I was going to give this another shot, but I actually got so pissed off at this that I just gave up and quit. It is genuinely way worse than I remember it being.

Fallout 4 is slow, sluggish, and boring. Every action feels weird and delayed. The UI is among the worst I've ever experienced in a video game. Menus within menus, inconsistent buttons to get out of said menus, and I swear sometimes the game straight up drops button inputs.

For aiming to feel anything close to decent with a keyboard & mouse, you have to edit the ini files to disable mouse acceleration and make it so that vertical sensitivity isn't always half of horizontal sensitivity. The fact that this is even a thing in a 2015 game, well after PC gaming became more prominent, is fucking baffling to me. Options in general in this are impressively limited. You can't even change brightness settings or FOV in-game.

Exploring the world sucks because it's ugly and uninteresting. Everything is an ugly shade of brown, gray, or green and it all looks smeared together like someone took a shit in their hand and wiped it on a canvas. Enemies blend in with the environment too easily and love to hide behind corners, making most encounters a game of hide and fucking seek.

Skills and general RPG mechanics are gone. All you really have are perks, which leave much to be desired. You're pretty much required to get stuff related to guns and combat because so much of the game is a generic shootbang. Quests all just involve killing things. Most locations are just dungeons with things to kill and a treasure chest at the end. The honest truth is that this is basically a looter shooter in disguise as a Fallout game. What's bizarre about this is that the combat isn't even good. Like sure, the gunplay is technically better than the previous Fallout games, but I can't stand how this game feels. Something about the flow and feel of combat in this compared to 3/New Vegas really rubs me the wrong way.

I'll admit I do kind of like the crafting mechanics and the base building stuff. It's clunky, but you do get a good amount of freedom with it. Ultimately, it comes off as kind of pointless though.

I recall my first playthrough of this, I did almost drop it due to similar feelings. I don't know what happened, but I think I somehow managed to push myself to finish it and eventually got used to things. I don't think I have the ability to do that anymore. Used to think this game was merely mediocre, but now I think it just sucks.

Complete dogshit, absolutely the worst of the franchise, painfully unfinished.

Having to scoop up hundreds of useless junk items to feed into a settlement system that is quarter-baked at best? All XP gains nerfed to force you into leveling through settlements? The endless level grind instead of directed character builds? The painfully stupid story with characters you hate and a plot that makes no sense?

Just about every single part of this game could be and has been done better by the other 3D Fallouts. Fallout 76 (I know, I know) nailed the building and scavenging aspect by divorcing it from the underdone settlement management system, and New Vegas is the vastly superior RPG in just about every other way that matters. To make Fallout 4 works requires a boatload of mods and zero self-respect.

I do have to begrudgingly give it kudos for finally making a character controller that doesn't feel like complete shit, and changing how power armor works away from being just "the best armor" and into something with weight and feeling

Playing this game is knowing you're stuck on the hamster wheel, hating it, and continuing anyway.

Fun game! I just need to talk to whoever thought it was a great idea to lock saving behind the sleeping mechanic on Survival difficulty.

To put into perspective why this is an abhorrent design decision made by absolute fucking dumbasses who couldn't tie their shoes, even under the threat of gunpoint, you have to consider:

- This is a Bethesda game. Halfway through the tutorial on this most recent playthrough, my game crashed. Imagine being halfway across the map and you haven't saved in a while. While this sort of thing is true for any game that withholds saving like this, it simply isn't acceptable when the scope of your game is so large that these sort of technical hiccups are more inevitable than anything else.
- The combat mechanics and scenarios were evidently not built around this. To give a lesser example, the warehouse you have to clear to get to Diamond City requires a significant amount of cheesing if you want to see it through, and this is only expedited and compounded when you step outside and have to deal with multiple snipers. To give the most textbook example of this, one of the very first quests in Fallout 4 has you dealing with a Deathclaw. This Deathclaw only gets spongier with each progressive difficulty option, and by the time you've turned Survival on, can easily one-shot you. Given that you have to fight a litany of raiders before this encounter begins, you already start the fight with reduced resources. Unless you chose to pick off the remaining raiders with the laser musket the game hands you before you decide to pick up the minigun, good luck running around the second you have to reload that minigun. The only way this fight is even remotely fair is if you cheese it by going back inside the building you came out of, running back up to its roof, and "stealth killing" it from the roof while it runs around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find you. The big issue with this approach is that it drains you of your ammo for the minigun, seeing as there's no real chance that you're getting a clean shot on that thing while it's moving around. Seeing as you'll probably need that minigun if you want to have a fair fight in places like the aforementioned warehouse, this is less than optimal. Once again, this is one of the first quests in the game. It would hardly surprise me if they didn't test this thing, that's how poorly thought out this is.
- One of the enemy types in this is a mole rat that will suicide bomb you. If you're lucky and have enough distance from one, this isn't a problem. But if even a single one of those things surprises you, you better start hoping your last save was recent.
- If you're playing on PC, none of this is an issue! Just install a mod that allows you to customize the rules to whatever you're comfortable with. If you're playing on a console, in particular anything PlayStation-related, you're shit out of luck.

What I love about Survival difficulties in games like these is that they force you to engage with the minutiae of the game's world. Having to actually scout for empty bottles so you can pour water into them is far more compelling than using what would be that water for boring, barely noticeable stat bonuses on regular difficulties. In this regard, Fallout 4's survival mode adds a nice layer to an already pretty fun game. But good lord, unless you're in a situation where you can circumvent the baffling decision to restrict saving in this way, I can't recommend it. Unless you're already halfway through the game, it makes the game nearly unplayable, and I'm not mincing my words here. It's genuinely that bad.

I've been keeping up with the tabletop game Wolves Upon the Coast lately, part of the current glut of fantasy heartbreakers but distinguished by some mechanical novelty in service to its focus on sacrifice in the pursuit of power. Where most games in this genre award character advancement based on the acquisition of wealth, Wolves grants the equivalent of a level each time a player boasts that she'll accomplish something difficult, dangerous, and impractical. There's a fanzine which characterizes the effect of this on play as dividing adventures into two types: one in the pursuit of glory and one in the pursuit of wealth with which to finance the former. It's compared to potlatch: adventure for the sake of experience is a wealth-destroying process.

Fallout 4 wasn't designed with this dynamic in mind: if it were, in fact, about spending hours gathering up resources and recruiting support for a big, symbolic attack on a raider camp that does more harm than good but advances your personal prestige, it might be a good videogame. For the first ten to fifteen hours, however, the thin trickle of good ammunition you loot off corpses doesn't really compensate you for the amount you've expended. Early adventuring is typically a net loss of resources unless you judiciously limit yourself to the absolutely miserable pipe weapons.

This is the game's way, I think, of pushing you into its other systems, its scavenging, crafting, and base-building. In my twenty-ish hours with the game, the only quests I really engaged with were for the Minutemen, which function as a tutorial for the settlements accompanied by a man who sounds vaguely confused and embarrassed by every line he delivers. Construction in the game is limited, somehow both counterintuitive and excessively simple, and typically represents a process that could be automated, but which instead demands manual engagement so as to keep it in the forefront of the player's mind: God forbid someone put down a sleeping bag without your permission.

I'm sure it's quite possible to play without ever engaging with the settlements, but if set up properly they provide you with too steady a stream of wealth to pass up. Getting to such a point involves a certain amount of skill point investment, as do the crafting skills which allow you to keep up with the game's damage scaling. There's no builds in Fallout 4, as one doesn't so much choose to focus on a certain approach as on getting one aspect of the singular, optimal end result, a character with good equipment and boosts to damage output, before the others. It's an utterly maximalist experience in which every mechanic is an intended part of the gameplay loop.

Like eating chocolate alongside potato chips, the alternation of base-building and dungeon-clearing works well to keep the player in its thrall: the inadequacy of each system fosters a craving for the other. In the absence of self-control, what broke this cycle for me was finally deciding to go to Diamond City, where about fifteen minutes of dialogue filled me with enough disgust to quit.

In light of the game being a single-player gacha, criticism of its actual content feels petty, but a few points stick out. Why are half the songs on the radio recycled from Fallout 3? Why does the prewar sequence present the period in exactly the same terms as the setting's propaganda?

Really mixed bag on this one. As many other people have, I finally decided to jump into Fallout 4 because of the recent Fallout Show. In terms of pure storytelling and character work, the show is miles ahead of the game. Aside from that, the dialogue was just as big of a disappointment. I focussed my stats on perception, charisma and intelligence and that choice was probably the worst way to play this game. No interesting dialogue choices opened up for me and I don't think I experienced a single questline that I could alter in any meaningful way. While that is harsh critique for an RPG, I still enjoyed the gameplay loop of exploration --> combat --> loot quite a bit. The individual places were definitely put together with care, though that care lacks in a lot of other areas. But for the love of god, please Bethesda, find better ways to integrate your menus into your games. It really takes you out of the world if you constantly have to open different menus for every single interaction.

Fun Entertaining
Lacks many RPG elements from the old games
Dialogue is literally yes, no (yes later), maybe, exposition question, or occasionally funny sarcastic remark (still yes).
Good gunplay and enemy variety
Lots of map and areas to explore
Lots of upgrades and loot
This game feels like it has good bones but is ultimately half baked with shallow story, dialogue, irrelevant choices, and factions.