A pretty ingenious game, Fallout provides a small slice of well-crafted game world full of potential. The time limit is a stroke of genius that gives you enough urgency to avoid stupid behavior like rest-spamming or loot ferrying while lenient enough that as long as you don't totally ignore your key objectives you should have plenty of time to complete them.

Combat is a bit one note, mostly consisting of luring enemies around corners and abusing one's understanding of the AP cost for actions to deny them turns. While it's not devoid of tactical depth it does leave something to be desired. The body targeting system is a pretty clever idea, but due to damage being mostly homogenous across enemies and a lack of armor for specific body parts you're pretty much always best off attacking a few key weak points. It would be far more interesting if you were encouraged to tackle foes in different ways, going body or limb shots against enemies wearing helmets or disabling certain pieces of gear. The game plays with this slightly but it's simply too underdeveloped.

The worldbuilding is exceptional but even more so in how it's delivered to the player. Many sidequests and minor characters feedback into the major narrative of the game, often in unexpected ways and it leads to a cohesiveness that is ideal for crafting your own story. I was frequently performing some task that was seemingly unrelated to the game's main quest and would find myself uncovering new story beats or background details or even finding useful info or tools that fed back into it, giving the real sense that I was building up my character's own unique adventure.

The atmosphere throughout all of this is fantastic at capturing the moody, dusky wasteland and the pre-rendered backgrounds and clay models used for important NPC heads look great. There's a good amount here to see and do but also no real pressure to do all of it. Despite the max level of 20 I only got about halfway there by the time I'd beaten the game, meaning there's tons of wiggle room with clever play.

Fallout is a densely packed, 15-20 hour adventure full of replayability and in which nearly every moment feels meaningful. It's a shame more crpgs don't use this as a template instead of giving us needlessly massive games with actually interesting content spread far too thin across them. It's a game I can easily see myself coming back to many times to experience its atmosphere, explore missed and optional quests, attempt alternate solutions and pathways and just generally enjoy playing something good that doesn't demand I devote a month of my time to it in order to get something worthwhile from the effort.