When I heard that this thing ended on a cliffhanger, I expected that to mean the central mystery wouldn't be fully resolved, not that the credits would roll with our hero seconds away from being punched in the face. Of course, "our hero" here being David Young, a bubblegum-chewing, bad fake Boston accent-having, amnesiac PI who time-travels to the past via his bathroom mirror using objects called "mementos," and his assailant being Phillip Cheney, a British (?) airline steward hopped up on Real Blood, a drug that may or may not give its users superpowers and also may or may not have caused the death of the late Mrs. Young (jury's still out, and will never be back in.) If that all sounds stupid, that's because it is, endearingly so. In fact, my interest in these wacky characters- essentially suspects from Ace Attorney but with the cartoonishness dialed up to eleven- far eclipsed my interest in the actual Case of the Dead Wife. Not that my preference here matters, as neither has the chance to shine- or, really, even get started- before the game is cut short. Likewise, the mechanics had potential but never reach their stride, as it attempts to gamify the investigation sections from, again, Ace Attorney, with the inclusion of a stamina meter. The idea is that you have to logically strategize about which elements of the environment you're going to search for clues with your reward being more pieces of the puzzle at hand. It doesn't work, as the important stuff is supremely obvious and every other bit of info just ends up giving you in-game currency that you can use to buy maid and nurse outfits for the female characters, but the vision is there. Though, a mere vision, tied to these two-and-a-half-episodes of an unfinished season, is all that will ever remain, and, unless you're perversely curious about a solid demo of a game that will never fully release, it's impossible to recommend. But, on the other hand, the

What if Resident Evil 4 did away with tank controls in favor of ‘modern’ controls? That’s the question RE4make is trying to answer, and from which many of its other changes flow. After all, it’s precisely that control scheme which lent the OG many of its unique dynamics. Yet it is also an overwhelming reality of convention and industry standards that makes tank controls in a modern game an incredibly hard sell, which no doubt influenced RE4make’s decision to move away from it. But, I do not believe that tank controls are irreplaceable to the OG’s success. If there’s any opportunity a remake has, it’s to twist the original to see what happens, and RE4R sure has done some twisting. Now freed of tank controls, what are the consequences of that in the remake?

The most noticeable changes by far are that Leon can now aim and reload while moving, and sprint in any direction. In RE4 this was restricted to put more emphasis on aiming as an action and your main method of interaction with the world, as if you were playing a light gun shooter (not unlike how stealth games make your player character poor at combat to emphasize stealth, or how games with a melee focus restrict the usefulness of ranged weapons). In the remake, this was done away with for the sake of appealing to intuitiveness and player comfort. However, by having it play and control more similarly to other shooters on the market this came at the expense of identity. Not that identity and uniqueness really impacts the quality of the game, but people do not experience games by just their ‘objective’ quality. So on RE4’s launch many fans called it “not a real RE game” precisely because of how differently it played to older RE games, whereas nowadays the definition of a “real RE game” has become much looser. It may be a silly and illogical and inconsistent thing, but humans were never perfectly logical creatures to begin with. To mitigate this loss of identity by taking away what makes something unique, you're better off also giving something unique back.

These changes also have several other knock-on effects on a mechanical level. Ranged attacks are now much less oppressive since the player can now simply sidestep most of them, reloading your gun now leaves you much less vulnerable, and the range of enemy melee attacks had to be readjusted to keep up with the player’s newfound mobility. On top of that, there’s the fact that RE4R was designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform release, and thus had to be designed with keyboard/mouse controls in mind. RE4 was designed mainly around the limited movement speed of the crosshair to give you more accuracy on a gamepad; enemies would slow down when they got close enough so you had the proper time and space to line up a shot. Playing RE4 with KB/M controls on PC or motion controls on the Wii then made target acquisition and targeting specific limbs much faster, leading to a different experience where the player could more easily control any given situation. Removing tank controls from RE4 as is would result in a more toothless experience, contrary to the survival horror vibe it wants to go for.

So how does RE4R make sure enemies can keep up with the player’s newfound mobility? For starters, enemies are much more aggressive and harder to control. They initiate attacks from further away, have more tracking on their attacks, and their attacks cover a greater distance. More enemies can attack you at the same time, and most encounters tend to feature more enemies than in the original. RE4R also implements RE2make’s crosshair bloom, making it harder to land hits unless you stand still to steady your aim (unless you have a laser dot equipped on your pistol), but also having a fully steadied crosshair give your next shot enhanced properties on hit.

The most important, and potentially most interesting change by far is that Ganados now take multiple shots to stagger (more prevalently the case on Hardcore difficulty and above, most of this piece is written with the higher difficulty settings in mind). It’s a necessary change considering the ease of target acquisition with the new control scheme. Otherwise automatic weapons would become even more busted than they were in RE4, but also because being able to move while holding the knife would let you set up a lot of staggers for free. What makes this change so interesting however is how it could in turn interact with the ammo economy, reload management, and the new focus shot system. The player could double/triple tap a Ganado for a quick stagger, or they could risk standing still for a moment to line up a focus shot for a guaranteed stagger using only one bullet--saving up on ammo in the long term and staving off a reload in the short term. This way RE4R could have emulated the control constraints of the original in a way where the player wants to not move while aiming rather than being forced to do so, providing a best-of-both-worlds option where the original light gun-shooter dynamic can be preserved in a way that’s also intuitive to most players. Plus, said “focus shots” could be applied to the knife as well, again incentivizing rather than forcing you to stand still for enhanced attack properties. Not only that, but the fact that you’d have to consider firing more shots at once rather than doing one-tap-into-roundhouse repeatedly would add some more nuance to reload management and decision making than RE4 did[^2]! At the same time, the increased aggression of enemy encounters and enemies themselves would make it harder than in the original to stand still and line up a shot, so it’s not as if lining up focus shots would be completely free.

Now, note that I am speaking entirely theoretically. In practice, RE4R doesn’t work like what I just said at all. Focus shots do not cause guaranteed staggers, they only slightly increase the critical hit chance and stagger value of the next shot, which is only a minor reward for a major risk. It makes steadying your aim not worth doing outside the accuracy benefits. Even worse is when you apply the laser dot upgrade on a pistol, which automatically makes every shot a focus shot and makes the stand-still/focus shot dynamic largely irrelevant for pistols (just like in the original Deus Ex, for example). Here I wish the game had adopted a hybrid crosshair system where you had both the OG laser sight and the RE2R crosshair bloom/focus shot dynamic, but alas.

But perhaps the most damning design choices in RE4R for me are the following two combined: the pistols have a relatively low base rate of fire, and enemies can’t be consistently flinched (i.e., a hitstun reaction without a melee prompt) even upon being shot in the limbs. What this means is that even if you do want to double/triple-tap an enemy into a stagger, the time it takes to get off enough shots is so long that in most cases enemies are about to hit you before you can get a stagger off anyways. In a system where one shot guarantees a stagger a la the original, having a low rate of fire to emphasize careful aiming makes sense, but in the current system that asks you to shoot multiple times for a stagger, a low rate of fire is just painful. At the same time, you cannot create additional time and space to set up staggers by flinching enemies, because whether an enemy will flinch on hit is semi-random[^3]. This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem in games where your workhorse weapons had a higher rate of fire (it’s why in games with RNG-based hitstun like Doom, a fast-firing weapon like the Chaingun is your go-to stunlock weapon), but the opposite being true in this case only exacerbates the fact that trying to control crowds in RE4make is generally unreliable and too slow to match the Ganados’ new aggression and numbers.

As a result of crowds becoming more unreliable to control, it turns the original’s pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay of enemy state manipulation and well-timed i-frames into something more akin to horde shooters like Devil Daggers and Serious Sam. When the state of an enemy or a group of enemies becomes harder and more inconsistent to manipulate, the player will naturally tend to mitigate as much inconsistency as possible by keeping their distance from said uncontrollable threats. Crowd control is now less a matter of creating CC/i-frame opportunities by manipulating enemies to your benefit, but rather trying to out-kill an onslaught of enemies before they overwhelm you. In the original you could play aggressively right in the thick of enemy crowds thanks to the many i-frame/CC options at your disposal, but in RE4R this has been significantly nerfed: vaulting over walls/through windows or climbing ladders no longer gives you i-frames, contextual animations have next to no exit i-frames after you’ve regained control (i.e. still being briefly invincible after Leon recovers from being knocked on the floor or after doing a suplex), and kicks have a smaller hitbox and a smaller effective range on account of enemies tending to be more spaced out from each other now. Being caught in the middle of a crowd in RE4R has a higher tendency to snowball into you being stunlocked to death now that enemies are more aggressive, i-frames aren’t as easy to get, your context melee moves not being as useful for CC anymore, and stuns not being as reliable. While RE4R might have done away with tank controls in favor of more “fluid” controls, trying to control the situation has never been more difficult.

That said, me being Serious Sam’s strongest online defender, I don’t think this kind of gameplay in a RE game is inherently problematic, but when you view RE4R through the lens of a horde shooter you can start to see why it doesn’t really succeed at being one either. For starters, RE4R makes it too easy to kite enemies forever. While there was nothing preventing you from doing so in the original, it’s something that didn’t come as naturally to do on account of Leon’s backwards movement speed being slower than his forwards speed. If you wanted to create some distance, you had to turn your back towards the enemy and so lose sight of the situation. But in RE4R Leon can run towards the camera, allowing him to see his pursuers while running at full speed, thus rendering that original dynamic void. As most enemies in RE4R cannot catch up to a sprinting Leon (outside of Garradors, who only appear sparingly), whether you can kite them forever depends on whether the level you’re in gives you enough space to do so. In RE4R that is the case most of the time, outside of setpiece encounters where you get gradually boxed in from every direction (like the village and cabin fight). The original also made kiting come less naturally to do simply because the context melee moves were that useful, and made you want to stick closer to enemies to take advantage of a stagger before the enemy recovered. Not only was it free damage, crowd control, and invincibility, but it also saved ammo. On paper this is still the case in RE4R, but as mentioned before, context melee moves are now much less safe to do in the middle of crowds, and less rewarding.

Furthermore, RE4’s and by extension RE4R’s enemy cast were never designed to be that interesting to fight from a distance. The nuances in fighting a group of Ganados wielding a mix of one-handed, two-handed or no weapons at all become significantly less pronounced when you aren’t in melee range. Pressure units like Plagas spawns, Chainsawmen and Brutes were not meant to be that threatening from a distance, and ranged enemies with crossbows and grenades were designed to complement regular melee Ganados rather than be any interesting to fight on their own, which is why they have lower HP. There are no real long-range pressure units outside of Crossbow Brutes to make kiting harder to pull off, and Crossbow Brutes only appear in the last third of the game. As a result, target prioritization often feels like a matter of targeting whoever happens to be closest, while occasionally focusing on the ranged Ganado here and there. The constantly shifting threats and priorities that RE4 had with its close-quarters combat or Serious Sam has in its diverse enemy horde compositions is a large part of what kept them engaging, yet RE4R feels like it has neither. For this new horde shooter-ish gameplay to really tick, RE4R would need more enemy types that can control space from different ranges as if it were Doom 2 in order to fit the more ranged focus of its combat, rather than stick with the original enemy roster where most enemy types are melee combatants.

The main consequence of how kite-heavy RE4R’s gameplay turned out is that fights now feel a lot more homogenous, despite many encounters being largely identical to their original counterparts! The nuances that the tank controls and pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay brought to each encounter are largely gone, and what’s come in its place doesn’t truly fill the void (however, with more radical changes to the original formula, or by bringing it more in line with the original instead, it could have done so). While it’s true that fights in the original could easily be boiled down by doing headshots into roundhouses ad infinitum if you wanted to, the system still allowed for a high degree of control and aggression the better the player got, which combined with the nuances in enemy behavior and controlled injections of RNG kept the game fresh and engaging even across multiple playthroughs. RE4R’s system on the other hand relinquishes potential player control in favor of creating uncontrollable chaos, resulting in a more defensive and reactive game where reasonably skilled play is identical to higher skilled play simply because there is less space for expression. Playing “lame” is what RE4R’s higher difficulties push you into by default. Again, this style of gameplay that you commonly see in horde shooters isn’t inherently problematic, but RE4R doesn’t have the enemies or spaces or tools or target prioritization to make the process of planning around and dismantling hordes that interesting.

To give you a (sharp) edge amidst all this chaos, the game thankfully gives you room to breathe using the new knife. Now that moving away from tank controls would take focus away from the original light gun-shooter feel and thus by extent Leon’s signature preference for pistols, RE4R absolutely made the right call by instead focusing more on Leon’s signature knife. New knife moves include being able to perform takedowns on stunned or knocked down enemies, which instantly kills regular Ganados and deals massive damage to higher-tier Ganados, while also preventing Plagas spawns. You can backstab unaware enemies using the new stealth mechanic, which felt like something Leon should have been always able to do, what with him being a special agent. My favorite new interaction is how takedowns work together with the new wallsplat state: carefully aimed staggers or kicks that cause enemies to stumble backwards into a wall puts them in a wallsplat state, during which you can execute a knife takedown on them from the front for big damage. It adds a new and interesting dimension to fighting Chainsawmen and Brutes where you’re trying to position yourself correctly to chain multiple takedowns together, and so get rid of them quickly while saving up on bullets.

Of course, it’s impossible not to bring up the new knife parry[^4]. It works as you’d expect. Time a parry right--you escape damage. Time it perfectly–you get a free stagger on top. It’s the only tool in your arsenal to let you play with any degree of aggression rather than endless kiting, so regardless of your feelings about the prevalence of parries in modern action games, the knife parries are arguably a net positive inclusion in RE4R. Thankfully RE4R is sane enough not to have parries be the answer for every attack: you won’t be able to chain parry a stream of arrows/bullets, a knife won’t help much against fire or explosives, chainsaw swings can only be blocked with your knife and usually end up breaking it in the process, and hammer swings and grabs can only be ducked or ran away from rather than parried. Sounds good, right?

Well, there’s actually two major caveats that end up kneecapping the usefulness of parries in larger fights. One is that while perfect parrying attacks gives you some reward, successfully ducking grabs gives you nothing. Second is that unarmed grab-happy Ganados are present in almost every encounter, and you can increase their numbers if you disarm a Ganado holding a weapon. So what does this have to do with parrying? The issue is that even if you’re trying to play with some measure of aggression by parrying a group of enemies in their faces, the presence of unparryable unarmed Ganados will make parrying an unsafe choice compared to just kiting the entire group. You’ll parry one, and then you get grabbed immediately afterwards from behind. You could of course focus on the unarmed Ganado by doing a well-timed duck, but this in turn leaves you vulnerable to any other kind of attack, nor do you get any reward out of well-timed ducks. And even if perfect ducks gave you a free roundhouse kick like perfect parries, it still wouldn’t be an effective CC option with how nerfed the effective range of kicks has become and enemies being more spaced out in general. It’s a deadly mix that’s not worth getting close to.

While creating dynamic situations where some player options are less or more optimal than others is what action games should strive for, here we have a situation where next to no option except one (the almighty kite) ends up being the correct one, which is just as bad as one option being so strong that anything else is just redundant. It’s something that could have been avoided with more consistent flinch/stagger rules on (unarmed) enemies. If anything, that’s already how it works against Ganados with throwables in RE4R! You may not be able to parry explosions or fire, but you can shoot a ranged Ganado’s projectile to make it prematurely explode/deflect or shoot them in their arm to momentarily disable them. That way you can proactively create safe opportunities to deal with melee Ganados without having to keep kiting for an opening. Instead, you’ll just have to deal with the chaos.

As to why the developers chose to make RE4R more a game about being subjected to chaos, one can only guess, but mine is that it was done to bring it more in line with the Resident Evil 2 Remake that the team previously worked on. RE2R was unabashedly about risk mitigation and being subjected to RNG, also as a way of minimizing player control over situations for the sake of creating horror. How many shots it took to kill a zombie there was even more random! But the key reason it worked there and less so in RE4R is because of RE2R’s traditional survival horror structure. You could kite zombies, sure, but the even scarcer ammo management discouraged killing every zombie you see in favor of running past them, whereas the narrow halls of the RPD made running past zombies easier said than done. The fact that your objectives made you backtrack through zombie-filled rooms you already visited added more long-term considerations on whether to spend ammo on zombies in a room you’re likely to revisit often, and on how to plan your route through the map. Add an invincible pursuer enemy to the mix, and you get gameplay that really tickles the noggin’. The micro-level dynamics of dealing with individuals or groups of enemies in RE2R is simpler than in RE4R, but what kept RE2R engaging was the macro-level resource management and routing gameplay on top of that. RE4R being more of a linear action game means these macro-level dynamics couldn’t be as present. It’s probably why RE4 added more nuance to how micro-level engagements played out to keep the linear gameplay interesting, even if Leon roundhouse kicking and suplexing enemies would make the game end up feeling less scary. The remake then trying to make the horror more pronounced again by downplaying player control over situations without adding anything to fill the void probably wasn’t the best choice.

Overall, while the new additions from RE4R to RE4 are generally okay, the changes to existing elements end up feeling haphazard. It doesn’t quite try to refine/emulate the original, but at the same time doesn’t try to do something radically new either. Perhaps the intention was to bring it closer to RE2R in terms of gameplay, but in a linear action context that would never quite work. When changing a core element such as tank controls, especially in a game as mechanically lean as RE4 was, there will be a lot of ripple effects. Some will be obvious, but a lot will be more subtle. As it turns out, a lot of the subtler ones are also the little details that helped make the original tick. Without a clear vision on where to take the gameplay in a new modernized context, and without thorough knowledge on how the parts in the original moved and worked, it’s easy to end up with what feels like a stilted translation of an old text. At the very least, it is interesting to see how experiments like this pan out as a way of reexamining what made the original (not) work, and for trying out what-if scenarios. I did expect a remix of RE4 rather than a comprehensive reimagining, and that’s largely what I got.

I give it a 5/5 S.T.A.R.S.

Addenda:

The new ammo crafting system may feel like a thoughtless modernism, and perhaps it indeed was one, but I think it ends up being a major net positive. Basically, by introducing more crafting items with a high drop chance to the enemy loot table, you end up reducing the chances of you getting healing or ammo drops. The more items there are in a loot table, the lower the theoretical maximum drop chance of any given item is going to be. But at the same time, these crafting items let you mitigate these lower drop chances by giving you more direct control over what kind of ammo or grenade you want to craft. It’s a brilliant two-birds-with-one-stone solution! It makes resources more scarce to more often push outside your comfort zone and reconsider every shot (especially in comparison to how lenient RE4 could get ammo drops, even on Professional). At the same time, giving extra control over what resources you get prevents the game from feeling like you’re at the total mercy of RNGesus. It also has the hidden benefit of smoothing over and covering up the ammo rubberbanding the game does under the surface, which helps diminish the notion that you can expect the game to automatically start dropping extra bullets for your gun if you happen to almost run out.

Footnotes:

[^1]: Incidentally, the original already has a near-identical dynamic when it comes to the time it takes to target different limbs. Because of how OG Leon always recenters his aim to head-level when deploying his guns, it means that it’s always faster to move your crosshair over an enemy’s head (for doing headshot into roundhouse kick for crowd control) than it is to move it over their shins (for doing legshot into suplex for big single-target damage). Re-centering your camera upon aiming down sights is another one of those things that you absolutely could not get away with in a modern game, even though it comes at the potential expense of cool dynamics like these.

[^2]: Rather than one shot guaranteeing a stagger or a flinch reaction depending on the enemy hitbox you shot and the state they were in, now there’s a hidden bar for staggers and flinches that fills up the more damage you inflict. How much stagger/flinch value a shot inflicts is calculated via an obtuse formula which depends on the base stagger/flinch value of your current weapon, the damage of that weapon, whether it’s a focus shot, and some additional random deviation. Basically, as you upgrade the damage on your weapon, the more often it will inflict stagger/flinches on hit. What this means is that in the early game stuns are triggered inconsistently as all hell, and throughout the game it becomes difficult to intuit what exactly the minimum and maximum shots required to stun is, which becomes even more complicated since some enemy variants have different stagger resistances on top of that. Then to throw another wrench in the works, enemies in the Island get increased stagger resistance overall.

[^3]: Reloading is one of those things that gets taken for granted in most shooters, yet RE4 forcing you to stand still while reloading already makes it a more interesting implementation than those in most other games. When you consider that reloading and limited magazine capacity is the shooter equivalent of stamina systems in action games, you can start to see how barely any games try to do anything interesting with it and just include it for realism’s sake. Basically it’s an inevitable cooldown where the player can control when and where it gets reset. In RE4 this led to several interesting decisions, where sometimes it would be better to forego knifing a downed enemy in favor of reloading your gun so you were prepared once all other downed enemies woke up. In other situations where reloading was too unsafe to do, it’d push you to switch to another weapon that either doesn’t really fit the situation or uses an ammo type you’d rather not spend, which ended up creating cool moments of improvisation. RE4R having smaller base magazine capacities and making you expend more bullets at once would mean reloads have a larger presence in combat, but being able to freely move and even run while reloading cuts out most of the risks associated with reloading. Annoyingly there’s also the tendency on top for most shooters to just let you upgrade reload speeds and magazine capacities to the point where the downtime of reloads becomes irrelevant, which includes both RE4 and RE4R.

[^4]: Though I’d hesitate to call parries being new to RE4. The original already had parries, it was called “shoot an enemy in the face right before they hit you”. This even worked against Chainsawmen! Normally they tank blows to the head as a pressure unit should, but shoot a Chainsawman in the head right as he’s swinging off your head, and you get a guaranteed stagger! Then again, this is a bit easier said than done considering enemies would rear their head back right as they swung at you.

The Markdown markup for footnotes will remain unmarked as-is until Backloggd adds support for them like any sane website made in the Reiwa era.

I recently received a very kind comment, where someone said that they enjoyed my reviews in spite of the fact that I give all their favorite games two stars. That’s just an unfortunate side-effect of beating hundreds of games; the potential for a novel experience shrinks while the bar for excellence goes up. Also, I only write a review when I feel strongly about a game, which means it’s either something I love (rare for the aforementioned reasons) or something I’m particularly dissatisfied by. So, I hope no one takes it personally when I say that this game is slop.

I’m fine with remakes. In fact, I endlessly talk about how REmake might be my favorite game, and I even enjoyed the remake of 3, the one people don’t like. It has plenty of flaws, but at least I know why it exists. I can feel its thesis: it wanted to take a game designed to evoke Terminator, and cut down on all the parts which didn’t fit the explosive pacing. So, out goes the clock tower, in comes the rail gun. With this game though, I feel absolutely no thesis, since it doesn’t commit to either a new direction or general refinement. The main problem I had with the original was its pacing, with hours in the middle where there’s hardly any mechanical escalation. In the remake, this issue isn’t corrected, but doubled. Now you have asinine sidequests ranging from rat-stabbing to item fetching, randomly grinding the game to a screeching halt. The difficulty adjustment system from the original would elegantly tune supply levels for each area, and the new system tries to do it in the same way, but players can now craft ammo of any type at any time, trivializing challenges on demand. Knifing an enemy on the ground was perfectly simple, now it’s cluttered with contextual prompts. Even simply dodging an attack is cluttered, with a few scarce attacks requiring contextual dodges, which didn’t feel great in the original even when it was kept outside of core combat. People were ok with knife durability in RE2, so let’s just throw that in while we're at it, despite how the flow of combat was originally designed around its constant use. People didn’t like Ashley in the original, so let’s give her infinite health, making it beneficial when she gets hurt intercepting attacks. Let’s expand the treasure-combination system to the point where players have to futz with crafting every time they visit a merchant, because it’s a safe change we can sell as a new feature. The list goes on with complaints like how most encounters begin with enemies teleporting behind you, a hit-or-miss new script, and so on, but the point is that none of these changes are even in service of a greater goal. The core experience isn’t revolutionized even a tenth as much as the other modern remakes, it isn’t scarier or more action-packed, the mechanics are less elegant, and the problems were, at best, left untouched.

That’s why this game is just slop to me. It's a disinterested ladling of content onto the beige plastic lunchtray that is my psyche. It wasn’t created through passion, but to fulfill an obligation. Resident Evil remakes are safe investments, so Capcom felt obligated to rearrange a near-perfect formula, even without a creative vision for it. All it was intended to be is “more”, a version of Resident Evil 4 they could port to the next few generations of consoles for $70 instead of $20. Well, they certainly achieved THAT goal, but if their idea was truly to recreate the magic of Resident Evil 4, they didn’t even come close.

When I think of the beginning of my teenage years and the games that occupied that space as I grew older I tend to think of a few different ones.

Assassin's Creed, Oblivion at my, at the time, best friend's house (R.I.P. Max), Heavenly Sword, Blazblue Calamity Trigger and most importantly of all I think about Mirror's Edge.

Mirror's Edge upon its first announcement blew me completely away. It came at that time of my early budding explorative amazement with art and different mediums where I would look at an E3 show or trailers online or discussion of different things and I, all wide eyed and still not that aware of what the medium can fully do yet, go like "holy shit VIDEO GAMES huh? What can this medium do? What CAN'T it do? Holy shit! That Killzone 2 trailer is TOTALLY real!"

In the case of Mirror's Edge I'd never seen first person platforming and parkour quite like this. I'd never seen a game try to be this and try to do anything like this. I hyper fixated on it, I thought about its wonderful usage of color in the trailers and gameplay I'd see of it, I remember wanting to know more about the dystopian 1984 ass world it takes place in, I wanted to run, I wanted to jump, I wanted to wahoo even all while radly jump kicking a cop off of a rooftop. I was spellbound by this game made by those wildin Battlefield devs that I didn't know much about at the time and what they were going for. It just hit something for me in a really special kinda way.

Eventually I was able to get it and to say my expectations were met and exceeded would honestly be a complete and total understatement. I played this game to fucking death, I wanted to get levels down, do no gun runs, get the best routes and lines down that I could. It excited me and while I didn't have a lot of people to share that passion with as a kid, I at least had my older sibling who shared that passion with me. I think I even remember kinda wanting to do parkour too but being too afraid of pain to ever bother trying lol.

So for me picking this game up is picking up a lot of memories I guess. Like a sort of time capsule, I remember the couch I played it on, I remember playing it with my sibling and trying to beat each other at the races, I remember playing it late into the night on weekends and my blink and ya miss em summers. I would take it to my Dad's place when we had to go, I would watch videos and runs of the trials other people online were uploading at the time.

I would play some other things too but this game just didn't leave my mind a lot for a good few years. It in a way was a comfort game for me. It made the bad and hard things that I had trouble dealing with and had difficulty fully grasping in my life not seem so bad to me and it gave me the genuine escape I tended to look for in those days. I would always return to it and give it a few more playthroughs. I just absolutely fuckin loved it.

Eventually though I put it down and didn't return to it for a long time. I would get it through a Humble Bundle years ago at this point again on PC but wouldn't really get too deep into it again. I picked up Catalyst too (though I forget if through a sale or bundle years ago too?) and have still only barely played the beginning of it. I think a part of me especially at that later time (about 2015-2018) was trying to get away from these feelings that I associated with bad things from my life that I was only then fully coming to terms with and trying to figure out how to really deal with.

Embarrassing experiences and personal things that with hindsight hits in a way that I don't wanna describe. It hurt to remember these things around that time, dealing with anything quite head on felt fairly impossible to me and this game was tied to a youth that I felt and honestly still feel was somewhat false in ways. Looking at this game I felt a sort of void and I didn't want to feel that anymore. Honestly I just didn’t wanna think about anything, I think in a way I became the void I wanted to escape without realizing it. So I just let it sit there in the pit of my memory, faint nostalgia and personal pains for a long while.

So I couldn't really tell you why I decided to just replay this today. After making videos I tend to like to chill with things I play for myself and review here or on letterboxd or whatever, detached from videos, and just write even more for myself and for all of the wonderful people who follow me and read all of this shit I write. But honestly I don't think that's fully why. I think maybe that wide eyed middle school MCR listening wannabe goth 7th grade self that's in there somewhere carrying all of the good and bad memories alike wanted to play it again and get me to see what I loved so much about it.

Playing this again I see it. The wonderfully smooth parkour that feels like a dream once you get the flow down. The levels that feel so great to learn and replay over and over again, the sense of height and verticality as you look down at the world below you from the high rooftops above. The wonderful art direction, the melancholy yet intense score just all of this comes together that makes something very special to me.

Even its imperfections just make me feel so happy for some reason. The clearly crowbarred in sloppy ass gun combat that doesn't fit what the game is really going for, some of the level design being a bit messy and somewhat flow breaking with the parkour (looking at you sewers) the first real go around, ledge grabs where sometimes I feel like I should've had that jump right and instead I completely plummeted to my death, the kinda empty and messy story. It all just makes up what Mirror's Edge is to me. An innovative testing ground of ideas and ambitions from a team clearly wanting to try something different than what they felt the norm of FPS games were and to me that just makes it special. Like Gravity Rush, even its imperfections add to the overall charm and humanity of the project itself. It just connects with me in a very particular kind of way.

Even though I just knocked the story, I also gotta admit that Faith and her want to get Kate out of the situation she has been tricked into resonates with me in ways that I don't wanna go into. Just know I relate to Faith in a lot of ways and although not the most fleshed out it just hits me in a very particular way.

This whole replay of the game just reminded me of a lot of things too. A lot of people that I miss. The places I haven't been to since the last time I left California. How much time has passed since then. How much time continues to pass as I and the people I know get older. All that I still wanna do with my life and the dreams and goals I have for myself and my future.

I miss those days and late nights on the couch with my sibling doing runs of this game. I miss that couch where I kept doing my best to get the pacifist achievement runs. I miss the couch where I completely beefed the speedruns cause I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be at them. I miss those days and some of those good feelings that come with them but I carry the memories with me forward as I continue to live on, both the good and the bad ones. I live to keep those memories alive, to find joy in the things that younger me never got to experience or always wanted to see or play or go through or listen to.

I guess in a huge roundabout sorta way I’m saying that Mirror’s Edge is why I love video games and art in general. Or it’s at least one of the many reasons. I love connecting to works on such a deep level like this. I love feeling like a piece of art is speaking to me in a way that it may or may not for someone else. I feel like I’m giving back to myself because I’ve needed to in ways and I feel like playing this again has just helped me even see that I needed to reconnect with that in a way. I needed to know that it’s okay to feel all of this right now. All these feelings of doubt within life choices, within where I am and why I’m still here and what matters the most to me, of what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown and changed and continue to grow and change. The fear I have of the future and things that could happen to me or the people around me but my desire to still take it on regardless and try to keep pushing forward regardless.

It’s easy for me to just feel kinda stuck sometimes and even just running through the same thought processes on loop while I’m trying to understand why exactly I’m feeling that way. I didn’t expect this at all or even realize this would happen on this replay after all of these years but I’m really happy that it did what it did for me. Honestly writing this and just sitting with these thoughts did too. Maybe a bit indulgent on my part but fuck it this is Backloggd! We all indulge a little!

At the end of the day I’m honestly just glad to Still be Alive ya know? (Corny I know but I wanted to end on a nice note and I wanted an excuse to link the song! It’s really good! I used to listen to it on my Sansa MP3 Player on my way to school!)

bethesda is a lucky, lucky, lucky games company. like, insanely lucky, and i'm not even discussing the legal wins they've bagged against mohjang, human head, interplay, id--no, i mean they're lucky in that, twenty years ago, they developed a really impressive open world rpg engine. that was morrowind, and morrowind allowed for all sorts of unbelievably cool, innovative ways to maneuver its wide world: every building could be entered, every npc could be killed, every item could be picked up, and everyone could be talked to. not only that, but objects in the world had consistency--you could drop your armor right where you stood in the middle of balmora, leave for many moons, and come back to find it still very much there... exactly as you left it. and many of those npcs wouldn't ever respawn should you kill them--your actions had consequences. and all of this... absolutely all, was contained in a massive world that allowed you to walk from one end to the other without stopping.

and this is why the bethesda of today is lucky. see, on top of all those features morrowind bolstered was an excellent story with excellent, captivating, un-tolkein-like lore. but with every subsequent open world release came the same sort of open world mechanics birthed here with a regression of that writing, and a regression of the whole "rpg" aspect entirely. oblivion was embarrassing, lore wise--you could tell the devs saw lord of the rings in theaters together on a company wide trip, shit their pants, and thought "oh fuck yeah, let's just do that." and credit, many of oblivion's side quests and character writing is actually phenomenal... at the cost of its bland, grinded down lore. fallout 3 and skyrim follow, and they're written as intelligently as a cliff racer--they fly with style and take no more than one hit to fell. but all of this doesn't REALLY matter--i mean, it does if you appreciate good dialogue and engaging storytelling, but the majority of bethesda's players just want to goof off in a consistent open world, and THAT'S why this company's lucky. they can get away with it. they can write honest to god slop and as long as it feels good to yell at a dragon or lop off a raider's head, they'll keep going.

bethesda is insanely lucky.

anyway, that's why fallout 4 is so playable--it's easily the best feeling combat they've ever sharpened. calling on the talents of former destiny devs, bethesda put together guns that feel varied and unique from one another, that feel damned good to shoot and damned good to connect. the basic gameplay loop of wandering around the wasteland killing all sorts of whatever, looting the surroundings, and moving on... is fun. it is, or else i wouldn't have put as many hours into this as i did. that fun does come with the fattest asterisks you can imagine, however: the experience needs mods. not "improves" with mods, no--NEEDS.

~~

you have a game where enemies are almost always these ridiculous sponge tanks that absorb all your .308 rounds despite ostensibly defenseless--half these enemies don't wear proper helmets, and it feels stupid. this isn't a human enemy example, but soon after starting the game (with a mod that thankfully skips the default intro), i wandered over to a mirelurk assaulted town called salem. now, killing these things was somehow near impossible no matter what i did, but there was a sidequest there that involved starting up some stray turrets around the city, and i figured i'd knock it out. so, there i am bobbing and weaving through these infinite health lobsters to get all the sentries online, and.... nothing. they do near nothing. you know why? because, in the infinite wisdom of bethesda's developers, all of the turrets are placed high up, aiming down. why is this a problem? well, have you SEEN a mirelurk? let me refresh your memory: they wear giant fucking crab shells on their back, shielding them from damage. so, the turrets did nothing despite waiting around, trying to lead them in front of gunfire, etc, and i eventually get bored and just snuck off to tell the quest giver the job's done. i trek over, walk in--loading screen--and then every single goddamn mirelurk spawns in there. i did eventually wear them down after a reload and what felt like an hour, and--look, i get it. the game has tough creatures that, realistically, you're meant to come back and fight later, and that's fine, but following the mirelurks was a scuffle with some atom worshippers who wore rags around their head and ate ammunition like it was nothing. you can guess what they did to me. you can also guess why i then installed a mod that rebalances weapons.

and a mod to allow npcs to die, because there are dozens that can't. and a mod to increase the weight limit, because you are incentivized to pick up all sorts of bullshit necessitating trips to home base. and a mod to turn off enemy respawns considering any cleared out dungeon would be repopulated with the same threats just after three days. and a mod to remove harvey from the entire workshop and settlement elements of the game--surprising how less annoying it is to just clear out a camp and press a on the workshop. and that mod i mentioned that skips intro this game leads with and just lets you start with whatever ROLE you want? well i got that one, too, considering this game series used to be ROLE PLAYING. and on that note, there's one more mod i installed: it silences your sociopathic, unrelatable, insane protagonist.

he's bad. i haven't played as female either back in 2015 or now, six years later, but i have to imagine she's just as. the male is voiced by a snot nosed marvel movie zinger slinging psychopath, and this shows up in his very basic self narration, when you select a basic object, when you talk to basically anyone. his tone makes the player seem like he isn't processing anything happening like a real human being--all disjointed and awkward, and his sarcastic quips ripped straight from suicide squad scripts land real weird when you just spent the last twenty minutes banging physics based pots and pans against dead npcs to see if their heads would pop off. the generally agreed on problem is that the protagonist's voice has to fit all sorts of varied player personalities whether they be good samiratans or xbox players, and it ends up fitting neither and none. what's even more mindblowing is how dramatically improved fallout 4's immersion is when you gag yourself from any further one liners. you actually feel like it's you playing, almost. it still hurts to read what the player dialogue actually says and realize you're only ever getting three options that all mean the same thing.

also, this is just completely unrelated to that point, but i want to focus on this last gameplay element before i dive completely back into the writing: fallout 4 has some weird bugs and design decisions, doesn't it? have you ever gotten trapped trying to cook something or repair items? has your pip boy button ever just straight up been disabled? what's with npcs trying to ride elevators and then suddenly shooting up and falling from the sky like god almost let 'em into heaven but decided against it? back in fallout 3, clicking on a terminal just brings up the terminal prompt, but in fallout 4, clicking a terminal means your character performs this awkward intepretative dance as they draw up close to it, and the amount of time this takes seriously varies. i've sat there for a full minute watching my character dance around props and hazards, tin cans foiling my efforts to read the screen, and then watching myself die because an enemy just walked in in the middle of it and opened fire. there's also this door thing where npcs will enter a building ahead of you and, i don't know, hold the doorknob shut or something? seriously, you'll stand there like a dumbass for twenty seconds looking away from and back to the door until it finally highlights back to green. bizarre, but the very worst, most baffling, evil design decision i cannot understand is the fading out of black that follows loading in. like, i have died just quickloading because the time it took to completely fade in was the time it took for a raider to pincushion me. so, what this means is you have to just hit tab as soon as possible to pull up your pipboy until you can actually see the damn game.

okay, ooooone more point before we full on dive into the writing. let's talk graphics and aesthetics. because honestly... fallout 4 is a gorgeous looking game, i'm serious. the full range of an actual color palette paired with a brilliant dynamic lighting system both result in an aesthetic miles ahead of that ugly yellow, green mess that fallout 3 was. hell, i think there's a line some brotherhood member offers poking fun at that, something about how "you should see how the capital wasteland looks". and you should see it and compare, because they've come a long way: the commonwealth bolsters weather patterns filled with intrigue whether it be foggy, orange hued mornings or radiation storms, and when things clear up and the sun can poke out, god if the game isn't standing tall, hands on hips, going "goddamn would you look at my lighting engine". you ever seen people posting webms of f.e.a.r. to show off its lighting? fallout 4 does it too and with a grander scope--the fucking sun. it doesn't always work perfect downtown, but it's still pretty damn dope. now i'm gushing on these graphical points because, with a game doing so much wrong, you may as well praise what's done right. its these textures and carefully colored, carefully rendered environments that really sell the post apocalypse. if it had just happened recently--not two hundred years later.

yeah. back to talking about writing. worldbuilding, specifically, because the world fallout 4 takes place in does not make any sense at all and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. and this? this is scrutiny. the game has received tons of criticism hammering in this point, but the reason poor worldbuilding strikes so many players wrong is because it ruins the believeability of anywhere you're exploring. you feel baffled entering a human settlement and there's just skeletons everywhere that scavengers seem to just step over like calcium decoration, among all the tin cans and trash as well. in certain untouched locations, this makes sense, while in others, it feels stupid. one infamous example of lore fuckery (in which pete hines made a tweet essentially saying "i don't give a shit and neither do my writers"), there's a pre-war vault full of drugs that emerged only after the apocalypse. dumb, but i'm here to describe that circumstances are even dumber than that. see, this vault is full of gunners, right? they've taken over the vault defenses and set up their own sentries and terminals, so they clearly have been here for awhile, okay? now, what's baffling is that, much of the vault is somehow still untouched, even with gunners themselves actually walking among the corpses and trash. and those very corpses all have drugs in their hands and scattered among them. and you're telling me there's not been a single gunner sweep to collect up all those jets and psychos and other valuables? are they under order to leave things exactly how they are? not likely since nearly every gunner i kill seems to have a drug on them. i get this comes across as nitpicking, but the fact that looking at this scenario with, again, any sort of scrutiny makes the entire dungeon fall apart in believability, kind of makes the whole dungeon exploring aspect suck. like, why even bother trying to piece together the story of what happened when bethesda's writers couldn't even be bothered. so, you just mindlessly clear out the vault of gunners, take your loot, and go.

there's more little things that bother me because they're baffling with no explanation, like how i found a farm of two children with a raider camp no more than twenty steps away. if there was a note there that said "i'm actually a good raider and keeping tabs on these poor kids while i sleep in the rain", i missed it. there's a house near vault 111 where a conspiracy nut locked himself away before the bombs dropped. what's in his vault? a fucking copy of the wasteland survival guide, something the fallout 3 player helped make. there's nuka cola machines all over filled with untouched sodas, every cash register seems to be full of both prewar money and bottlecaps, which is... strange, and unexplained. and vault 81 is accessed by making its owners a deal to give them three fusion cores. oh, you don't actually have to prove you have them or discretely dump em in a dropbox, no they just open right up. hey, don't question these things, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

but broadstrokes worldbuilding here, what makes the experience of traversing the wasteland most hollow and theme-park feeling is the actual placement of enemies. let me explain: take a look at fallout new vegas' map, and see how the different factions occupy spaces. you have ncr camps on a logical 'front', with caeser on the other side. for the role of raiders, you have a jail of escaped convicts contained to a circular area originating from their prison. for another role, you have 'fiends' who occupy a large strip of vegas ruins in the west originating from a vault they consider home base. even further west, you've got khans who occupy a very defendable canyon, and ghouls are always in areas that reasonably would be untouched or affected directly by the in-game conflict. what i'm trying to get at is that the enemies you fight, and where you fight them, always make sense. there are good explanations for why you're fighting what you're fighting where you're fighting them, and it makes the world feel... real. now let's look at fallout 4's map: enemy placements are shotgunned against map markers with zero cohesion. bethesda designs the dungeon placements first, and then goes "okay uhh how about raiders here and supermutants here and uhh maybe supermutants here too but uhhh maybe ghouls yeah let's do ghouls here and okay this looks like a good gunner place". it feels asinine, and you wonder how any of these fragmented groups are even able to survive, defend, connect with each other. there's this whole eastern part of the map that's mostly wildlands where you're likely to encounter deathclaws and yau gaoi. cool, and then like, in the middle of it is a raider camp. what the fuck? who are you even raiding, you're the only humans out there! no, what enemies occupy what camps is NOT decided by any sort of logical reasoning and instead, just "we don't want the player to kill raiders in one camp and then encounter more raiders in the next, so we chose the easiest solution" amusement park. this is why people describe these bethesda rpgs as amusement parks. but hey, don't question this, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

i keep saying that, and it's because that's the impression i got back in 2015 playing through the assortment of side quests fallout 4 offers with all of them feeling like "go here, shoot, leave" with fat-free window dressing because the substance is never there. this playthrough? i haven't even being doing any, i just go around mindlessly killing and looting like they want me to. hey though, i actually shacked up with a companion i "rescued" from an underground arena--could we have had an interesting sidequest where the player participates in that arena, perhaps forced to, or maybe one where the player searches out new talent to compete for them--no that'd be too interesting. anyway, her character is hilarious, like i can't imagine what whoever wrote her was thinking. she's this scottish tough girl who audibly adores that you don't boss her around (even though, yes i do, i make her open every door and walk infront of gunfire), and she eventually reveals her tragic backstory: for almost eighteen long years, her parents merely tolerated her existence until shipping the poor scot out into slavery on her 18th birthday (for probably, like, 40 caps). eventually, she makes it out and back to her parents' old home, and she kills them both. but the look in their eyes when she pulls the trigger... she feels guilt, and that's why she drinks, that's why she's game to slaughter diamond city villagers alongside me. harrowing. anyway, funniest thing about that story is that the parents waited eighteen years to ship off an extra mouth to feed and protect they ostensibly didn't care for, um... but whatever. this sort of character writing is what all of fallout 4's characters are like. no real depth, no actual thought, just funny wacky marvel personalities with fanfiction.net backstories.

just. nothing makes sense in this game, and bethesda clearly doesn't want you to think too hard about it, right? except, they do. no, they have to, have you seen the absurd amount of notes and terminals and audio diary logs the commonwealth is filled with? bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a skeleton next to a computer with three diary entries. diary one says "i'm so glad i'm not a skeleton", diary two says "uooohhh... i can feel myself becoming a skeleton", and diary three says "i am a skeleton now." bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a ghoul family who dearly miss their two hundred year old child you find no more than 40 feet away from their fucking house. they try. bethesda tries. pete hines doesn't get to hide behind "oooh not interested debating a world with talking mutants" because bethesda tried to flesh out that world of talking mutants--they just did a shitty job. and this'll be the most pretentious thing i say all review, but the reason they did a shitty job is because no one in that writing department has the right influences, and they all look up to the wrong people. you can tell they don't like fallout new vegas and they weren't inspired by fallout new vegas because they make no attempt to break down what made the writing and world of that game work, and i know this because, when bethesda was making fallout 3, they made no attempt to do that with the first two fallouts either.

i could go on, and on, and on but there's little point in hammering in the same points repeatedly as i basically say the same thing over and over again: the writing, worldbuilding, lore, and set design in this game is complete, incompetent ass. this doesn't hold fallout 4 back from being fun, or even good, or really good with the right fat asterisk mods. but it's half baked, it's unfulfilled potential. it could be SO much better. and there's absolutely no pressure at bethesda to address that... because they're lucky. they can write the most embarrassing slop of the entire games industry, and it won't matter, because in 2002 they built a fun open world rpg engine, and they're going to squeeze every last drop out of it--forever.

mark my words. without knowing even a single thing about starfield, two things are certain: it'll probably be fun, and it won't make any sense at all. that's a bethesda open world sized promise.

Why is it that the itty bitty sprite-based Fallouts let me blow up a locked door or pry it open with a crowbar, but this shiny, hundred million dollar PS4 game doesn’t?

I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.

This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.

Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.

To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.

I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.

Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.

In 1997, a game called Fallout spilled out into the world. Under the guidance of a nerd named Tim Cain, it was initially a hobby project until more and more people latched onto it, adding their talents and thoughts to the potluck that would eventually spawn the most annoying group of cryptofascists this side of Warhammer 40,000.
Drawing on their love of pulp fiction, retrofuturism, XCOM, sci-fi movies and a tabletop system they liked (GURPS, which is absent from history for a very good reason), this vast pool of influences eventually calcified and become Fallout 1.

This story had already played out several times across modern culture by the time Fallout came into existence. It is the basis of Star Wars, modern western comics as a medium, Gundam, Warhammer... Really, you can pick any longrunning and influential franchise to find the same story of one passionate person and their team of equally passionate collaborators drawing on a huge pool of influences to make something unique.

Fallout 1 is a great game. If I ever made a list of games you should play before you die, it'd definitely be up there. Rather uniquely for the post-apocalyptic genre, it's more focused on humanity pulling itself out of the ruins of a long gone civilization than it is on the long gone civilization itself. Compared to what came after, it's a far more somber and reserved experience where the potential of combat occurring is more like a sword of damocles than a regular occurrence. Sure, it has every trope you likely expect from the genre (mutants, bandits, factions mimicking old world stuff like cowboys), but those tropes are more of a deconstruction than anything; they're portrayed as kind of pathetic for having an obsession on old iconography, because there is a now in front of you and it needs help to be built and maintained. There's a reason the BoS are assholes in this one.

Sadly, much like every example I gave two paragraphs ago, Fallout has succumbed to what I nowadays refer to as the Lucas Horizon. George Lucas combined his love of westerns, samurai, Kurosawa movies, WW2, Flash Gordon and sci-fi to make Star Wars.

The people making Star Wars after him are using their love of Star Wars to make more Star Wars.

Despite calling it the Lucas Horizon, however, I feel Fallout embodies it more than any other franchise. Even starting with Fallout 2, the series began to develop an obsession with itself. Rather than letting the influences and references form a foundation to build a work upon, they became the central part of the work. Now, Fallout 2 isn't as bad about this as every game that came after it, and indeed it at least bothers to expand on Fallout 1's themes, but at the end of the day it's ultimately more about pop culture and Fallout stuff than anything else.

Fallout 3 is where the series begins to veer off into the Lucas Horizon for good. After two games that were about the gradual rebuilding of civilization and the ways in which people built a new life from the wreckage of American civlization, 3 did a massive 180 and focused specifically on the wreckage, setting itself in a wasteland literally called The Capital Wasteland, with all of the progress from 1 and 2 seemingly undone.
The game opens with a hollow recreation of Fallout 1's intro, once again narrated by Ron Perlman and featuring shots of a ruined world set to a dissonant song by the Ink Spots as the first game did, before revealing yet another person in power armor. The difference, though, is that while Fallout 1 used it as a prelude to the story, Fallout 3 uses it to signal just how much it adores the wreckage and the retrofuturism and the distinct Fallout iconography that Bethesda yoinked at a garden sale. Fallout 3 rolls out its new power armor model to make you go "wow, cool!" while Fallout 1's intro prominently displays the T-51 being worn by American soldiers extrajudicially murdering prisoners of war.

If you've spent any amount of time in gaming circles, either directly or indirectly, you've likely heard the phrase:

"It's a good game, but a bad [franchise] game".

Personally, I hold this phrase in contempt as it's almost often deployed as a means to avoid any indepth examination of what it means to be a [franchise] game, and is often code for "it's not like the games I love".

Fallout 4 is my one exception. It is a good game, but an atrocious Fallout game. We'll be talking about the latter part exclusively, you can infer my thoughts on 4's gameplay from the Starfield review I did.

Why is it an atrocious Fallout game?

Because it's not about the rebuilding of society. It's not about the struggles faced by those seeking to carve new life out of the bones of the old. It's not even about kitschy pop culture references or the ways in which veneration of the past drives one straight into the past's sins.

It's about Fallout. It's about Vaults, Vault Suits, power armor, the Brotherhood, retrofuturist shit, dandy boy apples, whatever comes to mind when you think "Fallout", that's the core of Fallout 4.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are some themes present in Fallout 4, but they're superficial at best. Any talk of 'rebuilding' is just a pretext to shove the settlement mechanic on you, and this game treats a question as intense as "If artificial life possesses humanity, is that natural humanity or is it as artificial as its host?" with all the seriousness of The Room tackling breast cancer.

Discourse surrounding this game points to the voiced protagonist as the source for many of its woes, but I'd argue that the protagonist being a pre-war survivor does more harm than anything else. Intrinsically binding the player to the old world means everything encountered is filtered through the lens of that world. For all its faults, Fallout 2 having the player be an insulated tribal whose confusion at the world around them stemmed from their post-war experience was a much better angle than simply having the protagonist be a 200 year old.
In the non-Bethesda titles, the pre-war period is explicitly associated with the concept of rot and decay. The Brotherhood donning the armor and imagery of pre-war America led them to become just as paranoid, isolated and self-righteous as pre-war Americans did. Ghouls, ancient pre-war survivors, were rotting zombies in the most literal sense of the word. Shady Sands becoming the NCR was explicitly portrayed as a bad thing, because its citizens assumed a mantle of relative safety in exchange for shouldering the foolishness that led to the state of the world as it is now - to the point of recreating American jingoism and oil barons in the new world.
Most obviously, the Enclave were the last bastion of the US government and their very existence is seen as a virus purely because they wish for some inane ideological and biological purity. Fallout 3, despite having more flaws than I can count, at least got it right by involving a literal virus in the Enclave's plans just to make it obvious.

In New Vegas, the Enclave's power armor has been forgotten by almost everyone. Those that are aware of it consider it to be either a hate symbol or a bitter memory of a failed state. You have to go through a long and messy quest to get it, and it's given as a 'reward' once you're told that the Enclave was a dream doomed to die from the start. The game rubs your face in how pathetic its remnants are; sad old people who struggle to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from them missing the Enclave yet being fully aware it was just another death cult. Should you convince one of your party members to don it in support of the """best ending""", he's immediately identified as a war criminal and given a life sentence.

In Fallout 4, it starts spawning at level 28.

But really, it's the Brotherhood who embody this complaint more than anyone.

In part because they've become the Enclave, complete with vertibirds and racism.

In a better work, this would be remarked upon. Someone would point out that there's a bitter, harrowing irony to be found in the Enclave's biggest enemy stumbling into their ideology, or that a group that was once positioned to be the country's heroic saviours were now out enforcing curfews and killing people without trial. That something once considered a reassuring symbol to the wastes had now become something people dread.

Fallout 4 instead trips over its own feet, because it's more concerned with making you - the viewer - think the Brotherhood are cool. They debut in an epic, memorable cutscene where a fucking blimp flies into the map alongside a vertibird swarm and a dramatic announcement, potentially accompanied by Nick Valentine quoting a passage from The Raven in dismay. Your personal introduction is given an equal amount of weight, featuring a cool vertibird sequence up to the Prydwen which caps off with a rousing speech from a guy deliberately designed to look like modern neo nazis. Progress the story, and they bust out Liberty Prime - Fallout 3's giant death robot who rants about communists in a hammy voice and literally can't be killed.

Being a queer person who has several other characteristics that make me a target for fascists, I'm very sensitive and hypercritical of how they're portrayed. One of my most strongly held beliefs regarding the creative arts is that, much like suicide, a creative should be very considerate of how they depict fascism as I feel it can have very very very lasting real world harm.
See, the other thing Fallout has in common with those other IPs I listed up above is that all of them have had their iconography co-opted by fascists, because all of those IPs eventually doubled down and made their in-universe fascists seem cool to the average viewer. Star Wars doubled down on the Empire's cool visuals, Gundam gave tons of screentime to Zeon, Marvel keeps bringing back The Punisher uncritically, and Warhammer 40k continues to glorify the Imperium even as queer people are made to feel unsafe and ostracized within the community.
I'm only speaking from personal experience here, but the Fallout fanbase is rife with nazis. For a time, Enclave iconography and visuals were pretty much synonymous with the more rightwing elements of the fanbase. Despite New Vegas being popular among queers, the series as a whole doesn't get much discussion because said discussion is mostly driven by rightwingers. The reactions to The Frontier mod contain a lot of the word "degenerate", which I think speaks for itself.

For Bethesda to try so hard to make the openly and textually fascist Brotherhood seem cool and admirable feels irresponsible given the franchise's history. There is a very good reason most other videogames do not give you a "bad guys campaign" when they're approaching anything political, after all. Even Skyrim, this game's immediate predecessor, handled the subject with infinitely more grace.

Such problems are the natural consequence of Bethesda equating "good writing" with "there is a Fallout Thing present". The moral, social and political implications of The Institute being a 200 year old ancient conspiracy who rule an entire region from the shadows are glossed over in favour of "Look! Synths and pre-war aesthetics!". Almost nothing touches on the messy politics of the Railroad and their written goal, which is altruistic on paper but in practice has accidentally become a supremacy movement that carries out 'justified' violence for the sake of the violence itself. The Vaults are no longer horrific dungeons of suffering that represent the sheer moral decay, disregard for life and ruthless exploitation that occurred under Fallout's late stage capitalism, they're a thing you can build if you buy a DLC.

This game's intro, while not as egregious as Fallout 3's, is still a sign of what's to come. Slapped into a pre-war house filled with the worst of Bethesda's fixation on that god awful retrofuturism aesthetic they've concocted, you waddle around interacting with things for a few moments before you get to see the bomb drops in person, run past the military (clad in power armor, naturally) and get admitted to a Vault.
It's all very... theme park. "Look, you can SEE the bombs drop!" doesn't really work when the core of Fallout isn't specifically that the bombs dropped, but what caused them to drop. The erasure of context in favour of simple imagery is a rare moment of honestly from Bethesda, though perhaps an unintended one.

It is not, however, anywhere as honest as Nuka World, a DLC which turns the Fallout world into a more theme park by being set in a literal god damn theme park. Most people have already said it, but the DLC forces you to side with deeply evil raiders to even experience it which is a bad start. Not as bad as the rest of the content, though. Peeling off their mask to reveal their intent, Nuka World shoves you through a series of dungeons utterly caked in Fallout's iconography and original stuff, so much so that it feels like a self-parody from Bethesda at times.

The ultimate tragedy of Fallout as an IP, and specifically the Vault Boy, is that both were very heavily rooted in criticisms of the uniquely insidious ways in which capitalism will weaponize things for its own goals. The peppy and cutesy marketing in-universe was meant to cover up a deeply rotted hyperfascist surveilance state which was willing to annex its neighbours due to deeply rooted Sinophobia. The Vault Boy in particular is a goofy, cutesy cartoon mascot meant to encourage people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from humanity that it saw a nuclear war as an opportunity.

Bethesda sadly now own Fallout, so the Vault Boy is merchandise, used to entice people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from reality that they thought Starfield could stand on its own merits.

It's an absolutely perfect adaptation to game mechanics from something that isn't a game. First you're taking your time, looking up everything in the guidebook to make sure you make no mistakes. Then you're strategizing about which rule checks are worth skipping because they take too long to warrant worrying about the fine they might cost you. Before you know it, it's second nature. You know that Bostan is in Republia and that the line on the MOA emblem goes diagonally from bottom left to top right. On top of this, the game is so good at increasing its complexity- each new rule fits in flawlessly with the existing mechanics, with the difficulty curve, and with the story events.

Like any great game, it feels worth mastering, but it by no means stops there, because you're in Arstotzka, a world where you're never commended for doing anything correctly, only reprimanded for doing things incorrectly. A world where you're fined heavily for the act of decorating your workspace. A world where conducting an X-ray to verify someone's sex and seizing someone's passport without any real justification aren't gross violations of rights but simply burdens, items on a checklist that must be done. Ultimately, Papers, Please is about being molded into thinking, acting, and making decisions like a robot. Come across a moral dilemma and you'll more than likely make your choice on whether or not to admit someone just based on if you've exceeded your protocol violation warning limit for the day. Human beings aren't human beings in Arstotzka, they're means to an end. Through this theme, not only does the game perfectly encapsulate both bureaucratic labor and authoritarian government as a whole, but it comes to the conclusion that no other game with moral dilemmas has been able to quite reach. When working as an immigration officer, there are no people. There are only sets of information which may or may not line up, the specific details of which are so irrelevant towards whether or not someone deserves to pass that they might as well be randomly generated.

And yet, somehow, the human side of Arstotzka shines through. Jorji is more than fine with playing the immigration game, applauding you for working such a difficult job whenever he's denied entry and vying to have more convincing papers next time. Calensk tells you that you'll earn a bonus for detaining more people, and yet he's unable to pay you fully the first few times because he had to spend more money taking care of his family than he anticipated. Even Dimitri, the man in charge of overseeing your position, the man who's forced you to become this robot, will give you a game over if you follow protocol and refuse to let one of his friends into the country. Like the rest of the game, this characterization is so effortlessly natural. The game's mechanics already made going back to get all the medals and endings worthwhile, but picking up on these details adds an additional, equally fulfilling layer. This all culminates in what I think is the high point of the entire game, and what's probably the most optimistic of the major endings. You've just grinded out nearly two-hundred credits to escape the country and are now at the hands Obristan's immigration officer with your family. But you're not denied entry, like you so very much deserve to be, you're let in. Why? Maybe the officer didn't notice your passports were forged, or maybe he inferred the situation that you were in and took mercy. Either way, it's because he's a human being, not a robot, and now your family's safe. Thanks for playing, roll credits.

Everyone has their own opinion on how to fix Fallout 3. Even fans of the game will say that the conflict between Enclave and Brotherhood wasn’t fleshed out enough, that morality plays like Megaton’s bomb were just pitiful, and so on. Those less charitable to the game might say it needs a total rework, to be set in an earlier time period and ditch the classic factions to tell a story more in line with series canon. Personally, I’m somewhere in between, because I think that Fallout 3 actually does have the potential for an amazing story, despite the innumerable problems with its writing. The change to make it all work would be shifting the emotional heart of the story from the Lone Wanderer’s father to another character who already exists, who gives you a quest that could also hold up the entirety of the narrative.

Moira Brown.

Yes, the eccentric shopkeeper in Megaton who wants your help writing the Wasteland Survival Guide, and no, I’m not kidding. The way that the quest works in its current state mostly puts you in the path of raiders, mirelurks, and mole rats, but consider how it would look with an expanded scope, with the goal being to catalog not just the major hazards, but factions and politics as well. It would play out similarly to the independent route in New Vegas, where your goal was to make contact with the major regional powers, and either do their quest to make an ally or ignore them altogether. In the case of this hypothetical new Fallout 3, the plan would be the same, to visit raider camps, Brotherhood outposts, the Enclave itself, hear all their perspectives on the world, and try to bargain with them to make life safer for the common wastelander. Just like how the base game allows you to put in a varying level of effort with optional objectives and stat checks, players would have a wide latitude for how involved they want to be. If they want to improve the wasteland by joining one of the factions, they could then choose to write the book in a propagandized, realistic, or disillusioned way, with more useful details coming with more time as a member. It’s a system that would encourage players to genuinely engage with each faction and learn everything they could, on top of exploring different regions and destroying nests of monsters. Just as the player shapes the guide, the writing of the guide comes to shape the wasteland, which has shaped the views of the player. That sort of expressiveness is exactly what an RPG like Fallout really needs to leave a personal impact.

So, where does Moira herself come into it? Well, she’s the embodiment of the question at the heart of a project like this, of how a single person with hardly anything to their name could heal a deeply troubled world. Think of how much we struggle with this question in real life, how so many of us look around and see nothing but collapse and disparity, and don’t know what we can even do about it. Moira represents that spark of action we have within us, even if we aren't sure how to use it, and whether her own efforts are naive, noble, or something in between is up to interpretation. Whichever way she's viewed, the harshness of the world outside enforces just how much it needs people like her, and not more soldiers. Fallout loves to say that war never changes, but a story like this could be the reminder that there's still hope. It’s people like her who can change the world.

Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
If you’ve read my other Bethesda reviews, you know the drill. The date listed for this completion is for a replay, and I had only played the DLC once upon its release, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just make fun of the game fairly directly, which for this game, is probably what everyone was hoping for anyway. Also, there are a whoppin’ FIVE expansions to get through this time, so I hope you’re comfy.

Operation Anchorage might just have the strongest premise of any Fallout DLC. It’s a rare glimpse into the past, depicting a significant moment in the lore for the first time, and what makes it doubly intriguing is how it’s presented as a military-produced simulation. It’s the perfect opportunity to present how pre-nuclear culture distorted reality, to satirize the sort of politics that lead America down that path, and mix it with grains of truth that the player has to dig through for the real history. It would be Fallout’s version of the histories of Herodotus, which contain a mix of true historical insight next to biased legends meant to excite the crowd. It could even be combined with an alternate plot of trying to escape the simulation in a way that gels nicely with Fallout’s sci-fi influences, there are so many ways that a writer could run with this that the only possible conclusion is that none were actually involved in this project. The DLC starts with a short linear shooting section, then drops you into a small map with two objectives: blow up two fuel tanks and clear a base full of enemies. Then, another linear shooting section wraps it all up. Did they think Fallout 3’s combat was so fun that the game just needed more? Did they think the base game didn’t have enough already? I genuinely have no idea what happened here. There’s no substance, just a little under an hour of pure shooting. The only benefit to engaging with it at all is how the armor it rewards you with is bugged to have 9,991 times the durability it should. Classic.

The Pitt has a much simpler idea going on: sneak into the industrial hell that Pittsburgh has become, go undercover, and coordinate a resistance with the enslaved people. Having all your stuff taken from you to collect ingots in a factory overrun by mutants, scrounging for every bullet and stimpack, is an effective change of pace for highlighting the desperation of the setting, but that single mission is all there is to it. Afterwards, you fight in the arena, with the first enemies dropping great weapons that you can use to easily blast away the other two fights. Then, you get all your gear back. What happens next is particularly odd: you get called up to meet the boss of the entire operation and are expected to hear him out and maybe reach a compromise. However, knowing he’s a slaver and that I’m wearing 9,991 layers of power armor, I disagreed and chose the dialog option to kill him along with all the other bosses. This broke the DLC. Bethesda must have genuinely thought that the choice between maintaining the systematic enslavement of the entire East coast or killing a handful of slavers would be something I needed to really think about, because it made half the NPC’s dialog shut down. It also made the final quest entirely pointless, being a mission to overrun their base with mutants, even though everyone was already dead. So, The Pitt was a promising little plot for about 20 minutes, but after that, it completely ran out of steam. No interesting rewards or additions here either.

Broken Steel is perhaps the most famous of the bunch, thanks to its rewriting of the original terrible ending, but the new one has almost all the same issues. The Enclave’s overall motivation and their reasons for fighting the Brotherhood were hazy at the best of times, but with the purifier lost, their main base destroyed, their leaders killed, and the enemy in possession of a superweapon, what’s keeping them going? What’s their goal that we’re trying to stop? The closest we get is how their orbital satellite superweapon destroyed our giant robot superweapon, and now we want to get even. What they plan to do with it from that point, or why they didn’t just use it earlier, go largely unaddressed. So, the new finale of the Fallout 3 main quest is blowing up a base you learned of an hour ago, in defense of nothing in particular. I genuinely think this DLC was created just to pull the Lone Wanderer out of the grave that the writers inelegantly shoved them into, and the rest was an afterthought. Here’s a fun fact though: Broken Steel contains the only time in the main completion path where you visit the iconic Pennsylvania Avenue. While most players end up there while searching for Dad, players who did Moira’s quest first probably found Dr. Li in Rivet City, skipping quests from Moriarty’s bar, visiting DC, fighting mutants with the Brotherhood, and running errands for Three Dog. See, I told y’all that Moira was the best, she knows where to go.

If it wasn’t for Bethesda’s trademark lack of awareness, I would think Point Lookout was a parody of the main game. You join up with someone who’s entirely contemptuous of you in order to take down someone who’s essentially the exact same, with no firm reason established. Then, the other side tries to flip your allegiance, all without specifying a reason to do so. You really have no context for anything that’s going on and just dumbly shoot your way to the end, until you’re confronted with a pointless choice and an obligatory locker full of stuff. At the very least, this DLC has a full new map to explore, and I have to give credit for that, but it’s just not what this game needed. It’s like Bethesda asked what we wanted, and we yelled “More roleplaying opportunities!” and they said “Great! More shooting!” and served up Operation Anchorage. Then they asked us again, we yelled for more roleplaying again, and we got The Pitt, which asked us if we would be willing to end the murder of an entire generation if it meant the person running the operation would be really disappointed. Then the lag caught up at Bethesda HQ and they got the message that the ending was terrible, so they changed it to allow for more shooting. After we kept screaming for more roleplaying opportunities, we got a couple more square blocks of green mess to explore in a game that had miles of that already. Maybe the next DLC will finally give us what we want.

It took me an hour and a half to complete Mothership Zeta, I had started with 1,006 microfusion cells in my unique plasma rifle, and I ended with 96. So, firing 910 shots over the course of 90 minutes gives me 10 shots per minute, about once every six seconds. Since none of the enemies drop those cells and I never switched weapons, it’s a fairly reliable measurement. However, keep in mind this includes a couple times where I got lost, and all the time spent looting containers when the game is paused, so it’s more like a shot every 4 seconds. There were no story choices to make, so let’s put that at 0 meaningful roleplay interactions per second. Looks like we didn’t ever get what we wanted, huh. What’s sad is that they actually did have a decent premise in here: there are a bunch of people from different time periods and cultures that you release from cryostasis, and you all have to work together to escape the alien ship. Considering how Fallout is all about warring factions, wouldn’t it be beautiful to end the game’s saga with a story about how people can come together across culture and time to create the perfect team? Instead, it just means you can pick a companion with a shotgun, a rifle, or a revolver to shoot along with you. It blows my mind how a DLC that overtly apes Star Trek and classic sci-fi so thoroughly misses the underlying humanism.

If there’s a theme to all this, it’s how Fallout 3 has some nice little seeds of great ideas, which could have grown with some time and love, that just went nowhere. The Capital Wasteland is criticized for being a big green concrete ruin, but the harshness would have been really compelling if it was tied into a story about pushing forward when all seemed lost. Operation Anchorage’s premise is great, The Pitt is a setting just begging for more development, Broken Steel… shows that Bethesda is willing to listen to feedback, and so on. While I would love to say that the team just had to get their sea legs and would make the next Fallout amazing, we all know that didn’t work out. Fallout 4 was also a story that was basically about nothing, and Fallout 76 was entirely based around being about nothing. With such a storied legacy of nothingness, I don’t even know who I would tell to play Fallout 3 in this day and age. You don’t need to play this to see that New Vegas was good, and there are tons of games out there that are more fun to wander around in, overshadowing the one saving grace this game could be said to have.

Thus ends the Fallout 3 Survival Guide. As Moira said, “That concludes our exceptional expert endeavor. I have to admit, I was worried it would go over some peoples' heads…

...but it should be fine.” Thanks for reading this behemoth of a review, I think every Bethesda game I’ve covered has been the longest I’ve ever done at the time of its writing. Luckily, Fallout 4 only has two expansions.

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.