This review contains spoilers
This is hands down one of the worst mainstream video games I think I've ever played.
Normally even with some of the worst games I've played, I can think of a few good things to come out of it, but not here.
The visuals look awful even for 2015. My only guess on why the game looks the way it does was, they heard that Fallout 3 looked like brown and green crap so Bethesda decided to just throw the toaster in the bathtub and destroy the visuals.
The saturation has been turned up so high it makes all the NPCs look like they have high blood pressure, the god rays are out of control and it got so bad I had to turn down almost everything since the game is so poorly optimized I could barely keep a steady framerate, and my PC isn't bad I can run Death Stranding at 60 on Ultra settings so it's 100% the games fault.
The models look awful. Their lip movement looks really bad and almost never actually sync up with the voices.
Another thing I noticed is how low poly the models can look at times take, for example the super mutation form of Dr. Virgil, it looks so low poly and bad looking you'd think it came from a crowdfunded indie game.
The AI is still awful, and not in a so bad its funny way like in 3 and NV it's just bad now.
The Commonwealth is really fucking boring, nothing about it is nearly as interesting as say the Mojave from NV, and to some extent, the Capital Wasteland was more interesting than 4's map. The game has this magnum dong of a map but barely anything in it is remotely interesting. On rare occasions, you might find something interesting like a flying pirate ship stuck in a building run by robots but stuff like that rarely happened. Most of the time all you'll find is an abounded building full of Ghouls errr I mean Zombies (I'll touch on that later). Another thing that makes the Commonwealth are the settlements, the game only has 2 big settlements Diamond City, and Goodneighbor, both are supersmall and both don't feel like the BIG city I want to go to.
Diamond city is this games version of New Vegas "The crown jewel of the Commonwealth", so why does it look like a shanty town with trash all over the place, you can't use the argument that its the post-apocalyptic because this game takes place 200 years after the bombs fall, and if you didn't know this 200 years is a really REALLY long time, by the time in Fallout 2 nearly 80 years after the bombs fall the world was pulling it's self together and trying to better themselves and make the world a better place. Granted it didn't look like New York City but still, Diamond City looks like something I'd see 30 or 40 years after the bombs fall not 200.
Goodneighbor is no different other than it barely meeting the criteria of a "Big City". it's only 2 blocks of a few buildings and nothing else. It's barely a town so why would I never actively want to go there other than being required by the story to do so.
The biggest problem to me though is that the Commonwealth is that it feels like nothing has changed in 200 years. There are still skeletons around from when people died when the bombs fell, most of the buildings are destroyed and full of Gholes, and everything just looks like the bombs had just fallen rather it had been 2 god damn centuries.
The enemies are bland, repetitive, and in some ways way too easy to kill. The enemies list in Fallout 4 is surprisingly small and that's not a good thing. You have your human enemies as generic Raiders, you have robots who are also very generic, You have you're Mirelurks and other mutated monsters like Death Claws. Super Mutants are also here somehow and are now just dumb angry brutes and compared to Super Mutants in the past feel super generic, and the worst of them all and the most prominent are the Gholes which in this game are basically generic zombies, even though it's been 200 years now and most Feral Ghouls have been taken care of but I digress. If you've seen the pattern most of the enemies are really generic and at some points don't make any sense in how they are even here.
Another problem with the enemies is how bullet spongey they are. Since the game's mechanics are more level based now all the enemies are also level based meaning depending on what level you are an enemy will be either super bullet spongy, or easy as hell, case in point The Death Claw. In NV The Death Claw, we're superpowerful enemies that had set states and could kill you almost instantly if you were not careful, here if you're a high enough level you could kill a Death Claw with a 10mm Pistol, try doing that in NV and you'd get your ass handed to you.
The weapons, armor, and loot are much worse than any other Fallout game.
The gunplay feels more floaty than older titles, and since Fallout 4 introduced randomized loot none of the weapons in the game feel special besides the randomized state given to me, the same goes for all of the armor in the game too. In NV almost every weapon and armor were hand made with its own unique stats and so on.
The Power Armor is this was just fine. It's not great and it's not dogshit there just fine. I could rant about how the T-60 power armor makes no sense in the Fallout lore and how Bethesda is retroactively destroying the Fallout lore but at this point, I'd just be sitting here for the next hour explaining every wrong and nitpick everything but I'd rather just get to my final point and the worst part of the whole game.
The character writing and the story are without a doubt the worst part of not just Fallout 4 but of the whole god damn series.
Most of not all the characters feel one-note with barely any real personality aside from three companions in which the writers tried to make fleshed out character.
The writing also fails at creating a good story which is what Fallout is best known for, unfortunately, the story in Fallout 4 is so fucking bad it's almost amazing how this game got so much praise.
None of the plot beats feel interesting, you don't have any real drive to do the main goal of finding your son, because you only saw him for like 30 minutes and since he's a 3-month-old baby you can barely make a connection with him so making it the players primary goal feels flimsy and poorly done. The main plot twist in which your son is actually 60 some years old and you've been frozen for an extra 60 years feels super hallow and unfulfilling, the same can go towards the ending in which it doesn't really matter which faction you pick it will always end with the same boring cutscene and will throw you back into the open world to keep playing forever until you eventually get bored and stop playing, so no this game really doesn't have an ending.
I could keep going about a bunch of other shit that makes Fallout 4 awful, like how the perk system is now tied with the leveling up system, making it much harder to make your own character rather than a jack of all trades. Or the fact that you can't even make your own character you have to play as a premade character rather than role-playing as your own character, you know LIKE EVERY OTHER FALLOUT GAME.
I could talk about how all the factions feel one-note and black and white rather than NV's all gray factions.
I could even go on about how so much of the stuff in the game either makes no sense on why there even in the game "Super Mutations, The Glowing Sea, the stupid amount of Feral Ghouls, and the fact that the Commonwealth looks worse then NV even though it takes place in the future", and so on. But I'm getting tired so I'm gonna leave it there.
Fallout 4 it's the worst mainstream AAA game I've ever played.
Normally even with some of the worst games I've played, I can think of a few good things to come out of it, but not here.
The visuals look awful even for 2015. My only guess on why the game looks the way it does was, they heard that Fallout 3 looked like brown and green crap so Bethesda decided to just throw the toaster in the bathtub and destroy the visuals.
The saturation has been turned up so high it makes all the NPCs look like they have high blood pressure, the god rays are out of control and it got so bad I had to turn down almost everything since the game is so poorly optimized I could barely keep a steady framerate, and my PC isn't bad I can run Death Stranding at 60 on Ultra settings so it's 100% the games fault.
The models look awful. Their lip movement looks really bad and almost never actually sync up with the voices.
Another thing I noticed is how low poly the models can look at times take, for example the super mutation form of Dr. Virgil, it looks so low poly and bad looking you'd think it came from a crowdfunded indie game.
The AI is still awful, and not in a so bad its funny way like in 3 and NV it's just bad now.
The Commonwealth is really fucking boring, nothing about it is nearly as interesting as say the Mojave from NV, and to some extent, the Capital Wasteland was more interesting than 4's map. The game has this magnum dong of a map but barely anything in it is remotely interesting. On rare occasions, you might find something interesting like a flying pirate ship stuck in a building run by robots but stuff like that rarely happened. Most of the time all you'll find is an abounded building full of Ghouls errr I mean Zombies (I'll touch on that later). Another thing that makes the Commonwealth are the settlements, the game only has 2 big settlements Diamond City, and Goodneighbor, both are supersmall and both don't feel like the BIG city I want to go to.
Diamond city is this games version of New Vegas "The crown jewel of the Commonwealth", so why does it look like a shanty town with trash all over the place, you can't use the argument that its the post-apocalyptic because this game takes place 200 years after the bombs fall, and if you didn't know this 200 years is a really REALLY long time, by the time in Fallout 2 nearly 80 years after the bombs fall the world was pulling it's self together and trying to better themselves and make the world a better place. Granted it didn't look like New York City but still, Diamond City looks like something I'd see 30 or 40 years after the bombs fall not 200.
Goodneighbor is no different other than it barely meeting the criteria of a "Big City". it's only 2 blocks of a few buildings and nothing else. It's barely a town so why would I never actively want to go there other than being required by the story to do so.
The biggest problem to me though is that the Commonwealth is that it feels like nothing has changed in 200 years. There are still skeletons around from when people died when the bombs fell, most of the buildings are destroyed and full of Gholes, and everything just looks like the bombs had just fallen rather it had been 2 god damn centuries.
The enemies are bland, repetitive, and in some ways way too easy to kill. The enemies list in Fallout 4 is surprisingly small and that's not a good thing. You have your human enemies as generic Raiders, you have robots who are also very generic, You have you're Mirelurks and other mutated monsters like Death Claws. Super Mutants are also here somehow and are now just dumb angry brutes and compared to Super Mutants in the past feel super generic, and the worst of them all and the most prominent are the Gholes which in this game are basically generic zombies, even though it's been 200 years now and most Feral Ghouls have been taken care of but I digress. If you've seen the pattern most of the enemies are really generic and at some points don't make any sense in how they are even here.
Another problem with the enemies is how bullet spongey they are. Since the game's mechanics are more level based now all the enemies are also level based meaning depending on what level you are an enemy will be either super bullet spongy, or easy as hell, case in point The Death Claw. In NV The Death Claw, we're superpowerful enemies that had set states and could kill you almost instantly if you were not careful, here if you're a high enough level you could kill a Death Claw with a 10mm Pistol, try doing that in NV and you'd get your ass handed to you.
The weapons, armor, and loot are much worse than any other Fallout game.
The gunplay feels more floaty than older titles, and since Fallout 4 introduced randomized loot none of the weapons in the game feel special besides the randomized state given to me, the same goes for all of the armor in the game too. In NV almost every weapon and armor were hand made with its own unique stats and so on.
The Power Armor is this was just fine. It's not great and it's not dogshit there just fine. I could rant about how the T-60 power armor makes no sense in the Fallout lore and how Bethesda is retroactively destroying the Fallout lore but at this point, I'd just be sitting here for the next hour explaining every wrong and nitpick everything but I'd rather just get to my final point and the worst part of the whole game.
The character writing and the story are without a doubt the worst part of not just Fallout 4 but of the whole god damn series.
Most of not all the characters feel one-note with barely any real personality aside from three companions in which the writers tried to make fleshed out character.
The writing also fails at creating a good story which is what Fallout is best known for, unfortunately, the story in Fallout 4 is so fucking bad it's almost amazing how this game got so much praise.
None of the plot beats feel interesting, you don't have any real drive to do the main goal of finding your son, because you only saw him for like 30 minutes and since he's a 3-month-old baby you can barely make a connection with him so making it the players primary goal feels flimsy and poorly done. The main plot twist in which your son is actually 60 some years old and you've been frozen for an extra 60 years feels super hallow and unfulfilling, the same can go towards the ending in which it doesn't really matter which faction you pick it will always end with the same boring cutscene and will throw you back into the open world to keep playing forever until you eventually get bored and stop playing, so no this game really doesn't have an ending.
I could keep going about a bunch of other shit that makes Fallout 4 awful, like how the perk system is now tied with the leveling up system, making it much harder to make your own character rather than a jack of all trades. Or the fact that you can't even make your own character you have to play as a premade character rather than role-playing as your own character, you know LIKE EVERY OTHER FALLOUT GAME.
I could talk about how all the factions feel one-note and black and white rather than NV's all gray factions.
I could even go on about how so much of the stuff in the game either makes no sense on why there even in the game "Super Mutations, The Glowing Sea, the stupid amount of Feral Ghouls, and the fact that the Commonwealth looks worse then NV even though it takes place in the future", and so on. But I'm getting tired so I'm gonna leave it there.
Fallout 4 it's the worst mainstream AAA game I've ever played.