I played the crap out of the previous Fallout games, namely Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I spent hours wandering the world, looking for things, playing with mods. It’s safe to say I came into Fallout 4 with great expectations. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
Fallout 4 is not a bad game. It just isn’t as great as it’s predecessors. It doesn’t improve on any of the old Bethesda tropes and gets worse in many ways.
First and foremost is the amount of content. There feels like there is a lot less content in this game than other Bethesda games. I spent about sixty hours playing this game and felt like I exhausted just about everything. In prior games, I spent hundreds of hours.
There is also the inclusion of infinite repeating quests. These just suck and I wish Bethesda would label them or indicate them in some way so that I could skip them.
Combat has no real changes from prior games. You use the Vats system if you don’t like first person shooting, which has a random chance of striking certain areas of an enemy’s body based on a predefined percentage.
Conversations are even worse. Not karma system. Conversation choices are simplified.
Graphically, it is only slightly better than it’s predecessor which came out over five years ago. The art direction is amazing and is the strongest aspect of this game. The detail paid to every inch of the landscape is incredible. However, technically, the game looks like a game for the last generation of consoles. I played on my computer, and it still looked like disappointing. It looked like Skyrim. I expect each game in a franchise to improve at least somewhat graphically. That they just got cheap and lazy and decided to use the same game engine as the prior Bethesda game is pathetic. In the era of Witcher 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront, you need to push the technological envelope and Fallout 4 does not.
Additionally, building a settlement is fun, but too simple. It seems ripe for DLC or fan made mods.
Score: 7.6/10 Fun, but was expecting so much more. Feels like a game that was made five years ago.
Muse Bank 