I hated the tone of this game. It is Fallout at it's most goofy and lamest.

The intro sums up this game's lameness nicely. Before Fallout 4, every Fallout title had a creepy and foreboding intro cutscene that sets the tone and mood very well. Fallout 4 has a mopey and melodramatic cinematic intro, narrated by an unimaginably boring replacement of Ron Perlman, sheared of all edges. This is Fallout at it's most accessible and sentimental, and it's most uninteresting.

Is it an okay rpg looter shooter? Sure. I had some fun, for a bit, playing a sniper with a cartoonishly overpowered rifle. It has some nice atmospheric moments as well, if you ignore how claylike and garishly colourful every npc and location can look like. It can have good sound design, particularly when the decaying urban environment creaks and breathes around you, and the first few radiation storms were brief moments that made the world feel actually foreboding, but these moments are glimpses of a more interesting game.

Open world games should give you cool and interesting worlds to explore. I love Fallout when it provides a bleak and dark world to explore, with bizarre people, places, and politics, juxtaposed with some tasteful heapings of self-aware goofiness and black humour. Fallout 4 asked me to explore an overly lame and dorky world who's overall story felt unclear and confused, and to endure a protagonist who constantly sooks about his missing baby boy, and for these reasons, I sunk around 30 hours into this caricature before I quit.

Which came first: Ranch or Cool Ranch?