Fallout 4 exceeds impossibly high expectations as one of the best games of 2015
Fallout 4 justifies all the hype. It is an improvement on
Fallout 3 in every way, and borrows popular systems from
Fallout: New Vegas to create the most vibrant
Fallout game yet.
Fallout 3 was praised so loudly that you wouldn’t have blamed
Bethesda if it had decided to play it safe with
Fallout 4 by sticking to the same formula. Instead, very few game elements have gone unchanged.
The writing is better, the characters are more fleshed-out, there’s more variety of environments, combat is more thrilling, and you have substantial opportunity to shape the world rather than simply living there.
Fallout 4 has game-of-the-year written all over it.
The fact that your character is voiced gives the story greater visibility, and the new cinematic dialogue option makes your conversations appear more like traditional cutscenes, which also helps tremendously to put the story front and center and make you more invested in your character's primary quest.
Underneath your adventure is another brilliant soundtrack from Inon Zur. His haunting, subtle compositions for
Fallout 4 build off the themes of his score for
Fallout 3, and once again they perfectly match the barren beauty of the wasteland.
Fallout 3 was controversial among old-school RPG fans because while combat still essentially depended on virtual die rolls, the game also behaved like a shooter.
Fallout 4 has doubled down on this, to the point where during some gun battles I wondered whether
Fallout 4 has become a true shooter/RPG hybrid.
I [...] played on Survival mode specifically because Bethesda took a page from
Fallout: New Vegas, and enforced a delay between using a health item like a Stimpack and regenerating hit points. The length of the delay is tied to the difficulty setting.
Even at Normal difficulty you can’t just snap into your inventory, take a stack of Stimpacks to get your health to 100 percent, and then go right back into combat. You always need some break from taking damage to regen health. And the long delay at Very Hard or Survival difficulties means you have to be very smart about how you plan your attack.
The harder the difficulty in
Fallout 4, the more likely you are to find randomly-generated Legendary enemies in the world. They’re much deadlier than anything else you’ll encounter. When gravely wounded, they’ll often mutate to regain hit points.
I have spent more than 60 hours in the Xbox One version of the game and don’t feel anywhere close to having tackled most of the content.
Fallout 4 could be the only game you buy for the next six months, and you might never get bored. It’s everything that
Fallout fans were hoping for. When it comes to game releases in 2015, the best was truly saved for last.
5/5
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