"Stay my blade from the flesh of the innocent. Hide in plain sight. Never compromise the Assassin Brotherhood. These are the tenets of the Creed. The principles I used to live by. I was a young man then. The Seven Years War was about to begin. I could not have imagined what the future had in store for me... Nor the cost I would choose to bear... My name is Shay Patrick Cormac. This is my story."



Rogue is definitely one of the most fascinating AC games. It's regarded as underrated by certain parts of the fanbase while other more vocal members vehemently despise it. The truth to me lies somewhere in the middle. There are aspects that are certainly extremely underrated while others are quite lackluster.

I think Rogue is pretty good but I don’t really have very complex feelings towards it so I think this one is gonna briefer than usual.

Let’s get gameplay out of the way. It’s Black Flag on ice with a satisfying amount of touch ups and improvements. Shay has a very cool toolset (sucks that his weapon is almost the same as Edward’s tho) and the Morrigan definitely has a more balanced and fun arsenal of weapons. There are a good number of additions that make the naval world more tangible like random events, getting boarded by the enemy, using icebergs to your advantage and stuff like that. Even minor stuff like the anchor hud symbol whenever you stop by an island with a contact point (which 4 lacked) are much appreciated. It’s all very fun and very good.

The world design is excellent. I love the setting of the Atlantic North with its frigid beauty and River Valley is very unique to traverse. NY feels distinct enough from AC3 as well so also cool. There’s a sense of verticality in all of these places that stood out as different from 4’s very ground level design. This game is like the one game in the series with a good PC port which is great because I could appreciate the beautiful visuals without unavoidable crashes and dumb shit like most of the previous ones. One knock against the world tho is that this game’s side content consists pretty much exclusively of fetch quests which is definitely due to the restrained development time. I’m biased with this one but playing the game is a blast so even with the WAAAAY too bloated spreading of collectibles (they got like 4 different armor sets like vro chill), it’s still a fun time if you’re up for it.

Story wise I think this game is very cute. There are certainly very controversial narrative decisions but by the end I think it all comes together very nicely. Shay is a really endearing protagonist, love him and his dumb cheesy catchphrase a lot. Honestly to me the biggest narrative blunder is the story’s length because I desperately needed more time with Mr. Cormac, learning more about his past and what led him to follow Liam into the Brotherhood, with a way beefier section working with the templars before he joins their cool kids club to boot. It’s all done way too fast which softens the impact of the narrative considerably but the key moments are always done EXCEDINGLY well which is why I think so many people leave this game with such a strong impression. Rogue starts strong and ends strong and I think that’s a really good breakdown of how most of its plot developments go, the setup is fantastic and the pay off is perfect but the middle chunk is always either messy or way too fast.

I feel like a broken record talking about the OSTs because honestly all of these games have impeccable scores but damn Elitsa’s score for Rogue is STUNNING. The main theme is striking as fuck and tracks like “The Hunter”, “Cityscape”, “I am Shay Patrick Cormac”, “David and Goliath” and many others just fucking hit different. Also, this game has by far my favorite synchronization themes and the main theme motif carrying from those all the way to the naval battle victory are 10/10.



Rogue is Black Flag on Ice but with a narrative that makes this one a really hard recommendation for those not up to speed with the series. While AC4 stands on its own, this game serves as a really cool chapter to close off the Kenway saga while transitioning straight into Unity (God I love the ending). It’s good as hell but very flawed in a lot of areas.

In a lot of ways it reminds me why I was so lukewarm on AC3. The story missions are filler-y and repetitive (I lost count of the number of times I had to tail someone back to the same exact ship just to climb the same exact mast and perform the same exact assassination from above), the story is whatever, the melee combat is very basic, it looks flashy but all you have to do is spam the counter button to win, with the occasional someone making you hit the break defense button first instead (or that one piece of shit boss you have to hang back and shoot like 20 times), and there were lots of rough edges with the ragdolls often going crazy, animations not always lining up and a couple missions that had me spawning in clipped under the ship. Redeeming it though is how much it leans into what’s probably my favourite thing about these games, immersing in the historical setting. Sailing the high seas, getting into ship battles, singing sea shanties, navigating storms, exploring the tropics, diving for treasure, this game really lives up the pirate fantasy, gives you lots to do and I love it. I do really wish though that you could keep more weapons on your belt than just the dual swords. Muskets, hatchets, boarding axes, or even just single swords, you could keep all of them in AC3, so I don’t know why they decided to slap an arbitrary limit on you here. Aside from that though, my experience was positive. I think this might be my favourite Assassin’s Creed game.

The problem with this game in one example:

I was working with The Railroad, an underground movement attempting to take down the Institute.

The Institute made me their leader after I infiltrated them for the first time.

I thought, okay, now I can go back and relay to the Railroad that I'm now the leader of the Institute. You know, the group that our whole goal is to take down.

You can't. I felt like I was going insane when I walked back to the Railroad base and desperately tried talking to everyone to reveal this critical information about the war I was participating in. In that moment, the veil was lifted. This is not a world, it's a shooting gallery.

What is the point of even having a dialogue system if this very common occurrence that the main quest forces you down creates this level of dissonance due to a lack of options? Why even have factions? Why have dialogue? The game would not be any better or worse than it is now.

Update:
So, revisiting the game now in depth for the first time since it came out, I realize: there IS a whole side section of quests dedicated to exactly what I was talking about but it didn't trigger for me on my first run! This does make me feel less insane and I'm glad the game is more functional now, but it's insane that a bug occured nearly ten years ago and colored my perception of the entire story so strongly.

replaying this is after playing ~45 hours of it in 2015, never getting very far in the shameful main story, but... this is one of the greatest failures of storytelling bethesda have ever mustered. it requires nothing short of the total suspension of disbelief every second of playing it to give a shit about anything you're doing. to its... uh, credit? i enjoy a big open world game i can explore, and this one feels pretty good to move around in, but every single line of dialogue fills me with a mirthful disgust. nothing else presumed to be a "role playing" game makes me want to be an asshole like this one does. i cackle with delight when some npc spouts bullshit and an experience gain is triggered, activating my "idiot savant" perk and a dumb giggle from my character. i don't care about this world. i don't care about the must-find-babby plot. i almost want to see it through to its end just to hate it and shit on it in every way i can. my rating doesn't really reflect as much because i have my own fun with the game—i like to wander a big place and creep around in the smaller parts of it—but i think fallout 4 is an embarrassment and that bethesda should be shamed into making a better game next time around. i can only hope that's why they're taking so long...

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.

Bethesda at its state of the art.
I think that everything in Morrowind is nearly perfect. Its interface is the best I have ever seen in a computer role playing game, and the exploration is the best I have experienced together with Gothic 2.
These two games are still better than a lot of AAA role playing games that come out today.
What I like the most about Morrowind is its weird and strange setting. Everything seems so alien, bizarre, it looks like another planet. I think that Bethesda used a lot of ideas from Morrowind in order to build Starfield. But Morrowind is on another level. While the following games relies too much on plot and characters, Morrowind is still totally a world driven game. There is no suspension of disbilief. Perfect game. I would never stop playing it.

One of the worse Fallout games, the surest sign of the irrevocable decline of the RPG as genre, Oblivion with guns, one of Bethesda's finest efforts. In my view, this is a game limited not by its shoddy execution but by its puny ambitions. Take the much maligned morality system of the game: will you defuse the bomb or nuke Megaton? The choice is mocked because the choice is obvious but enough is enough, let's be professional adults who do not condescend to professional adults: does anyone, perched atop some dilapidated hotel tower with a scenic view of the explosion REALLY think Todd Howard and company believed this was a grave moral quandary? It is so clearly not meant to be a dilemma. The point of the choice - the point of Fallout 3, to its ultimate detriment - is not to make you ponder good and evil but to give you the freedom to embrace extremes. In so being, the mutation is complete. The feint of fun in the original Fallout that gave way to a muted, omnipresent sadness has become the blatant substance of it all - post-apocalypse as playground.

It is within those unfortunate parameters that Fallout 3 can be considered a good time. The same way it was never meant to have you consider the weight of your actions, it was never meant for you to consider the weight of your gun. Comedically light, almost ornamental gunplay, interrupted anytime by the bored or thwarted player who pauses the flow of time to save time and find the next interesting attraction of the radioactive theme park. Fallout 3 pays homage to the shooter the same way it pays homage to the RPG, and arrives at something both lesser and special - it's the Bethesda guarantee. With the long-deserved revelations, reckonings, and admissions of Bethesda's myriad failures in our collective past, we can perhaps afford to be a little generous to this and Skyim, the supreme balancing acts between Bethesda's genre-skimming, aesthetic-appropriating, rigorously shallow method and the studio's mysteriously unprecedented and unmatched open world entertainment. Fallout 3 would be followed by New Vegas, 4, and 76, all of which made radical changes to 3 while keeping its true, solid, and generally underappreciated fundamentals: VATS, open world, diminished 1st person shooter, modified WRPGs. Influence or infection? That is each person's lot to decide, but both RPG Codex and Reddit can perhaps agree on this: in retrospect, this was the irreversible turning point, our last chance to be mindless before it came time to pay mind to how good and how bad things could be. This was the nuke of the Fallout franchise.

no amount of great encounter design can make up for The Last of Us's ugly form. "trust no one", "bond with caution": it has every cliché associated with its genre but the twist is that everyone dies, sucks, or both! you can predict literally every single part of the experience if you simply assume the worst in every character. if it wasn't such a cookie-cutter game it could have probably explored some interesting angles.... but no! get along with your basic ass found family while the game sets up the next arc written entirely around a boringly artificial sad twist.