mary_mustard
1994
Oooooh...banana
This game is brain poison in the best way, encouraging hundreds of hours of arbitrary genocide and expansionism at the click of a distant button - much like history!
2002
I'm pretty sure I played this for 100 hours as a kid and am only just now learning you're supposed to do racing in it
1997
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.
2012
When you breathe a sigh of relief as your gay, idiot son and heir is assassinated by an upstart Count (who you then proceed to execute along with his entire family in public-facing retribution) you know you've made it.
2015
Transforms the last gasp of actual Role Playing from its predecessors into an enjoyable but kinda brain-dead action open world game with a completely nonsensical story (I have just woken up, in my mind, like an hour after the complete apocalypse. Everyone I know and love is dead, the world is dead, my life is dead. Seems like a perfect time to go adventuring! Orange colored skyyyyy!)
Also nonsensically sparse of an environment for 200 years post bomb. Like Californians are living in a technological paradise in Vault City at this time and Boston is 80 people living in tin shacks on a baseball diamond.
I really liked the settlement building and scavenging aspects. I just wish you had more of a story incentive to do so.
Also nonsensically sparse of an environment for 200 years post bomb. Like Californians are living in a technological paradise in Vault City at this time and Boston is 80 people living in tin shacks on a baseball diamond.
I really liked the settlement building and scavenging aspects. I just wish you had more of a story incentive to do so.
Reaches a plateau point a little too quickly for my taste, where the game stops being about development and exploration and more about increasingly elaborate enhancements to the limited space of your island that feel less and less rewarding. Regardless, the game is adorable, comforting, well designed and scored and sufficiently rewarding for less intensive levels of play. Recommend for chill sessions with your SO.
2019
It feels like they made 1/3rd of a really good game and then ran out of money and pushed it out. I was led to believe it was some kind of fun critique of hypercaptialism, but it really isn't. There's no meaningful "labor" side vs "company" side (the company is so comically evil it makes no sense to side with them or take them seriously as an antagonist.) Likewise, I was led to believe it was a Fallout: New Vegas successor, wheras it's more of a baby of Mass Effect 1 and Borderlands. Worse, the game introduces a much more interesting conflict in the last five minutes as some kind of cliffhanger that makes you wonder what the point of doing the main plot even was.
Gameplay wise, RPG elements are purposeless as there are precious few non-combat options, forcing the player to spec into a high-dps machine gun build to get anything done. Environments are gorgeously designed but entirely sparce, leaving no real reason to explore or look around.
In short: You are asked once why you are doing the main quest, and one of the answers you can give is "I don't know."
Gameplay wise, RPG elements are purposeless as there are precious few non-combat options, forcing the player to spec into a high-dps machine gun build to get anything done. Environments are gorgeously designed but entirely sparce, leaving no real reason to explore or look around.
In short: You are asked once why you are doing the main quest, and one of the answers you can give is "I don't know."
2009
The pondering, nonlinear construction really pushes the expectation on what a Halo game or a space-marine shooter really can be (within the constraints of the genre.) Adds a lot of thoughtfulness and pathos to the Halo world.
2010
Incredible western epic. Gameplay and the environment really informs the feel of the story and allows the player to build their own sense of John Marston's character to fit around the man shown in cutscenes.
Shows what Rockstar could do when they're not designing GTA games with such insightful satire as "Fat Idiot Zombie Phone Company."
Shows what Rockstar could do when they're not designing GTA games with such insightful satire as "Fat Idiot Zombie Phone Company."
2005
Has an old-fashioned jank to the gameplay that is compensated by incredibly clever and funny design and story writing. I wish every game was as inventive as this one, honestly.
Any criticism I could make evaporates as I roll a boulder into a pile of exploding barrels, launching a Bokoblin into the air only for it to be shot by 5 electric arrows at once.
you'll get more out of the in game books and Michael Kirkbride's inane rambling and sick as hell pen sketches than you will playing this shit. sorry, millenials
2018
At time of play 2021, surprisingly durable. Did not experience any serious bugs on my ten year old computer nor did I have more than two crashes total in 65 hours of playtime.
Plays pretty identically to Fallout 4, a servicable action-rpg shooter with slightly less satisfying gunplay as server latency and overleveled enemies make everything softer. While strong in the midgame, there is a lack of diversity in enemy types or behaviors that makes further play more and more of a slog. It's basically either ghouls, super mutants, robots, or the new enemy "scorched" which are like ghouls but moderately more smart about their tactics. The peculiar leveling leaves you about a half step behind any enemy you find, making you always feel at odds with the environment. Plus, currency is designed to only be used with other players, meaning it is basically impossible to sell or buy anything. The only rewards come from quests, which are too far and few in between to keep you supplied. I went hours once with no ammo, running gauntlets through super mutant settlements to scrape for 25 .38 rounds.
Exploration is the highlight of this game and is admittedly enjoyable, as it makes the base game's main quest. There is a lot of environmental storytelling to be had and one feels like an archaeologist tracing the timeline of some past battle or mishap, and breakthroughs of finding the answer to a mystery in one town in some bunker across the state is satisfying. Particular highlight is the town of Huntersville and an all too real story of corporate power and pollution destroying a small community. That said, after a while, the lack of any advancement in this makes everything sort of ring hollow and feel dead.
Wastelanders update adds NPCs to the game, but applying that framework to the existing characterless structure is difficult. Chronological issues abound in dialogue, and having to pen in all human characters to just two settlements mean the world never feels alive. The NPCs themselves are rather one note, and you meet them so late in the course of play that they never develop any kind of emotional resonance to them in the way the rich characters of NV do, or even some of the screwballs from Fallout 4 and 3. Likewise, they are all so vague about their backstories and motivations - like you ask them "hey where'd you guys come from" and the response is literally "all over the place." Cool. Way to illustrate a vibrant world, guys.
Story wise, the game is at its weakest. Gone are any kind of exploration of the life and death of America, capitalism, the futility and cycle of war - all left behind. The game treats the absolute horror of casual nuclear weapons use as a piece of zany teehee advertising, for frick's sake. In its place, you in the first half examine an effort to fight a deadly disease. But luckily someone already made the cure, so all you have to do is show the two human groups that they would die without it and they all agree pretty easily. I even expected them to be like "hey, you aren't inoculating our main competitors too? We'd rather they die out." Nope, they're chill about it. The game then takes a baffling left turn into a heist story, where you try to steal the gold reserves of America in a vault. The laughable absurdity of lusting after gold after twenty five years in an apocalypse is never really acknowleged, as every character on their face is like "yeah totally we want some gold, for sure." Your overseer (in every other game an incompetent, evil or worthless person; in this one, your mom for some reason) literally says she wants to rebuild society and you're supposed to be like yeah totally that seems like a good idea. One really misses the story of the Sierra Madre and how greed for the currency and life of the past no longer has any meaning when it has destroyed all of society.
Sigh. Worth getting on sale if you want a passable shooter to zone out to and get some tidbits of more Fallout lore, or if you have too much time on your hands.
Plays pretty identically to Fallout 4, a servicable action-rpg shooter with slightly less satisfying gunplay as server latency and overleveled enemies make everything softer. While strong in the midgame, there is a lack of diversity in enemy types or behaviors that makes further play more and more of a slog. It's basically either ghouls, super mutants, robots, or the new enemy "scorched" which are like ghouls but moderately more smart about their tactics. The peculiar leveling leaves you about a half step behind any enemy you find, making you always feel at odds with the environment. Plus, currency is designed to only be used with other players, meaning it is basically impossible to sell or buy anything. The only rewards come from quests, which are too far and few in between to keep you supplied. I went hours once with no ammo, running gauntlets through super mutant settlements to scrape for 25 .38 rounds.
Exploration is the highlight of this game and is admittedly enjoyable, as it makes the base game's main quest. There is a lot of environmental storytelling to be had and one feels like an archaeologist tracing the timeline of some past battle or mishap, and breakthroughs of finding the answer to a mystery in one town in some bunker across the state is satisfying. Particular highlight is the town of Huntersville and an all too real story of corporate power and pollution destroying a small community. That said, after a while, the lack of any advancement in this makes everything sort of ring hollow and feel dead.
Wastelanders update adds NPCs to the game, but applying that framework to the existing characterless structure is difficult. Chronological issues abound in dialogue, and having to pen in all human characters to just two settlements mean the world never feels alive. The NPCs themselves are rather one note, and you meet them so late in the course of play that they never develop any kind of emotional resonance to them in the way the rich characters of NV do, or even some of the screwballs from Fallout 4 and 3. Likewise, they are all so vague about their backstories and motivations - like you ask them "hey where'd you guys come from" and the response is literally "all over the place." Cool. Way to illustrate a vibrant world, guys.
Story wise, the game is at its weakest. Gone are any kind of exploration of the life and death of America, capitalism, the futility and cycle of war - all left behind. The game treats the absolute horror of casual nuclear weapons use as a piece of zany teehee advertising, for frick's sake. In its place, you in the first half examine an effort to fight a deadly disease. But luckily someone already made the cure, so all you have to do is show the two human groups that they would die without it and they all agree pretty easily. I even expected them to be like "hey, you aren't inoculating our main competitors too? We'd rather they die out." Nope, they're chill about it. The game then takes a baffling left turn into a heist story, where you try to steal the gold reserves of America in a vault. The laughable absurdity of lusting after gold after twenty five years in an apocalypse is never really acknowleged, as every character on their face is like "yeah totally we want some gold, for sure." Your overseer (in every other game an incompetent, evil or worthless person; in this one, your mom for some reason) literally says she wants to rebuild society and you're supposed to be like yeah totally that seems like a good idea. One really misses the story of the Sierra Madre and how greed for the currency and life of the past no longer has any meaning when it has destroyed all of society.
Sigh. Worth getting on sale if you want a passable shooter to zone out to and get some tidbits of more Fallout lore, or if you have too much time on your hands.
1998
Builds upon Fallout 1 to create a different tale that follows the same throughlines of greed, the end of the old, the beginning of the new and the cycle of war. Has a lot more levity to it than the first game, but at its core still a rather dark story. (I don't think we're supposed to read into the origins of the NCR or Vault City, or just walk through New Reno with too much hope, as we see by New Vegas.)
Gameplay is bigger and better than the first, based upon the same system but adding more weaponry, skills and companions to make it an even more challenging and enigmatic game. You have to be able to accept failure and loss in this game to enjoy it in the best way.
Story wise, has classic fantasy themes of simple-villager-defeats-evil-empire. The Enclave are hilariously evil but deeply menacing. Highly recommend as a classic.
Gameplay is bigger and better than the first, based upon the same system but adding more weaponry, skills and companions to make it an even more challenging and enigmatic game. You have to be able to accept failure and loss in this game to enjoy it in the best way.
Story wise, has classic fantasy themes of simple-villager-defeats-evil-empire. The Enclave are hilariously evil but deeply menacing. Highly recommend as a classic.