More than anything, just the start of a lot of the series' bad habits and an absolutely bloated game sitting precariously on top of Fallout 1's great base.

Both easier and harder than the first in different places, but it mostly gets credit for being the only one in the series to get charisma actually right. Play with stat modifiers for long enough and you can get an army of up to 5 companions (6 if you use an exploit). The companions are given a lot more characterization this time around some having unique scenes and endings but again, like the first it's entirely uneven. The world in general is entirely uneven, but unlike the first instead of blank spaces theres gags. Lots and lots of gags. I know 90s PC nerds ate up pop culture references and 4th wall breaks like candy but this is just so fucking obnoxious. Look we had a character acknowledge how little sprites we have instead of scaling down the to focus on making existing locations interesting. Look at the star trek reference you dumb fucking rube.

Storywise its like if you tried to make the worst possible sequel to the first. Your character from the first went off to establish his own civilization with a bunch of his other vault dwellers who left, but over the course of literally one generation they regressed to tribalism??? Everyone in the starting village speaks as though they are from a different era despite their parents being some of the most educated people in the world, but your character can opt out of this and choose to instead speak in detached sarcasm. Its so wimpy. We made our world really obnoxious and nonsensical, but don't worry, we gave you the ability to show how cool you are by not engaging with any of it.

The cool bits everyone uses to show you how cool the game is are few and far between and almost never relevant to how you'll play the actual game. The enclave are fun villains but you don't really get to do anything with them until the end of the game. The master in the first comes a bit out of left field but theres plenty of clues about what hes doing before you actually uncover him, the enclave just sort of show up and gun down some people occassionally and then the brotherhood finally decides to tell you what they're up to at the end before disappearing entirely. The final act is decided by a conflict between a scientology riff and a giant reference to chinese kung fu movies. Why should I care about anything when so much time is dedicated to joke characters whose schtick can barely survive one dialogue but dramatic moments like Goris' entire family getting killed get one or two lines max.

Going back to this, I don't really see how anyone could see a distinction between this and Bethesda Fallout. If anything, Bethesda has been markedly more reserved with it's tone!

Beautifully written, incredibly dense and thought provoking but overall a bit limited. A medieval murder mystery about different points in a small country town's history that is ultimately more about the impact and the history surrounding the murders than the mystery.

Timeskips are whats needed to be even remotely accurate to a medieval setting like this, but the lack of interludes between them hurts even when the suggested emotional impact can hit hard anyway. Getting to decide how the main character Andreas feels about his estranged wife is a fun concept, but it's ultimately a veil for an emotional beat that will happen regardless of what you pick. There's a lot of moments like this, and it's not like previous obsidian games or games like this one were totally transformative with their choices, but for an entirely narrative experience theres just very little difference in anything. What's left feels more like a visual novel with all the most annoying parts of a 90s adventure game tacked on.

Regardless the plot is very, very engaging. The mystery and the uncomfortable guilt of probably knowing you're going to finger the wrong person is sort of thrilling. The main problem, again, is that half of Andreas journey happens offscreen and as more and more information is recalled it feels less and less "focused on the town" and more "budget." I feel like even just one scene in any of the provinces you picked or even at home would've connected the story a little better, because otherwise you're left with these disjointed and sudden "mind palace" scenes where different characters explain Andreas' emotional state to him. It's a fun play on medieval theater at first, but as time goes it just feels confused.

Again, an absolutely fantastic story that's gotten me very interested in a lot of the history surrounding it (kudos to the devs for including a reading list) but not one I can imagine going back to.

Definitely a lot to like especially compared to a lot of other CRPGs from the time but progression is so bizarrely obtuse at times and while still pretty forgiving the time limit is an unknown stressor that put me off the game for a good while. It took me four playthroughs to actually get a game going because frankly I didn't know what the game wanted from me and with how much time exploring takes I felt like I didn't have time to figure it out.

It feels very low budget at points despite an assumedly expensive (somewhat) star studded cast rounding out most of the voice acted characters. Important characters or objects often times don't have unique sprites and sometimes don't even have unique descriptions to signify to interact with them. Definitely a "click on everything" game, which gets pretty grating when most of what you get is repeated flavor text and empty containers. The rope on a random bookshelf (which has incorrect interaction collision in some places) in a random corner of shady sands being the difference between basic progression at the start of the game or a few days off your timer is just one example of how much you'll need a guide here.

There are a lot of compelling and fun characters but the story gets lost and sort of meanders by the time you get the water chip and go to LA. Theres a couple good town quests and dungeons to be found but it's very limiting, which works for the tone but combined with how little a lot of the fun and interesting characters have to say it all feels a bit rushed. There are multiple quests referenced or mentioned that are straight up not in the game or entirely unfinished, and finding the final boss ultimately comes down to a crapshoot bumming around a random location given to you by the worst follower in the game. Some endings are either entirely impossible or determined by seemingly random factors.

The soundscape is pretty dull, the droning ambience and whispers are good for some areas but get grating as they repeat. I don't mind the repetetive attack sounds but at some point I gave one of my followers a deagle or something that is so loud it manually lowered other sounds on my computer every time he fired???

Combat is infamously bullshit at some points but often times way way funnier than later entries. The brutal and well animated death animations combined with your followers accidentally doming you in the back of the head every 5 seconds paint this sort of bizarre portrait of chaotic gunfight that none of the games really capture afterwards. The animation in both the actual game and the cutscenes is generally very detailed and impressive for the time. Bosses have insanely brutal death animations and characters accurately display dismemberment based on what direction of a blast they were hit by, though there was one part where dogmeat turned into a man because he didnt have an animation for being killed by flames.

TLDR play with a guide if you want to have any fun, just watch some hack talk about the lore on youtube otherwise

5 years later still an entirely nonsensical fallout game getting by on the fumes of an mmo market with little competition.

As someone with an embarrassing 500 hours in fallout 4, I can tell you all the people talking about it having the "best combat" on the series are entirely wrong. Most people are very easily tricked by the very flashy particle effects and sound design into thinking that all of the combat in the game isn't either finding an angle to cheese overly tanky ranged enemies or finding a big rock to cheese the ones that run at you. Fallout 76 enhances this hypnotizingly boring experience by adding a full second of network communication delay any time you shoot something and a whole bredth of bizarre errors any time more than one player gets into a fight with a group of enemies.

To top it all off this game also uses a directional audio system mostly in line with new cod games, where everything is almost inaudible if youre not looking at it????? Quick combat encounters in Fallout 4 are now stretched even further as youll walk away from what you think is a finished encounter, only to get progressively attacked by a train of melee enemies trailing you from the scene and doing the wonderful full second stun all melee enemies get to do.

Playing mostly solo there was nothing particularly difficult aside from overleveled raid bosses I would occassionally attempt. Even as most of my armor and guns broke down and I didn't care enough to fix them, combat was as easy as just slowly walking up to enemies and slowly unloading a shotgun into them. There was a bit of challenge in what I think was supposed to be an expansion raid, but even going up against high level enemies, half the time their AI seems to break and they either wont advance on your or will just straight up stay still and stop attacking.

Unlike Fallout 4 there are actually interesting things you can build in your base but they are of course mostly locked behind microtransactions, a subscription service and a battle pass. Even experiencing most of the actual story content and doing plenty of dailies and events on the way, progression without spending actual money moves at a glacial pace.

There are some somewhat interesting sidequests but most either have no payoff or are just lead ins to dailies. Factions are maybe some of the most dry and boring I've ever seen in a game and while I don't like to be anal about nerd timelines almost nothing going on here makes any sense. The justification for this being so early after the bombs dropped is that appalachia was untargeted as a mostly rural region, but because of time constraints there were no people at launch, so all of the human npcs you meet are talking about "coming back" to appalachia. Coming from where all the bombs dropped??? The radio announcer, possibly the worst in the series, goes on multiple therapyspeak diatribes on how hard it must be for everyone out there while cracking lighthearted jokes about how dangerous the regions is. Multiple people talk about experiencing life before the bombs, which was a hundred years ago. What the fuck is happening?????

I think the moment I turned on the game was when going to the expansion areas and seeing the insanely ugly fullbright areas that look straight out of a half baked Fallout 4 mod. I genuinely don't see how the series can come back from this because this is Bethesda fallout distilled into a science. Shoot ghoul. Shoot supermutant. Shoot deathclaw. Look its the brotherhood. Shoot raider. Just fucking nothing. Soulless. There are people who are vehemently defending this game because they fell for the hypnosis trick. It's over.

Shares a lot in common with New Vegas with its problems, outdated engine the devs clearly werent having a good time with, loose and somewhat useless perks and a story that closes in on itself and rips control away just as it's getting interesting.

But where new vegas offered freedom with a clear and succinct dialogue system (that even then could still confuse your intentions), this game goes the Mass Effect/LA Noire route and kills most of the interest you could have in the world in the crib. To be fair to it, it does more with this dialogue system than most seventh gen games, often times giving you a short time to respond when a question catches your character off guard, theres an intentional difficulty to communication and not paying attention can cost you. It does not change the fact that it is supremely fucking boring and annoying to try and approximate what you'll be saying, what any particular character will like and whether or not any given option will tie into gathered intel at the same time.

The gameplay is awful, both normal combat and stealth are like pulling teeth in the worst way and the game doesn't even respond to how you play correctly despite giving you a bunch of tools to encourage an mgs european extreme type playthrough. Often times I'd go through a whole level knocking everyone out and a character would still respond that I'd killed his guards.

All that said, even with all those problems, 7th gen obsidian had the juice to make basically anything compelling. The only way to make a premise like this work is to pull no punches and this game, even through its goofy tabletop OC spy bullshit, pulls absolutely no punches about what your actual role in geopolitics is. This would work great as an isometric rpg, or even just an attempt at the same script with an engine overhaul, but as it is it's at least a compelling game.

Some great and stressful combat that's bogged down by a lot of story execution that misses the mark and provides the same question as the RE4make: why?

Not much to say about the combat other than that it's very meaty and fun. The main problem is that technically it falls apart when put under any scrutiny, hotswapping can often result in your character doing the wrong action or getting stuck in a reload. Backtracking is also a bit annoying as the map is incredibly hard to navigate and for some sidequests gives you the entirely wrong marker or direction.

Not intimately familiar with the original as I only skimmed through some playthroughs on youtube as a kid but immediately the performances seemed very stilted compared to what I remembered, the worst thing in the history of existence is happening and everyone sounds somewhat bored about all of it. Isaac talking makes a lot more sense than him not doing so in the original but it leaves some characters with little to do as he does all the problem solving.

The original games also stand out in my mind as some of the best arguments for manual as opposed to mocapped animation, the original had all sorts of scenes of zombies bouncing off the walls draggings guys left and right in the most animated and dramatic way possible. It's pulpy! It's fun! Whereas here some scenes reuse the original manual animation and the ones that don't are incredibly jarring. This shares a very hard to describe problem with a lot of new games (spiderman, god of war, resident evil, etc) where you can almost immediately tell the jarring moment when they have to transition a mocapped body from moving around in their small space to interacting with or doing something fantastical such as getting flung or grappled by a large creature.

The new graphics look great at a lot of points but anything from high to ultra had pretty bad stutters even on my 4090 and doesn't leave enough of an impression that I could really distinguish it from the original. You can an unlock an old version of the main suit that is just the original low poly model from the 2008 game and while it's pretty interesting to see how much it buckles under the new advanced lighting engine, it still doesn't really convince me that this was worth it over just doing a graphical overhaul/rerelease of the original.

The orchestral score is great for some story beats but gets grating fast as every single potentially scary surprise is accompanied by 50 guys on strings competing who can play the loudest.

Overall pretty well crafted and pulpy, but not enough that I'd consider replaying.

"Milsim Call of Duty" is the sort of hairbrained premise that would give the series severe brain damage in every almost every game after this, but here it's actually really fun. The presentation, gameplay and multiplayer are almost outstandingly perfect and it's all in service of one of the most horrifyingly revisionist plots in the series.

I think it goes without saying that the series is military propaganda, it's almost stupid to even point it out, but this one genuinely seeks to brainwash its audience of, lets be honest here, stupid people and children! There's a fine line between "stupid, jingoistic fun" and "Falsifying historical events in favor of the government writing your checks."

The game takes place in a weird fictional cross of Chechnya and Afghanistan where the Russians invaded around the same time as Afghanistan in the 80s, and in one level commit a massacre heavily inspired by one commited by American backed forces in real life in Afghanistan. There's a prison torture level that lifts a ton of imagery from the famous photos of American-Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, but this prison just so happens to be controlled by the Russians. They also commit the highway of death! But not the real highway of death. A fictional one. That just so happened to have played out as the exact same event in real life and have the same name and be commited by a convenient enemy of the state.

There's a lot of effort being put in to showing some heinous shit but it's both incredibly apologetic about it and doesn't go nearly as far as it would suggest. Every other mission has civilians, sometimes children, present during gunfights but making a mistake and shooting them still results in immediate mission failure and most of the children clearly recorded their lines in an environment that was tailor made to ensure they were comfortable and as a result sound incredibly bored about the horrifying violence going on. This is already psycho shit! Go all the way! You're going as far to highlight the children present to the point that the game has a content warning every time you open the campaign, but you refuse to show any violence being done to them (during one sequence an antagonists threatens and then goes through with shooting a child who conveniently runs offscreen before it can be shown) and refuse to put in the effort of making them sound scared!

You kill the aforementioned child killing antagonist in front of his own kid after threatening his family, but any attempt to even non fatally harm his wife and kid results in an immediate cut to black game over. Our heroes have to be conflicted, violent maniacs but never enough to paint them as worse than the bad guys, so you end with a game constantly bearing it's teeth and absolutely refusing to bite because that might displease it's masters.

Again, maybe the best Call of Duty to date, the story is engaging and has momentum! Almost every gunfight and setpiece is perfect. But even as someone who enjoys the series (the original had fake Saddam Hussein detonating WMD in the middle of fake Iraq for god sake!) this is entirely both too far and insane pussy shit. I cannot conscionably recommend this game to anybody unless you want to get a few good multiplayer rounds in.

Also it ends with a marvel movie stinger teasing the characters from the original games. Actually fuck off.

Some of the best gunplay in the series dragged down by some of the worst scripted bullshit to date. Anytime you have a fun or tense gunfight it has to make up for it by filling twice as much time with a terrible gimmick or an insanely boring cutscene. Also, stop trying to put "boss fights" in these games. It does not work! It never works!

I don't mind the premise of a swashbuckling ww2 A-team, but the game does everything in its power to make everyone as annoying as possible. I don't like to rag on "dialogue" especially in a game as mindless as this but it's genuinely impossible to convey through text how fucking dumb it all is. I see a lot of complaints from the usual crowd about this game having forced diversity (it does to be fair) or how it disrespects the troops or yadda yadda yadda but the reality is that you can get away with all of that shit if you make anyone likeable to any degree whatsoever! They let you play as a silent guy in the beginning and then immediately kill him off so you can spend the rest of the game watching what is basically just a bad streaming drama occassionally interrupted by gameplay.

I feel bad saying this because it's clear through little bits like the environment and the sound design that there are so many genuinely talented people who worked on this, who work on all of these games, and all of their work is crushed under mountains and mountains of intrusive garbage that almost seems designed to make the game entirely disposable and forgettable.

That being said, the multiplayer is probably one of the most fun times i've had with one of these. Honestly has some of the best maps in the series.

Starts off tonally generic but fantastic gameplaywise, reincorporates a lot of old gameplay mechanics and flow in a way that i would have thought was obnoxious and terrible but actually shakes out into something decent. Close quarters combat is fast and loose while progressing into the fields from the trenches brings the perfect level of pressure as you transition into long range fire. Set health bars with healing items are back from the first game but the healing animation is so fast and you always have such a steady supply it never feels unfair or slow. On top of that health packs and other supplies/abilities are given by squad mates you gain and lose over the course of the game and it really makes you feel the loss sometimes.

By the halfway point, though, everything devolves into a mess of terrible, instrusive melodrama that seeps into the setpieces turning the game into a nonsensical blur of stupid bullshit. We just took this hotel, theres civilians hiding in the basement who were completely safe from the gunfight we just had upstairs, instead of securing the hotel we need to spend a bunch of time putting these civilians into the middle of the line of fire so we can get them into a random truck we found so they can drive away through the middle of an active warzone??? Not to mention they start doing repeats of events portrayed in call of duty 2 and no matter how many big budget tree explosions they do it just cant sell the intensity as much as the originals.

Progression triggers are also insanely bizarre, most firefights give you a lot of room to move around and usually the safest place is in the back of the action, especially during defense sequences, but at some point you're supposed to infer that you need to run out into the middle of enemy fire to a specific point so you can get hit by a rocket and the setpiece can end with you slowmo shooting guys with a pistol while knocked on the ground. It is a bizarelly specific complaint but this happens three times!

If they had leaned into the arcady side more and done more of the dumb "you just got dropped into an exotic and interesting location behind enemy lines" shit that was in the originals this would have been a slam dunk. The originals had plenty of the same dumb stuff in them but its paced in such a way where THATS the break from the serious action, not the expensive yet boring cutscenes where you argue with your comically evil sargeant about fucking nothing.

Suffers from balancing being a followup to 0 and a remake of a game from when the series didn't have as much of an identity.

Generally the whole game is very neurotic about when you can or cant progress in certain areas and most of the minigames included are very disappointingly recycled from 0 to the point its not worth playing most of them. Most if not all factored into some progression with the business minigame while here they are all just occassionally the backdrop for uninspired sidequests or a single majima fight. The matchbox car game is almost entirely unchanged and the arcades have been gutted to now only offer a slightly more annoying version of the naked lady wrestling where you need to cover the entire town looking for playing cards in a game you will probably win regardless. Really the only thing there is to do is fight Majima, but that's also locked off between story progression and even then farming interactions with him isn't easy.

The combat system is a lot of fun when it gets the chance to shine but in the later half almost every chapter comes screeching to a halt so you can get stunlocked by a boss with a gun or a tanto knife, and the only options for dealing with them are special moves you can only get by abusing health items because you cant build up your special meter while being stunlocked. Beast style is almost entirely useless and the game teases you with a fourth style you cant get any meaningful progression in until the last chapter of the game.

There are definitely shining moments of charm like with the majima missions or characters emotional states being communicated with controller rumble, but it just doesn't justify a ground up remake. I haven't played the original but I feel like you could have just touched up the PS2 version and called it a day because most of the time this is probably just as frustrating.