Next to Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, and the Deus Ex franchise, Fallout has some of the most ridiculous and occasionally downright toxic fans. Say you appreciate 2008’s Fallout 3, and you’ll be told you are wrong. Say you enjoy Fallout 4, and people behave like you stabbed their kids. However, say you don’t like New Vegas, and they act like you pressed the button in October 2077. The only thing worse is to tell the eponymous crowd outside your house that you didn’t play the original series and don’t plan to.

I don’t plan to venture out into the wasteland as seen in the late 90s and early 00s games, and I didn’t like Fallout 3 or New Vegas. My first, proper, exploration into the wasteland was Fallout 4, despite attempts to get into the two that are lauded (one more than the other). Yes, I am the guy that likes Fallout 4, the one that apparently isn’t a true Fallout game because it doesn’t feature an ex-Friends actor or that bloke that just wants his family back. Okay, despite my teasing, I understand why people prefer Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but I simply don’t.

Fallout is not a series that changes much. Unless you have that stupid idea of “what if they did multiplayer,” then some idiot announces Fallout 76. As a concept, it is reasonably rigid. It is an open-world wasteland ’em up where you explore, do quests, and level up, unveiling the horrors and bright side of the lives of those after President Schwarzenegger III sneezes and presses the big red button. The perspectives may have changed throughout the decades, but ultimately you are still the lone wanderer committing a few crimes or possibly preventing them.

It was actually Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that brought me into this whole RPG lark. They properly expanded the number of games I’ve been delving into and ultimately enjoyed. Through the world, the gameplay, and the stories formed throughout my embarrassingly long playtime, I treasure this often denigrated entrant into the series. I understand the criticism towards the game’s actual narrative, but I’ve never enjoyed any of the three Fallout stories I’ve played.

It is not particularly difficult to piece together the story fairly early on. After living your 1950s retro-futuristic Stepford Wives life, designing yourself and your soon-to-be semi-defrosted better-half (for a whole five minutes) the world goes “to heck in a handbasket.” After sitting on ice for 200-years, you emerge as a butterfly of death, heading out into the Commonwealth of Boston and killing a whole lot of (at least semi-irradiated) people and animals. All to the soundtrack of our very genuine 1950s.

I’ve skimmed over some details, but they aren’t hard to fill in knowing very little about the game. Very little of which is the story I actually enjoy. The number of times I’ve seen “Sturges? Tell her,” I’m pretty sure I have recurring nightmares of talking to Preston Garvey, nightmares that don’t involve Mama Murphy. I’ve plodded through the Commonwealth several times, hating just how lackluster and simple the story is. However, I revere the overall scope of what you, the lone wanderer, bring to the wasteland. It is Doctor Who, you are hope and safety as you build the settlements and protect your people.

This is the point of an RPG. You embody a character, and you flesh them out with your own sentiments. Fallout 3 and New Vegas don’t bring that do-gooder exuberance. I don’t sense I am doing anything S.P.E.C.I.A.L to my own skills if all I am doing is going and killing someone/something in a cave, Skyrim. Building settlements feels like something good, crafting stories within the cramped conditions of Hangman’s Alley or open areas of Starlight Drive-in, Spectacle Island, or even Boston Airport. It gives my character(s) a greater purpose to explore. The new (it was for 4) crafting system is not just there to fit into the Minecraft mold without reason, and junk has a purpose.

This is a series that benefits from this style of gameplay loop. Exploration begets the next piece of crafting material or a settlement to build, and when you don’t have enough to build, you explore even more. You stumble upon stories through random events and side-quests too. You’ll find aliens, empty alleys to renovate, and vaults to explore. The most treasured of all is finding a coffee cup, duct tape, or light bulbs. It is just a shame that every time you do, you are standing on the wrong side of a Chameleon Deathclaw; often with half the ammo that you had when you encountered Super Mutants or a flying pirate ship manned by robots just down the road.

The map is beautifully dense. The typical thing to say is that Ubisoft has cluttered maps, and while I wouldn’t say the Commonwealth has the same number of useless icons cluttering your PipBoy, you’ll find something every two feet. I’m thinking Hangman’s Alley, Diamond City, and that little hardware store just five seconds up the road in which you’ll find Super Mutants, Ghouls, and Raiders along the way. In any other game, I might have reasoned that it gets overwhelming to begin with. However, with an immortal German Shepard and some pretty big guns, you level the field pretty quickly once again.

The companions are questionable at best, mostly offering little more than a voice to blather the same few tired lines. They offer an extra gun in combat, but nothing beats the good boy that Dogmeat is. They are walking trash bags for me to put all my stuff in, and they provide a bit of cover fire. However, I’d rather have Dogmeat, who doesn’t affect my Lone Wanderer perk, does all of that, and doesn’t yap about nonsense from time to time. They are great for moments like Nick Valentine’s mission in the subway vault, but otherwise, I am left wanting peace when protecting the Commonwealth and attempting to stealth my way through the Corvega Plant for the seventy-fifth time.

Of course, I say this with hundreds of hours logged. One save alone is about 180-hours. I am joking about how many times I’ve seen the staples of the game’s typical sights. Though, after about ten individual characters on PS4, one on PC, and one on Xbox One (so far), I am Icarus-ing too close to the “After five years on the East Coast...” knowledge. If I hear one more time about Mama Murphy’s “sight” I’m putting a brick through the woman’s face. After about the 7th time hearing about how Vault-Tec is here to protect me and my family, I wanted a skip to the Deathclaw section.

Character creation was greatly improved. Instead of looking like stock mannequins from Fallout 3 and New Vegas‘ slight improvements there, you can get a greater amount of detail from this Sims 4-like set of tools. Of course, you can’t go to the depths of alien you’d get with early to mid-00s wrestling games, but indeed, it is a greater improvement overall. That said, Nate is the world’s most boring human no matter the color of his hair, so Nora, or whatever I call her ends up being taken on the adventure more often because it is a better story.

Gunplay offers a greater feeling, though it might be minor in terms of Criterion’s Black, making me actually want to use the depth of weapons. There are quite a few, and with the quick weapon select/favorite menu, you aren’t hopping back and forth between PipBoy and gameplay. It offers a greater flow to what are sometimes unbelievable fights with that Shrek monster in the toilets of a magic school that’s not worth mentioning. Stopping mid-battle with a Super Mutant Behemoth to pull out a mini-nuke launcher would kill the pacing of an otherwise chaotic and fun fight, and this is precisely why I prefer real-time combat over semi or fully turn-based, more often than not.

Is it more superficial in terms of depth than some other Fallout games? Yes, of course. Featuring fully voiced characters by the hundreds, it doesn’t leave much room to give Fallout 3 and New Vegas-style dialogue boxes, but what it lacks with that face-button dialogue option is made up for with accessibility and a cleaner UI. I sometimes feel I mention it a little too much, to the point where I expect someone to yell about it not being an excuse (of which it never was), but gaming with dyslexia doesn’t allow for a great quantity of tolerance with RPGs that are as long as a book. What might take some 20-30 hours may take me 50-60 hours.

For many, Fallout 4 isn’t the most amazing because they prefer the wealth of depth in New Vegas despite the brief development time. For others, it is the main quest being one of the worst mysteries I’ve seen, and I watched of all Chris Chibnall’s biggest Flux-up. When it comes to my enjoyment, Fallout 4 is the one where I’m lost in the world of the strange, macabre fascination with retro-futurism and the American optimism of the 1950s for nuclear power. Not to mention the joy of building not only Sanctuary but the world as a whole.

Of course, it is futile. The world doesn’t change because I put down irradiated melons for my people to feed on, walls to protect them, beds for them to sleep in, and the copious amounts of labor I offer them (who said I need to pay them?). You aren’t clearing the rubble one piece at a time, sweeping up the world to its prior glory. You are simply building your own faction among the many delusional psychopaths with their solution. The Railroad’s Green Peace approach, The Institute’s Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg approach, and the Brotherhood of Steel’s Team America: World Police approach.

You can tell me a billion times about who is right and who is wrong, but the factions are not the most interesting or thought-provoking. It is an RPG, the foremost method to make it more stimulating than beige wallpaper is for you to imprint your character’s ideas into the actions done in-game. You can be an idiot filled with the dangerous fallacy of peace, a moron blinded by strayed connections, or someone who got a taste for blood and can’t stop killing, respective to the few factions available. Or the only option that makes logical sense: The faction you are already leading building settlements to bolster your numbers.

With this in mind, I’ve had quite a few crashes in recent years. That is common for an in-house Bethesda-developed game, but since 2018 I’ve found the PS4 version literally unplayable. Part of that is my fault, as mods are a lovely thing when you have the hardware to run the game easily when they help refine the game to how you want it. However, they also make your game unbelievably unplayable when it comes to Bethesda’s handiwork, Sony and Microsoft’s limited scope, and muggins here want wanting shots of those ugly half-decomposed brown shrubs everywhere in Sanctuary Hills.

I had crashes before mods were implemented, of course, but they were from running around the highrises too quickly. Generally, I was being so much of a nuisance that I was making a programmer’s head explode. My advice would be to go light on the modding, as it can often cause more problems than it is worth. Autosaves are a wonderful invention, but when you’ve played what probably accounts for 300-500 hours in several years, repeating some bits gets right on your nerves. Most of this is before you begin adding in DLC as well.

I’ll attempt to be brief on this, but the DLC is ok. The “Automatron” DLC isn’t that great, “Far Harbor” is probably the best of the three big ones, and “Nuka-World” is fun but not the most interesting. The “Wasteland,” “Contraptions,” and “Vault-Tec” Workshops are where my interest lies. Shocker, the person who just said the settlement building is a great addition, likes the DLC that adds bits to the workshop and a whole vault to design. As a bit more of the world to explore, I can’t help but like them. However, they aren’t mind-blowing and I’m not going to say you need them to enjoy Fallout 4 at all.

Ultimately, Fallout 4 might not be the greatest game in the franchise if we’re defining that by the depth of stories that aren’t that interesting in the first place. The point for me is absolutely constructed around my purpose as a character. Anyone could fix a busted water pump. Anyone could go out and kill Mathew Perry after 17 Again, but not everyone is either the hero or the villain of the Commonwealth. Depending on who you are and your motives, I am the bringer of death or peace, and I like that far more than some nonsense about robot kidnappers.

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Fallout 4

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Settlements and a use for junk.
• A better set of gameplay mechanics over others.

Cons

• A little buggy and a few crashes.
• A lacking story.