playthrough even through such incomprehensible technical problems. A glance at public opinion of the game from release to present time makes me think Fallout 4 is one of those games that have been ageing somewhat well. I simply don’t see the animosity towards it I saw during the first couple years, and I’m glad I don't. For better and for worse, Fallout 4 is a Bethesda Fallout game through and through, meaning it’s a fantastic, packed, meaningful, buggy take on its post-apocalyptic world. There are some continuity lore issues and noticeable flaws here and there, but I reject the notion that this isn’t something that can be appreciated under the Fallout umbrella. It can, and it is. It may not have edged out New Vegas in terms of my total level of appreciation, but out of the 3 Fallouts I’ve tried so far, it was certainly the most addictive, magnanimous one. I just wish someone at Bethesda knew how to optimise games. 9/10

I love Bethesda games. They always seem to make my favorites. From Oblivion to Fallout 3 to New Vegas and then, of course, Skyrim, they will always have a place on my favorite games list.

So that leads us to Fallout 4, everyone says that this one doesn't compare the company's back catalog, and maybe there is some slight truth to that, but I loved it.

Now starting with graphics they're nothing that special but I was still blown away when I first booted up the game and continue to think the apocalypse looks dang good.

The combat, however, is vastly improved. The flow and overall movement of weapons feels a lot smoother overall and makes for many instances where Vats (the freeze mode that lets you target enemies easier) isn't needed. You can just play in real time unless you're just in the mood for some gore in slow mode.

The conversation system is something that was harshly criticised when the game first came out and I'd say that was pretty overblown in my opinion. I like hearing the main character speak my dialogue choices, it makes it so conversations don't feel completely one-sided. Also, I think the voice actors did a decent job with the exception of that one old clairvoyant lady at the beginning who sounds absolutely terrible.

I guess one problem I have would be that not all side quests are interesting. There's a little bit of go here, kill the bad guy, come back, end of mission. But that's kind of nitpicking because the vast majority of side quests, as well as the main questline, is usually pretty good.

The music is good too. Fallout always has this certain type of old-timey music that really contrasts with the hell of the wasteland and it makes the whole experience less grim. But this time I tried playing for a good chunk of the game without that swinging soundtrack and tried the more moody composition of game. It made the game very atmospheric and doomy.

I liked the choices I made while playing and I've already started another playthrough. That's one of the great things about Bethesda games and almost exclusively Bethesda games, that you can just make a new character and play a totally different with different choices all the way through.

Pros: -Great graphics -lots of places to explore -improved combat -the songs -a good storyline

Cons: -occasionally generic quests -a bit glitchy

Overall, I'm biased and thought this game was great. Although it's not one of my favorites by this company, I do believe it doesn't deserve almost any of the hate it gets and has many improvements from previous titles.