I played this a few months ago and have been turning it over in my mind ever since. And seeing as there are no other reviews on the site yet I guess I'll finally take a crack at putting my thoughts into words.

Saving You From Yourself is a game about the gatekeeping trans people face when getting hormone replacement therapy. The game puts you as a therapist who must decide if a trans woman is "trans enough" to start HRT. I wish I could say that it goes without saying that the idea of someone being "trans enough" is ridiculous and wrong and transphobic; that someone thinking about gender things and coming to the conclusion that they are transgender is enough and should be enough to get the medical care they want/need. But unfortunately, society is by and large cruel to us and thinks that making trans people "prove" their trans-ness in increasingly mean-spirited and arcane ways is actually good-hearted and caring. My issue with where this comes up in the game is that it leaves most of that up to you. The game simply presents with you the choice to give HRT or withhold it with little to no commentary on the choice you make. So, from that angle it isn't necessarily a game that I would suggest to any people who don't know about the process of trans healthcare but are willing to learn. And certainly wouldn't suggest it to people unwilling to learn. So the game doesn't feel like it could be any sort of educational tool to point out something wrong in society. But it also isn't something that I can look at as a trans woman and feel like there's much value in playing this. I am already extremely aware of how shitty the healthcare system is and how it's a fucking gauntlet that I'm surprised anyone is able to get through at all. So I wouldn't recommend any trans people play this, either.

The one thing that I think is thoroughly positive, though, is that the game does show the perseverance and the endurance of trans people and the trans community. We put up with a lot of shit but we're still here. We still exist. We care for one another in ways a lot of the world seems incapable of. No matter how unkind people may be, we are still here and we will always be here. And that absolutely rules.

All that being said, I think messy art deserves to exist and that it should exist. And this definitely falls into the category of 'messy art'. I am glad that this exists. I'm glad that this was a game I was able to play. Hell, I'm glad that this is able to be on Steam. I'm glad the creator was able to make the thing they wanted to make. But I'm not sure if I actually enjoyed it.

It's a messy game so maybe it's fitting that this review is a bit of a mess. I have no idea what rating to give this because, depending on when you ask me, it could be one star or it could be five stars, so I'll just give it a "I'm glad it exists" out of five.

never before has a game so thoroughly understood what i seek in a relationship

edit: okay i feel a lil bad about this becoming my most popular review despite only being a one line joke so i'll add that this game is legitimately a sweet and caring look at bdsm in a relationship. it's very heartfelt and well-written in a way that i've seen in barely any other game (or piece of media). my review may be a jokey joke but the game isn't and people should play it, ok thanks

well I finally went and finished it. I've started this game probably a dozen times in my life, as far back as borrowing a friend's copy to play on my psone (the lil round one, not the big original kind) in 2001. And to no one's surprise: it's really fucking good! It's a classic for a reason.

Over the years I had already had a lot of major story moments spoiled and so I was expecting the game to not quite land or not really hit as hard as it did but it turns out that the execution is so strong that it didn't really matter that I went into a scene and said "Oh, this is the part where [redacted] dies" because that scene still Fuckin Hits!!

And there was still stuff I hadn't heard about! The submarine! Playing as Tifa! So there was still fun surprises for me here, too. And that moment when I finally got Cloud back after he's gone for a while? Hit so fuckin' hard!! The boy!!! He's back!!! Love him. Love it. Love it all.

I don't have many complaints about this game but one of them is all the little minigames you have to play. I think it is an interesting/cool idea to say "your character is going to perform an action that we can't really make work with turn-based combat so instead we'll do a lil bespoke minigame so the player isn't just watching a cutscene". I do, generally, like that idea. But so many of the minigames it has you do feel like unresponsive shit-garbage to control and frequently have little to no feedback to if you're even doing them correctly (or if you are doing things wrong, what it is you're doing wrong). So many frustrating moments that really feel like they should just make them more lenient. Just let me get through your story!! Don't be super strict about making sure I perform CPR correctly or am good enough at a military parade or raced a dumb bird or whatever else. I think the only one I really liked was the snowboarding but even that was kinda fucked up because of the Steam version's love/hate relationship with my controller.

My only other big complaint is Cid because, wow, that dude sucks ass. No wonder I've never heard anyone really talk about him when they talk about the characters in this game. His whole thing is really just he's an angry misogynist and I guess I'm supposed to think he's... cool? Because at the end he realizes he was mad about something he was wrong about? Fuck off into the sun, Cid. This is maybe the only FF I've played where I disliked a party member to the degree that I found him actually repellent. When I got to the section where I had to play as him I looked up a walkthrough to figure out how long I was stuck in that hell and what the quickest way through it was. Luckily, it was blessedly short.

Red XIII's line "It's hard to stand on your own two legs" has really stuck with me, maybe more than any other individual line of dialogue has in a long time. It's just such a succinct summation of part of this game's theme, y'know? You can't do it on your own, you have to be ready and willing to not just ask for help but also to accept it. You need people around you because life is hard and we can't make it on our own. Also, if you're an alien dog in disguise pretending to be a human solider it is literally difficult to stand on your own two feet.

At the start of the game I was a staunch Aerti shipper but the relationship that builds between Cloud and Tifa throughout this is so sweet it got me dangerously close to becoming a Cloti shipper. Although in my heart of hearts I know the real answer here is Claerti.

One last thing: like I alluded to above, the Steam version is super fucked! It didn't properly recognize my controller and had no way to rebind them so my only option would've been to do it via Steam's controller shit but that would've messed it up for every other game I play! It sucks! And if you use a controller the button prompts don't update correctly so you have to the keyboard binds and how those map to your controller! It sucks! Bad port! I think the only advantage this has is that it's easier to plug into a cheat engine table if you want that for any particular reason, y'know.


Let me tell you a tale of the wasteland. The Courier was wandering, as she is wont to do, and stumbled upon Vault 34. She made her way through a cave full of geckos and the irradiated hallways of the vault full of feral ghouls, all the while uncovering bits and pieces of the story of what happened to the vault dwellers. Too many people, too many guns, a struggle for power, and a broken reactor. A tragic story but stories like that come a dime a dozen in the wasteland. Eventually, the Courier made it to the bottom of the vault and found a suspicious terminal that allowed her to do one of two things: reroute the vault's controls or close the reactor vents. No one had told her to do anything about either of them and she wasn't sure what doing either would actually do. So she pushed a button and left to continue her adventures elsewhere.

This was what a large chunk of my experience with New Vegas was like: stumbling backwards into an area or a quest, getting a fraction of context on what is supposed to be going on, and then being asked to make a Grey Moral Choice™ to decide the fate of some strangers. I looked up what was up with Vault 34 and it turns out you can either let some people who are trapped in the vault out or close the vents so the nearby NCR Sharecroppers would have less radiation coming out of the vault and messing up their crops. It maybe would've been an interesting choice if the game had ever indicated that to me or found some way to communicate that to me. But instead I just tripped on into the last objective in the quest and pressed a random button. This quest was basically incoherent and it happened with enough other quests that I encountered that entire swathes of the game felt incoherent.

What I want to say is that the writing was strong enough and that individual stories worked well enough that I didn't need it to all fit together nicely and be presented in a way that was comprehensible but honestly I'm not sure I can really say that. I visited nearly every location and did every quest I could find but so much of the writing is relatively bland. The game is so chock full of uninteresting characters and stale stories that I found it hard to maintain interest beyond the most basic level of "I guess I should be paying attention so I have some idea of the larger plot." Maybe time is a factor and ten years of other games and other stories make this game feel a bit more stale now but I can't imagine that would effect every bit of writing across the entire game, right?

I'd like to end this with at least one positive note, though. I think this game does a much better job at connecting back to the roots of Fallout 1 and 2 than 3 does. This is mostly due to New Vegas's proximity but just the simple act of having people be like "oh, yeah, I grew up in Shady Sands" or whatever makes the franchise feel much more like a singular whole whereas F3 is just like "I dunno, this ghoul you might know wandered across the entire country and turned into a tree or whatever".

Oh, and the game only crashed to desktop twice and corrupted saves four times which is much lower than I was expected considering how monumentally broken and barely functional the engine is! So, good job on that one, New Vegas.

YES the third person shooting is kinda mid and YES the later levels get some pretty mean design choices that almost force you into grinding earlier levels for xp and gil and YES the first three-quarters of the game have very little meaningful or interesting story and YES everything with Omega and the Protomateria raises a lot of Big Lore questions about things going on in FF7.

BUT.

That last bit of the game! The last, like, three levels or something! It's all kinda sick as hell! The Rosso and Azul boss fights are just so damn cool. And basically everything once you get to the Weiss fight?? It's all anime bullshit and I love it. Vincent is great. What a cool guy. Yuffie is fun to have around sometimes! The little bit of Cloud/Tifa/Barret you get rules! Reeve sucks! And I guess Cid is there, too!

And I think the choice at the end of each level to convert your points into either XP or Gil is genuinely cool! And having your RPG stats to level up helps set this apart from the majority of shooters, which is neat!

I think I'm going to be rotating Rosso the Crimson in my mind for a long time.

If you don't like the edgy goth twink game then, I dunno, try letting joy into your heart or something.

I played at launch and had a fair amount of fun. Shooting feels good, movement feels good, writing is pretty good, all around pretty good. But when I got to what the 'endgame' was at the time, it became a confusing slog. You had to get your special number up but it stopped giving you items that made your special number go up unless you did specific things but it wasn't very good at actually telling you what specific things you needed to do. So I spent something nearly two weeks making next to no progress. Granted, it made for a good podcast game but I still burnt out on that eventually. Then Curse of Osiris came out a few weeks later and when I came back I felt so out of it that I wasn't sure how to get my special number up so I just did the new story stuff and it wasn't very good. Not particularly interesting writing or mechanics but the infinite forest had kind of an interesting look to it.

Then I came back and tried again when the game transitioned from Battlenet to Steam and was thoroughly confused. I had never finished Osiris so I wanted to wrap that up and do the other DLCs but that had all been buried away somewhere because they don't want people to play it? And there was zero explanation about what I should be doing? It just gave me a bunch of quests and told me to use some new mechanics and was an absolute mess. I cannot imagine what that must've been like for anyone coming to the game for the first time. I didn't take long for me to just give up on the game after that. What a weird experience.

On the surface it seems to be just a silly little game about smashing an office with your hammer but quickly becomes something more than that. But also it's got some real good hammerfeel to it. I could just smash that shit all day, to be honest.

This game is... fine. I guess. So much has been said about it, I feel like I shouldn't carry on too long about it. Like, yeah, Lara is a pretty terrible archaeologist. She does all the usual archaeologist stuff of traveling to a foreign place and stealing all their cultural objects but then, on top of that, she also shoots whoever happens to be living there and destroys entire ancient buildings, like, come on girl, what are you even doing.

The main plot feels so empty for a lot of it. The vast majority of the game is just "rescue Lara's friend(s)" and it constantly finds new reasons why you can't quite get to them yet or whatever. Pretty much everything interesting about the plot is developed via the collectible journals which sure is an interesting choice.

The puzzle solving and platforming aspects were mostly fine? It got pretty janky in some spots and the majority of my deaths were trying to make a jump and Lara not grabbing or the camera turning her mid-air and making me fall to my death but when it works it's completely competent, I guess.

Speaking of completely competent: The shooting. I liked the combat early on when encounters were very small-scale (with usually only 3-5 enemies) but once it gave me the assault rifle and grenade launcher, every fight was like a dozen dudes and it got very boring very quickly. At first I had thought this was a response to that half-joking criticism people like to level at Uncharted where they say that Nathan Drake is a mass murderer with how much dude-shootin' he does but it turns out, no, they were just slowly escalating the encounter size until I had a proper arsenal. At one point it took away all the weapons except the bow and that was awesome!! I really liked that part!! More of that, please!!

I feel like collectibles in games can be somewhat controversial but I kind of liked some of what this game did? The journals are where a lot of character and plot development actually happens (which is maybe an indictment of the actual main plot of the game) and the artifacts give nice little tidbits of actual history (that I really wish were longer). But those two gave me enough that I made sure to get all of both of those before I finished the game. There's a ton of other collectibles too, though, and those definitely feel like a waste of my time for the sake of padding out the game. The GPS Caches, for example, give a minuscule amount of experience but there is approximately eight trillion of them in each zone to find.

Lara and Sam are definitely gay, right? Sam calls Lara 'sweetie' several times and in basically every cutscene they're in, they're holding hands or putting their arms around each other and I'm choosing to read that as romantic because it being a game about a woman rescuing her girlfriend is a thousand times more interesting to me.

Fuck QTEs, always and forever. It took me, like, three QTEs to get tired of mashing a button to do a thing. And in the prologue/tutorial section, the QTEs weren't displaying properly so I had to watch Lara's skull get crushed by a boulder like eight times before the game decided to tell me what button I needed to be pushing. Luckily it seemed to just be like that for the first couple because if the whole game had been that then I never would've finished this. Not just from QTE frustration but also because I got real tired real quick of seeing all the brutal and gruesome shit they do to Lara here. From what I understand, they tone it down in the sequels which is good, but oh my god it's so awful here. Truly hate it.

And one last thing: fuck the bright white flashes that you get from almost every menu option at a campfire. I had to close my eyes every time I clicked to buy an upgrade or unlock a skill or fast travel cause that shit is so uncomfortable. Fuck off, don't do that, what the hell.

Anyway. It was funny to play this after having watched the 2018 Tomb Raider movie because that takes some of this game's plot (Queen Himiko, Yamatai, some other proper nouns) so every time I recognized something I could be like "wow cool reference to a movie that came out 5 years later".

Very middling game that was a generally okay way to spend 13 hours. I feel like at a different time I could have more venom for this game and the way it's indicative of the design tendencies of AAA games but I just don't have that in me right now because all I wanted was a cool place to runny jumpy collect things and rescue cute girlfriend and that is basically what I got.

I think the nicest thing I can say about this game is that the shooting feels okay. It's nothing special but at least it doesn't feel actively bad. Unfortunately, that doesn't get it very far because I never felt that the plasmid abilities felt particularly good or fun or interesting so the combat ends up feeling like an overall let-down.

And then there's the writing. It's a steaming hot pile of racist centrist garbage. There's a single named black character and you kill her because apparently black people are just as bad as racist white people?? Absolute horseshoe theory nonsense. Total garbage. Centrism is bad for the brain, y'all.

God, I love this game so much. The haters are wrong. Lightning is cool as hell and so are all the other characters. My only complaint is how long the beginning feels because of how slowly it dripfeeds mechanics to you. Otherwise it's a fantastic game.

This game absolutely whips ass. It's got a powerful aesthetic, a beautiful low-poly style, a moody soundtrack, and overall immaculate vibes. The card game combat is fun and the progression of unlocking more cards made it fun to occasionally re-tune my deck.

I can't say enough good things about this game's style. It looks and sounds amazing and has an aesthetic that you don't see a lot - there just aren't enough games set in mid-to-late 1800s rural Russia centered around the local folklore and mythology. Both the 3d and 2d art of the game is striking and evocative but I feel like the game really shines in its environments. Each place feels so specially crafted and the camera so carefully placed. The developers clearly have a strong sense of cinematography and that comes through the most during the cutscenes which are, across the board, gorgeous.

The difficulty spikes from time-to-time in a way that sometimes feels like I would need to go back and customize my deck to prepare for a specific fight but other times just felt like an encounter's numbers were just too high to deal with. The options menu does allow changing the difficulty at any time so I was able to drop it down to Easy when necessary, and it even has a Skip Battle button for when something got to be too frustrating (and it doesn't punish you for using that - a mistake that I feel a lot of games would've made).

Don't sleep on this game, I think it's a genuinely incredible thing that deserves way more attention than what it's gotten so far. And, hey, at the time of review it's getting to be Halloween season and I think this would be the perfect game for that time of year.

Also there's a card game in this card game so you can card game while you card game.

This game is Cool and Has Some Vibes and I Like it but I'm not utterly bowled over by it the way just about everyone else seems to be. One thing in particular that I like about this game is how much it wants you to succeed. It wants you to win and it wants you to make progress so that you can uncover the story. Over time, it gives you cards that are more powerful to the point that some are clearly overpowered and can carry you through a run to a win and it's nice to have one of these deckbuilder roguelike-y games feel like it doesn't just want you to understand the mechanics and internalize how they work but it is actively cheering for you, even though the NPCs you talk to and the aesthetics of the game and everything else is in that traditional sort of "well you died. try again, fuck-o" sort of attitude. And I think that that is part of why I feel that this game is more successful in it "meta" aspect than the developer's previous games.

A few months ago, when I was playing the rest of Fallout 4, I got to Nuka-World, found out that the premise of it is helping some raider gangs to build a bigger/better slave empire and I just kind of checked out of it. The game offers a quest to kill all the raiders instead of helping them, I did it, and my reward was the previously-enslaved NPCs glitching out and taking all their clothes off and then nothing else meaningful happened. I moved on with life. But now I felt a draw to go back. Maybe I missed out on something. Maybe within the rancid outer layer is a core that has something special. Maybe there is something here to point to that makes this awful DLC 'worth it.'

Dear reader, I am sad to say there is no such thing.

The Nuka-World DLC was made in response to fans at launch saying that they wanted more content with raiders and so Bethesda planned this out as a way to spend time with them and to add more depth to raider factions than what there was in the base game. And, see, that is a pitch I can get behind. Because in every Fallout game, from the isometric beginnings to the first-person present, the raiders are pretty much just murder junkies (and occasionally cannibals). They exist to fill a gap in the enemy progression and nothing more. Bethesda needed an enemy tougher than the random mutated bugs and critters but not as strong as the Super Mutants. And the raiders fill that gap. Fleshy bags of XP and loot that are pure evil that come from nowhere for you to freely murder the shit out of them without as much as a second thought as to who they are or why you're murdering them. The raiders are humans of pure function. So, the idea that you might actually get to sit down and talk to them and find out what's up with the raiders and why they are the way they are... yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone take a crack at that because no one really has so far.

Unfortunately, this DLC is a full product and not just a pitch. In practice, Nuka-World is a big map for you to go to with plenty of locations to explore and some very bare bones narrative to send you from one point of interest to the next. You arrive, are appointed leader of all the raiders and then you are almost immediately sent out to clear out the rest of the theme park of the various non-raider monsters and robots that have somehow completely confounded three rather large gangs. Each gang has a leader that you get one meaningful conversation with but even these are pretty disappointing. Instead of making raiders with depth, they just made different flavors of raider with fun coats of paint. Instead of generic murder junkies, you now have the Disciples (Original Flavor™ Murder Junkies), The Operators (Money-hungry Murder Junkies), and The Pack (Furry Murder Junkies). But that's kinda it. It's not like you get much background about who any of them are or where they come from or why they decided to be murder junkies. And after those initial conversations? They have nothing meaningful to say and will only send you on some classic Bethesda Radiant Quests to go murder people or enslave them. Cool.

Okay so it's a total whiff on the narrative end. But a theme park! Surely this is some cool locations with fun aesthetics! It's not just bombed out buildings or military bases or what! It's rollercoasters and fun houses and a zoo for some reason! And this all just... largely didn't do anything for me. The little bit of interest I had in it the aesthetic wore off fast, though, because this DLC has a lot of stuff in it and it makes you go to almost all of it. I recommend turning the volume slider for dialogue all the way down because the constantly looping theme park PA system messages about buying overpriced maps or how such-and-such a ride is out of order get old the third time they loop and get very old the eighteenth time they loop.

The one nice thing I can say about this is that they brought the Hubologists back and I think that's fun. I don't know how the religion from the West Coast games ended up in the Commonwealth but I'm not asking questions. They dose you with radiation and will give you way more lore than all three raider gangs combined before their heads all explode in a the best quest of the entire DLC.

Total ass DLC that is a huge missed opportunity because they just wanted to give you more. More locations to look at, more garbage to loot, more functional mechanical horseshit to wade through. As if the base game somehow didn't have enough. What the hell.

Spelunky 2 is a good game. It's biggest fault is that it's a sequel to a game that I consider to be perfect. How could they possibly have followed that up with anything other than something that was less-than? Disappointment seemed inevitable. And while I don't think Spelunky 2 is anywhere near a 'bad game' or anything like that, it did get to a point that I was tired of it and reinstalled Spelunky HD to play that instead.

My single biggest issue with Spelunky 2 is the path to the secret area and ending. Just like HD, 2 has you grab specific items and use them in specific places or in specific ways in order to unlock a door at the end of a "normal" run to get to an extra area (2 actually does this twice which is a fun change). In 2, the chain of events is much more complex meaning that it also becomes more restrictive. HD's secret ending used a lot of passive items (aka items that you pick up and show up in the HUD but you don't manually hold or activate) which left a lot of freedom in how you wanted to play. Use your whip everywhere or carry something like a shotgun or mattock or whatever. It didn't force you to play a certain way. Whereas in 2, because you so often have to actually carry an important item in your hands, the game forces you to play the way it wants you to play. And, to me, this is a significantly less fun way to play, especially because I've played enough Spelunky to always want to get to the secret ending, of course I'm going to go through this tedious chain of events to get there. And then, even if you go through all the required nonsense to get to the secret area, it feels like you've been additionally restricted just by elements of that secret area itself. Don't have good movement item on your back? No kapala? Don't have much equipment? Unless you're one of the best spelunkers in the world, you won't last long.

But there is a pretty good way around all the tedium: co-op. It allows you to split up the responsibilities of carrying the various items through levels makes it significantly more manageable. And with all the improvements to the co-op play, it's a much more feasible way to play the game. I've been playing with a friend who is over 5000 miles away from me and it's felt generally fine which has honestly been surprising!

I originally had a much longer and more thorough 'review' of the game in which I dissected lots of little bits of game design. Moles are bad. The way 2 plays with veteran players expectations is fun. This like that. But, honestly, this was all I really needed or wanted to say. Spelunky 2 is a great game. It's just too bad that it's the sequel to a perfect one.

Fallout 2 improves upon the foundation of Fallout 1 in many ways and when people are reminiscing about "the good old Fallouts", the things they're thinking about are almost entirely from Fallout 2.

The combat is a smoother experience and while it has some issues (that I'll get into later), it is a generally better game to play. The writing is, on average, better than FO1 (with the caveat that the humor tends to be much more abrasive - either opening mocking the game or its characters, or winking and nodding at how silly videogames are. I'm not a fan of either of those things but your mileage may vary). The crowning bit of this game, though is the ending. It's a pretty great ending that actually sets up one of the biggest facts of the setting that the Bethesda games later leaned into quite heavily.

But before I get too much further or get into too much detail, I need to get into some of the bad stuff. First off, the game is deeply racist. There's the very obvious stuff like Hakunin and Sulik both being bizarre mish-mashes of actual cultural traditions which result in deeply offensive caricatures. But there's also an idea that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic fiction that humanity would somehow "regress" back to more "basic" types of cultural, specifically that tribal or indigenous cultures are somehow "lesser" than more "advanced" cultures. This idea is straight-up racist and deeply offensive to indigenous peoples because it assumes that they are somehow inherently less intelligent and less capable because they live in tents and not in bombed-out buildings. Fallout 2 then takes it a step further and leans into this idea by having people (especially in the early game) refer to your character as "a tribal" and will talk down to you because of it. The game never seems to do this knowingly, either, because it never really remarks on how that's bad or anything - it just considers it a truth of the setting. On top of that, there's the classic Fallout racism that is in each and every game with ghouls. If you have the ghoul companion then you're going to have to tell him to wait outside whenever you enter a building because people 'don't like his kind around here.' The game at least seems aware of what it's doing with this but still isn't doing much to make note that people are being racist and that's a bad thing. It's once again just considered a factual part of the fiction. At least when Fallout 1 was racist it had the good graces to be ashamed and try to hide it a bit.

My other main issue with the game is that the combat, while an improvement FO1, is a slog. At the start it's okay because it's just the beginning and, hey, whatever, it's fine. But by the end of the game, nothing about the combat has changed in any meaningful way except now instead of fighting geckos and rad scorpions, you're fighting groups of Enclave soldiers in power armor. So you either have to do even more of this not-great combat to level up to even up the playing field so you can maybe survive all these random encounters or dump a bunch of your points into the Outdoorsman skill so you can avoid the random encounters completely. It's a poorly thought out system that seems to punish you for avoiding combat (because you get less experience) but also punish you for engaging in combat (by draining resources like health and ammo). It's not fun at all and is only worse because the game never adds any sort of interesting combat mechanics for you to implement. There are no skills, no special weapons, nothing that would make you approach combat in a different or more interesting way. The entire game you're either shooting things with a gun or hitting them in melee.

The issues with the combat connect into the later parts of the game where for the final third or so, the game sends you on a series of very long fetch quests. "Oh you just got here, we need you to go somewhere else to get one item or talk to a person." Over and over and over again. So you end up having tons of these high-level encounters while you're running all across the map to try and find every macguffin to move the plot along. It's an awful grind that exists only to drag out the length of the game. The actual end area of the Enclave Base is good but I'm not sure if it's even fully worth how much of an awful slog all these fetch quests are.

And that brings us to the ending which, outside of one specific part, I think it's pretty good! The most interesting parts of the story are here with some big reveals about the Enclave and the truth about the world as a whole. It should be said though, that none of those interesting reveals are ever hinted at when they really should have been just to let you know that something bigger was going on and not just evil people being cartoon villains (okay, it still is somewhat that but not entirely).

That one issue I mentioned about the ending is, once again, combat. After everything is said and done, you have to fight through a final boss. Despite Fallout 2 being touted as the game you can talk your way through, you still have to fight the biggest damage sponge in the game (and on a time limit, no less!) For a game that encourages so many different types of play and wants you to play around with how you interact with the world, it's absolutely bizarre that the ending is a fight with a big slab of beef with a minigun.

So overall the game is an improvement over Fallout 1 and I'd say a pretty alright game. Just don't be afraid to open up a character editor and give yourself some stats so you don't have to deal with atrocious end-game combat. It's a game you play for the story, there's no good reason to suffer through unrelated parts just to get to the good bits.

Oh and one final thought: I just want to give a shoutout to the talking scorpion. It's the funniest gag in the entire game and maybe the whole franchise. It plays within the game's setting (instead of most of the humor which can get pretty meta both about Fallout and about videogames as a whole) but it also has interactions with the game's mechanics and the player's stats. It's very clever and silly and fun and good.