This review contains spoilers
One of the best tRPGs around. Deceptively simple mechanics lead to brutally difficult gameplay that really encourage you to accept failure and loss when it comes.
Story wise, an incredible if depressing story of how how hypercaptialism and greed will destroy the world, and how we're probably would not learn our lesson when it does. Interesting to note how much lighter later titles get in their general perceptions of the world compared to this one, which I find most gloomy of all. Finding that pretty much every settlement is under the thumb of some criminal underworlder and that all justice is is a costly shootout that usually leaves some if not all of the law dead does not paint a pretty picture of the world as it stands then. As is your exile at the end, an absurd, meaningless act that serves to show how bad things really are.
One of my favorite aspects of this game is the spread of information. I realized in a recent playthrough that people will LIE to you. They won't have accurate information -- and why would they? it does so much to adding mystery and texture. In games these days everyone is a font of info that they have no right of knowing. (Like how everyone in America by Fallout 4 has agreed on the terminology of caps, ghouls, muties, etc.)
The Master is one of the best villains in gaming history in my opinion. Besides his horrifyingly good design, him as an innocent man fallen prey to the evils of the past world, maddeningly trying to end pain and create peace in the most psycho way, undone by the failures of the very past science he himself was destroyed by -- so good. The Children of the Cathedral are so weird, the story of the super mutants more tragic and human than they are in any other game.
Likewise, franchise mainstays the Brotherhood of Steel are also at their best, being universally mistrusted kooky knight LARPers who serve no other purpose than getting you endgame gear.
Story wise, an incredible if depressing story of how how hypercaptialism and greed will destroy the world, and how we're probably would not learn our lesson when it does. Interesting to note how much lighter later titles get in their general perceptions of the world compared to this one, which I find most gloomy of all. Finding that pretty much every settlement is under the thumb of some criminal underworlder and that all justice is is a costly shootout that usually leaves some if not all of the law dead does not paint a pretty picture of the world as it stands then. As is your exile at the end, an absurd, meaningless act that serves to show how bad things really are.
One of my favorite aspects of this game is the spread of information. I realized in a recent playthrough that people will LIE to you. They won't have accurate information -- and why would they? it does so much to adding mystery and texture. In games these days everyone is a font of info that they have no right of knowing. (Like how everyone in America by Fallout 4 has agreed on the terminology of caps, ghouls, muties, etc.)
The Master is one of the best villains in gaming history in my opinion. Besides his horrifyingly good design, him as an innocent man fallen prey to the evils of the past world, maddeningly trying to end pain and create peace in the most psycho way, undone by the failures of the very past science he himself was destroyed by -- so good. The Children of the Cathedral are so weird, the story of the super mutants more tragic and human than they are in any other game.
Likewise, franchise mainstays the Brotherhood of Steel are also at their best, being universally mistrusted kooky knight LARPers who serve no other purpose than getting you endgame gear.