Fallout 4, review: An enormously engrossing adventure with wonderful distractions

There are games that from when you first turn them on appear daunting and huge. How will I ever establish myself in this world with such underpowered beginnings? I find this a difficult stage to get past in games as long and large as Fallout 4. It is quite clear from the start that achieving anything in this world is going to take a lot of effort and time (and my initial reactions were not wrong). I may also be feeling a bit of “open-world fatigue” in a year that has brought us The Witcher 3 and MGSV.

Without wanting to give too many story spoilers away, the start of Fallout 4 sees you arrive blinking and disorientated into a post apocalyptic world. The nukes have dropped and now several hundred years later humanity is struggling to reclaim its place in the world.

The initial daunting feeling is not really helped by the difficulty within the first few hours. Your weapons will be little more than pea shooters and you may quite often find yourself killed by an early game swarm of insects or raiders. This is certainly helped by the quicksave feature though, something that more console games should adopt in my opinion.

A rather annoying extra layer of difficulty is added through the glitchiness this game can suffer from. Some early dungeon fights felt almost like a slideshow with frame rate dropping to unacceptable levels. This made shooting accurately near impossible, and a lot of the time it was just luck that I got through those scenarios alive. Hopefully these issues can be patched out soon, as the copy I had was obviously pre-release.

Technical issues dealt with, the game looks and feels great generally. The wastelands can feel a bit sparse, but they’re supposed to right? You also won’t get the variety of environment you would do with a game like Skyrim. But in terms of creating a world that feels alive and real Bethesda have done a great job.

The story in Fallout 4 is nothing to really write home about, but that is rarely the point behind these types of games. I for one just enjoy exploring and inhabiting the worlds, interacting with people and hearing titbits of their life stories.

In addition to the usual quests, crafting, cooking etc that you would associate with a Fallout game, this time the developers have added a few extra activities and distractions to pass the time. My favourite of which is the town/village creation tools. Adding what is essentially a basic city builder to this type of game is the extra little bit that keeps fans coming back. You can build houses and defences, if you want power you need a generator and pylons to deliver it to where it needs to go, you have to keep your inhabitants happy with food and water and provide them accommodation etc. It really is a great feature that I spent far longer with than I should have.

Other than frame rate issues my only other real gripe with Fallout is that a lot of the systems are beginning to seem a bit stale and in need of updating. The crafting system is effective but personally I don’t find it very fun. Judging by how well Bethesda do at introducing new elements it almost seems like a shame that they don’t focus the same creativity on the existing ones. Fans of the series may well want more of the same but some innovation and streamlining goes a long way in my book.

That said, this is an enormously engrossing adventure through an interesting landscape with some wonderful distractions. 2015 has been a wonderful year for open world games, with some of the finest examples ever created, and Fallout 4 is another to add to that list.