Fallout 4 begins unlike the rest of the games in the series. In this game, you start playing before the Great War of 2077, not after. You get to see what life was like in the retro-futuristic alternate history world of the games. Cars running on nuclear power, robot butlers and civil servants and a very strong anti-Communist vibe are present as you play the first part of the game.
I won’t spoil anything, but the rest of the game takes place in the year 2287, more than 200 years after dozens of atomic bombs destroyed the U.S. You play as a Vault Dweller, someone who lives in the giant underground fallout shelters that were used by civilians to survive the war. Players are immersed into the remnants of war-torn Boston, and you can visit many iconic locations, such as Fenway Park (where there is now a city built on the baseball diamond), the Massachusetts State House and the Boston airport.
One of the new features in the game is that you are allowed to build settlements, recruit settlers, and defend your settlements from raider and Super Mutant attacks. It’s a really fun addition to the series, and I ended up spending a good chunk of my time building up my little towns. You build defenses and grow your settlement using materials found in all of the items that, in previous games, were just junk. I overloaded myself with aluminum cans, spoons, and coffee mugs more than once just to build my generators, power lines, and defensive walls. It’s really cool that all of the junk I passed over in the older games now has a use.
Fallout 4 uses an updated version of the Creation engine, the same engine behind Skyrim, and basically just a heavily-modified version of the Gamebryo engine used in Oblivion and Fallout 3. The engine still has a lot of the same quirks and bugs that are present in all of the other games, like falling through the floor. This time around, though, developer Bethesda seems to have at least fixed some of the bugs that caused previous games to crash nearly every 20 minutes. I have played Fallout 4 for around 40 hours, and it has only crashed on me twice. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is a big deal if you’ve frequently lost progress in the other games.
The graphics are good, but not great for 2015. The animations are still stiff and awkward, just as in all other Bethesda games. The dialogue choices are over-simplified, and you often don’t know what your character will say from the labeled option (“Sarcastic” could mean anything). But still, Fallout 4 does a lot of things right. I really enjoy this game a lot, and I would recommend it to people who enjoyed Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
