Nothing short of a miracle of design. It could have been just a damn good tactical combat game, but they decided they wanted more. Instead, we get an extremely in-depth simulation about micromanaging your organization and the combat missions, and both sides are extremely good. The feedback between both sides is great too, as you frantically research the alien technology in hopes of fighting back the continually ramping up band of goons you face, which basically culminates in aliens that entirely turn your own squad against itself (Ethereals and Chryssalids) causing you to consider every single element even more carefully. Let's get this out of the way; if you want X-COM, there is no better game to play than X-COM in regards to what it does.

This all said, this game suffers from issues primarily tied to its longevity. Ships you see start being the same, individual troops get so powerful you can just send them in to kill out entire squads, the alien roster becomes predictable and the research feels meaningless. While I like the idea of hitting dead-ends, outside of the Flying Suit it rarely felt like any of the equipment I got was noticeably a huge improvement past the early game and it's only a problem because even the good stuff you research often feels a bit trivial as time goes on. It's worsened by the time you've realized that you've seen pretty much every consistent ship layout so every mission just becomes "send my one guy in and kill everyone unless there's a chryssalid in which case fuck time for my entire team to die." If campaigns weren't so long this would be a significantly better game IMO, but beggars can't be choosers; what exists here, in its current form, is still amazing and worth a play if any of the bullet points here interest you and you haven't played it. I fucking hate Chryssalids.

Really cannot understand the hype here for the singleplayer; the movement mechanics are beloved for their speed but rarely is combat intense in any particular way. The few times movement mechanics are used in any way is solely to pad out the game with "wall-run here" in the exact same way you do across 90% of the campaign, while the more interesting gimmick (Titans) get barely any utilization for most of the campaign as you follow a structure of "do repeated wall-run marathons from A to B with the stages unique gimmick being used solely for the sake of adding more wall-running." The Titans have the better gunplay with more advanced horizontal movement options and abilities with cool-downs that theoretically should lead to the more engaging combat, and it does, the Titan bosses are actually decently enjoyable if still a little lacklustre but they still show promise; so they make you spend most of the game outside of the Titans fighting regular humans who have extremely aimless AI and are basically just targets to hit. The saving grace could be that the campaign puts an interesting gimmick in each level - or so it seems; in reality, these gimmicks basically never change gameplay beyond making you utilize the same basic movement options repeatedly as already stated, even the most beloved gimmick in the game doesn't change much besides an aesthetic effect really, and that's where the heart of my criticism is: most of the gameplay in Titanfall 2 is equipped solely to look a certain way rather than feel it.

The rating I applied is most definitely unfair; out of the contemporary shooters of the time it is better, but does that make it good? Well, all I can tell you is I didn't really get a shred of enjoyment from it.

The argument to be made that struggle is inherent to human life, and that conflict is inevitable, is what I believe Fallout is proposing. Even if there's a happy ending, there will be a catch. Even if everything is looking perfectly fine, that One Asshole will ruin everything. Even if you've completely switched to pacifism, you will never have enough supplies to last long. Yet it's also a game about prosperity; all our desires to have perfect comfort and peace are a sign of ambition, and the fact is that what makes us wage wars and pillage (individuality, the ability to disagree, complex thinking) is the exact same thing that makes us an ambitious, caring and philosophically daring species. I wouldn't want to babble about philosophy at the start of a review usually, but I think Fallout keenly agrees with these concepts; hell, even the stats system is titled "S.P.E.C.I.A.L.", encompassing several basic human capabilities, and you can't be bad at all of them. All of this makes it a better role-playing game as a result since, even if you're a hero, you'll still struggle or fail in some way, creating a sense of grit to the apocalypse that's lost when you're certain things will go as planned. The game also has an interesting flow to almost every single quest, because in spite of its occasionally corny or simplistic writing, there's almost always a caveat to either the situation itself, or how you will handle things due to the type of person you are, and it never feels completely ungrounded or unjustified. Spoilers for a 30 year old game, but this is the only game I've played where on top of killing or joining the main villain, you can also logically deduce a hole in his plan and cause him to commit suicide. Everything pays off, every little stat upgrade, trait or even just knowledge obtained elsewhere, even if it still backfires horribly it'll cause something, since Fallout knows having a degree of risk adds tension and relief to even the most basic of encounters.

I think the cherry on top of all of this is the little subtleties Fallout has in its writing. It's not usually that complex but I think that's cause it knows so many more nuanced elements speak for themselves. There's rarely monologues about fundamentals of the world or its history you can pry from folks besides stuff centric to their homes, and often some things that do exist are straight up denied like the Deathclaws by most. All of this goes without mentioning some bigger oddities like the whole cultural stagnation going on in the far future not being clearly spelled out, only implied and shown, which adds up to create an incredibly haunting atmosphere that permeates an extremely interesting and unique world. I don't want to sugar-coat the game since it has some extremely annoying elements (companions, a lack of some obvious choices you should have in places, unresponsiveness to certain things that really should have responsiveness in regards to role-playing, a lack of unique character sprites and enemies occasionally getting bonus attacks within the same turn) but this game is otherwise, effectively a masterpiece to me, and my real intelligence stat is at least above 3, so you can trust me!