So I played this game a bit with my brother during the free week back in June. An ongoing sale brought the game's price down from the original $60(!) to $30, but I did not buy it nor do I have any plans to do so, joking to my brother that I wouldn't give $3 for this game.
Nevertheless, we did play it for about 10-20 hours over several days.
I tried to make my character as ugly as possible, but the result was still disappointingly human. Bethesda's face generator has come a long way since Oblivion.
So you create your character, exit the Vault, and then you... do what exactly? As has been so negatively met that even game journos complained about it, the game has no real story, only giving you notes and audio logs that you'll ignore as this is a multiplayer game and your party members are waiting. If you do decide to read them, it's just terribly boring tidbits about pre- or post-War life that has no bearing on actual gameplay. Michael Kirkbride the writers aint.
Since the game has no story, it's surely about the survival, exploration and combat gameplay then? You do need to eat and drink, the world is huge and diverse, and the Fallout 4 gunplay is entirely passable. But there's no real drive for any of it. Once you've cleared a camping resort of not-zombies, vacuum looted all containers and satisfied your thirst and hunger with some canned food and boiled water, you've already experienced the gameplay loop that the rest of the game will consist of.
You can nuke areas which will transform them into high-level zones with bullet-sponge enemies that drop even more stuff for you to hoard. You can build camps for absolutely no reason at all. You can kill other players, and upon death they drop their junk items - yes, junk items - so that you can use them to craft even more pointless stuff.
The only thing the game has going for it is exploration and architecture. Landmarks such as water towers and cooling towers have been expertly placed on the horizon, tempting the player to come explore them. There are beautiful cafes, water parks, golf courses, resorts and small towns for the player to find. However, when walking across a monorail outside the Vault-Tec University I couldn't help but to ask: Why is this not a singleplayer title? All these empty locations feel wasted on a multiplayer game that doesn't even do something interesting. In a multiplayer Fallout title, I'd expect to be able to join a group of, say, Caesar's Legion players and have a 30-player rumble against the Brotherhood of Steel or the Minutemen. Anything more exciting than aimlessly drifting around turning over cupboards for loot and shooting zombies in the head until you get bored and quit.
The game is notoriously buggy, but apart from the occasional floating ethereal enemy corpse (seen above) we didn't encounter anything screenshot-worthy. We felt the bugs though. Both of us had a bug that crashed the game whenever we fast-travelled to each other when we were part of the same group. And we both had these 1-second freezes (sometimes up to 4 seconds) that re-occured several times an hour. Doesn't mean much in a slow, PvE game like FO76, but still horrendous performance. And we also had occasional disconnects that threw a wrench in things - in my brother's case this froze the game indefinitely.
Like I said, I wouldn't buy this for $3. Thanks for the free trial, but getting these freezes in a game that has had half a year of patches? No sir, I would not pay money for that.
The last thing we did was to try out the recently added, run-of-the-mill Battle Royale mode. I killed a player, then another player killed me. Then the game crashed. Then I uninstalled.
