AlexaLily
1998
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.
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.
2016
Watch_Dogs 2 is a pretty clear step up over the first game in every possible way. It feels better to play, the world is more interesting, much of the excessive fluff got trimmed out, and (most importantly) the characters are actually likable now! Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, Josh, and Horatio are all great characters that were a ton of fun every time they got to have some dialogue together.
The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.
My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.
But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.
The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.
My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.
But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.
I played an unhealthy amount of this game when I was in college and absolutely loved it. I had never played a Battlefield before it and haven't played another since. Absolute banger of a shooter, both the campaign and multiplayer. I still have some of those MP maps committed to memory.
2019
One time I watched an actual scientist play this for a few hours and talk through all the how's and why's of things worked the way they did and it was one of the most fascinating experiences I've ever seen.
And then I tried to play it myself and I felt like a toddler trying to drive a car.
And then I tried to play it myself and I felt like a toddler trying to drive a car.
2010
Is Deadly Premonition good? No.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
2013
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.
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.
2021
A pleasant little game. Cute writing and art. Not too difficult. Free. Short. But the controls feel kinda clumsy and it isn't always super clear what to do or where to go next. But it's worth a look anyways.
I really liked what I was able to play of Epistory - it's practically my platonic ideal for what a typing game should be. But I have one problem with it that ends up being a pretty big, game-breaking, issue. This game has an egregious amount of screenshake. Everytime you type a letter, everytime you finish a word, just about everything you do causes screenshake and there's no way to disable it. I don't usually get motion sickness from games but this is one of the few examples that made me dizzy to the point of not being able to play it.
2020
Great vibes. Great soundtrack. Fun lil time to explore around a weird world. Some fun visual gags in the world to find. Certain parts of the controls don't feel great (climbing and gliding, specifically) which makes trying to complete everything feel way more tedious than it should.
2021
Frick Frack is a mix of Papers, Please and Dig Dug. It's an interesting little thing about how fracking is bad (it's very bad). Short and free, so it's worth a look if that sounds even remotely interesting.
There is a way to look at Operation Anchorage and read it as a scathing satire of the state of first person shooter campaigns circa 2009. The extreme linearity, the way everyone treats you as the biggest badass, the lack of any meaningful lore or side content. You could look at that and see it being Bethesda saying "look how boring other first person games are. Ours is big and open and and so much Content™!" The problem is that the DLC does absolutely nothing to encourage that reading so instead we're left with an incredibly boring shooter campaign. It really seems like they looked at Call of Duty, looked at their dev tools, and said "yeah we can do that too!"
There is one bit of writing in this that I find particularly interesting: before you go into the simulation there is a terminal that suggests that certain elements of the simulation itself may be exaggerated or incorrect because of the person it was based upon. So you go in thinking that it might get weird (or maybe even wacky) but instead there's nothing that wouldn't reasonable exist in the Fallout universe.
In short, this DLC is a massive missed opportunity and a waste of time.
There is one bit of writing in this that I find particularly interesting: before you go into the simulation there is a terminal that suggests that certain elements of the simulation itself may be exaggerated or incorrect because of the person it was based upon. So you go in thinking that it might get weird (or maybe even wacky) but instead there's nothing that wouldn't reasonable exist in the Fallout universe.
In short, this DLC is a massive missed opportunity and a waste of time.
"Hey so you know how our game has pretty bad combat"
"Yeah"
"What if we made a DLC devoted to really hard encounters that were mostly damage sponge enemies"
"Hmm, I dunno about that, I'm not sure that'll sell well"
"What if we bundle it with the patch to fix the ending that everyone hates"
"Genius!"
"Yeah"
"What if we made a DLC devoted to really hard encounters that were mostly damage sponge enemies"
"Hmm, I dunno about that, I'm not sure that'll sell well"
"What if we bundle it with the patch to fix the ending that everyone hates"
"Genius!"
2009
Bethesda continues the age-old tradition of Fallout games invoking slavery but trying to strip it of any politics and just kind of shrug and be like "it's bad, I guess"
Never in the history of the world has slavery been about a group 'just needing someone to do menial labor that no one wants to do'. It is always 'needing someone to do menial labor and also hating a particular group of people and considering them sub-human'. So to discard that second part is to have a fundamental misunderstanding of slavery and whether that's intentional or not is irrelevant because it makes for borderline irresponsible writing.
And the rest of this DLC is okay I guess. It sure is more Fallout 3.
Never in the history of the world has slavery been about a group 'just needing someone to do menial labor that no one wants to do'. It is always 'needing someone to do menial labor and also hating a particular group of people and considering them sub-human'. So to discard that second part is to have a fundamental misunderstanding of slavery and whether that's intentional or not is irrelevant because it makes for borderline irresponsible writing.
And the rest of this DLC is okay I guess. It sure is more Fallout 3.
2017
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.
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.
2009
Hey, you know how Still Life 1 ended on a whodunnit cliffhanger? Well this game looks at that and says "we don't care, it's solved and the characters know but you don't get to know". Then it goes on to just do whatever the hell it wants with a lot of pretty mediocre writing. The game was also very very broken for me. Several crashes, glitches causing softlocks, clunky controls, and a lack of saves made it way too frustrating to play. I really liked the first game but this was a massive disappointment.