Fallout 4
Bethesda Softworks
Reviewed on Xbox One
Five stars
Deus Ex, which was published in 2000 and is frequent mentioned as a candidate for the title of best game ever made, looms large over the storyline that runs through the Fallout games: hidden organizations vying for control of an unsuspecting population. One set of characters is even modelled after the brothers Denton, the protagonists of Deus Ex.
More importantly, the Fallout series also borrows from Deus Ex's gameplay. It gave players real choices to make, in a fashion matched by few games, especially newer games with bigger budgets.
In Deus Ex, not only could you pick the outcomes and methods you used to resolve quests, large and small, but you also had tactical freedom. Stealth playthroughs of Deus Ex in which no-one dies are possible, as are rampages in which your main problem-solving tool is a rocket launcher.
Fallout adds to this choice of gameplay style a nuclear war-ravaged post-Apocalyptic sandbox. In Fallout 4, it is the Commonwealth, a post-Apocalyptic rendering of Massachusetts. It also adds a soundtrack of 1950s classics, each ironically prefiguring the threat of nuclear apocalypse and the subsequent struggle to survive (for example, the 1955 country-music track Uranium Fever by Elton Britt), plus a big dose of retro-vintage whimsy.
It's this combination of elements, plus tight, imaginative writing, that makes the Fallout series truly original – and pretty brilliant. This winning formula is clearly at work in Fallout 4, and that's what makes it a great game.
To be fair, Fallout 4 is not so very different from Fallout 3. It is, however, incrementally bigger and even more complex. Creators Bethesda Softworks proudly boast that the Commonwealth map is three times larger than the world of Skyrim, which in turn was bigger than the Capital Wasteland, the Washington-based playground in Fallout 3.
One noticable change is that the player-character now has a voice – compared with the on-screen text of Fallout 3 – but this doesn't hamper the player's individual freedom, which remains as expansive as ever.
It’s also much easier to accrue a cast of travelling companions this time around.
The music, which was perhaps the single most memorable part of Fallout 3, exemplifies the incremental approach of Fallout 4's designers. All of the 1950s music from Fallout 3 returns, plus a couple of dozen new tracks from the same era. Bethesda says there's three times as much music, but that includes a vast and unmemorable score by Dragon Age: Origins composer Inon Zur.
This incremental approach could have been a problem if Fallout 3 hadn't already been exceptionally good. It excelled, providing players with an expansive, fully-realised and distinctive world filled with fun and bizarre backstories.
Fallout 4 also does this. It has opted for subtle change rather than wholesale revamping: the world is bigger, there are more quests, considerably more companions, the latter stages of the game are even longer – after Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, the trend is now for RPGs to offer upwards of 100 hours of single-player content, and Fallout 4 certainly fits in with this.
Other additions to the gameplay include the ability to build settlements – in which players can spend a lot of time converting junk gathered in the wastes into over-designed fortresses – and modify weapons.
Instead of picking up and disassembling the hundreds of damaged hunting rifles you find on your travels in a bid to build the One True Hunting Rifle, as in the previous game, you now collect the world’s detritus and use it to build settlements and turn everyday weapons (such as a naval cannon) into scarier weapons (a naval cannon that shoots multiple rounds at once, with spikes on).
There are a few small niggles. After emerging from your vault, it takes a while to get going – a problem that Fallout 3 did not have.
The settlements system feels inessential at best and irritating at worst.
There is more music, as mentioned, but there is not enough of the good stuff, the brilliant, inventive 1950s jazz tracks in the vein of The Ink Spots that made Fallout 3 uniquely memorable.
Although companions are more important this time around, the mechanism for interacting with them is very clumsy. You don’t ever really get the option to have proper, fluid conversations with your comrades – you can, however, press a button to repeatedly ask them for their thoughts.
Also, an RPG this complex should really be played on a computer – the menus are little hard to navigate with an XBox or PlayStation controller.
And towards the end of the game, large numbers of fetch quests translate into a lot of fast-travelling from location to location – with long load times, which starts to irritate.
But don't be put off. Fallout 4 takes an existing, exceptionally well-executed concept and set of gameplay mechanics, and builds more of it.
The effect is that you feel you really are exploring a vast, well populated world – not a game built using the copy-and-paste functions on a editor.
And it is a truly huge world. For Fallout 3 veterans, experiencing it will feel like a return to a welcoming, albeit severely irradiated, home. Filled with mutants.
artslife@thenational.ae
