Fallout 4 Review: Have a Blast

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Mood Perfected

While these problems persist, they’re a minor jab at a game that has much to offer. Fallout 4 has perfected mood and setting. No other game can pinball between campy humor and simmering horror as gracefully as Fallout 4.

You can tune into the game’s radio station to slaughter grotesque mole rats to the sounds of Bing Crosby, or turn it off and let the game’s hauntingly elegant soundtrack guide you through the unnerving corridors of the Massachusetts State House.

Beautiful Boston

All of these places…are densely packed with immaculate detail and rewards for the sharp-eyed vault dweller.

The map of the Commonwealth may not be as big as you’d expect, but what it lacks in scale is more than made up for in quality. The Boston area offers a wide variety of locations, ranging from seaside resort towns, colonial hamlets, dense urban cities, and even beautiful northeastern woodlands. The varied terrain is filled with historic landmarks and folklore, all rooted in America’s past.

The urban city areas are certainly the most impressive, bringing an unexpected verticality to Fallout 4. You can scale buildings that reach up to the sky and fight raiders back down through rotted out apartments of their interior.

Though these huge buildings are impressive, it was often the small things that left the biggest impact on me. There are many small interior locations in Fallout 4 that don’t contain things to kill. Instead, they are filled with things to find and stories of the past to unfold. There are corner bookstores full of eerie shadows and cigar lounges filled with macabre scenes of murder. All of these places, both big and small, are densely packed with immaculate detail and rewards for the sharp-eyed vault dweller.

Craft a Home

Fallout 4 is filled with wonderful locations, but eventually you’ll need a place to call home. The largest change to the series comes with the introduction of base building. Certain locations in the Commonwealth are potential settlement locations, and once cleared of enemies you can fortify them to your heart’s content and begin recruiting settlers to live there. If you want your settlers to be happy you must make sure they have enough food, water, beds, and protection.

The threat of a raid on my settlement kept me on edge…

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Every piece of junk scattered across the Commonwealth can be scrapped for parts, and from those parts you can build walls, beds, turrets, radios, tripwires, lights, or pretty much any item you’d hope to have in your settlement. If it becomes large enough, you can even establish traders in them to generate a revenue stream.

If you’ve watched any sort of post-apocalyptic movie, you know that a world in ruin is filled with muscle-bound characters looking to take advantage of others, and Fallout 4 is no different. The more resources your settlement generates the more likely you are to be attacked. The threat of a raid on my settlement kept me on edge, and pushed me to surround my largest base with walls and littered its interior with turrets. The settlement aspect of Fallout 4 feels like a game in itself, but throughout my 40 hours I only experienced a couple raids which were squashed with relative ease.

Grey Choices

The series has always given you the freedom to be goofy and Fallout 4 continues that tradition, but this time it amps up the serious tone beneath it all. There is no longer a karma system to tell you what is good or bad, so everything is open to interpretation. The removal of these moral bonds make your decisions more difficult. The story knows you’ll never be ready, or even equipped, to make the choices it puts in front of you, and that’s why it’s so good.

Another boost to the story experience is the inclusion of a voice for your character. Conversations with characters feel much more fluid since they don’t involve selecting pre-written text, and a third person camera gives conversations a much more cinematic feel.

Verdict

Fallout 4 may be soaked in Revolutionary era themes and locations, but it doesn’t revolutionize the series. Instead, it iterates on excellence and tells a thrilling personal story filled with difficult moral choices to keep you on your feet. Some of the longstanding issues in the series have yet to be fixed, but Fallout 4 sticks to its guns and delivers an excellent RPG experience that can also pass for a shooter. Expect to find yourself lost for dozens of hours as you explore this wonderful wasteland.

A copy of this game was provided to GameSided for the purpose of this review. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.

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