Crafting expands to the player’s tools as well, with an increased variety of fully-customizable weapons. Sights, stocks, handles, muzzles, and more are able to be swapped out and fine tuned to create your perfect weapon. If you’re into the more up-close and personal type of wasteland violence, you’ll be happy to know that the customization courtesy applies to melee weapons as well. Get ready to mod up some baseball bats and brass knuckles; raiders won’t know what hit them.
Weaving every odd end together is the Fallout action, and boasting a familiar feeling for returning fans yet a more refined approach to perks, shooting, and V.A.T.S. The perks are much clearer, broken down in a nice chart (that you also receive as a neat poster with retail copies of the game) that clearly states what they do. You can plot out your course of progression to prioritize certain abilities, and with no level cap, you can eventually revisit some branches you may have skipped over.
You’ll want to pay close attention to these perks since the enemy is well equipped this time around. Enemy AI has gotten quite the bump. They’ll flank, use cover, expose weaknesses, and they have some seriously good aim. More often than not, I found myself forced to be quick on my feet thanks to overconfidence and diving into situations I had absolutely no right to enter. Variety among large groups of enemies is also improved. Snipers, brawlers, suicide bombers, beasts, grenadiers, and more will constantly challenge, using the environment and their equipment to the best of their advantage.
While the enemy AI is challenging and engaging, the companion AI in Fallout 4 is seriously lacking. It’s almost as if they always know exactly where not to stand. You do have the ability to give them orders, but those are quickly undermined by the most trivial of things, such as a bottle on the floor. They are very useful at attracting attention, which is often necessary for you to catch a breather during more difficult encounters, and they serve as great mules for all of the stuff you will inevitably pick up. We won’t bother asking exactly where in Dogmeat you’re storing guns. On the downside, they will block your escape, spoil your stealth, and seem to straight up ignore you at random. At times this was frustrating, especially when a companion possessed a specific skill needed for a certain situation.
Then there are the cracks. With a game as massive as Fallout 4, a crack or two is expected, but they do tend to interfere with gameplay at times. For starters, the game world is absolutely beautiful. Light shines through rundown buildings and barren forestry, you can see fires and explosions in the distance, and everything in the game goes about a normal yet lively routine. But every now and then it can be too much for the game to handle. On both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, there were moments when the framerate would slow to a crawl and the graphics would just break down. It happened during the much larger combat encounters, and while you can anticipate these occurrences during the story, they can catch you off guard out in the wild.
Graphical glitches aren’t too much of a surprise in games of this scale, after all, the game is huge and there is a ton of content packed onto the disc. What’s a bit harder to deal with is quest lines that just don’t work. More than once was I left narratively abandoned when the triggers for a quest just wouldn’t click. There were times when a prompt would instruct the player to either talk to a specific person or head to a certain place and absolutely nothing would happen upon doing either. NPCs would stare at you silently no matter how much you prodded them, heading to required locations would lead to no results, and that would essentially leave you dead in the water. Making matters worse was the fact that it always seemed to happen when the quest really started to pick up. These are things that will hopefully be fixed in due time, but at the moment are major nuisances, especially for those looking forward to experience everything that Fallout 4 has to offer.
Even with its issues, Fallout 4 never fails to impress. It took the dead expanse of previous iterations and breathed a type of life that takes good care not to betray the experience fans have come to know and love. It is something a newcomer can easily get lost in as they discover several worlds within a Boston that appears decimated on the surface, yet is writhing with a spirit waiting to be led, or destroyed. It is a truly great game in every sense of the word. Expansive, immersive, engaging, and, every now and then, thought provoking. It is a step forward for the series as a whole. The Wasteland is every bit as deadly and seemingly uninviting as it’s always been, but beneath the surface lies more life than the pre-Great War world could ever hope to witness. The way every mechanic and decision perfectly marries to each and every other one is nothing short of amazing. War may always stay the same, but Fallout 4 has grown the series in marvelous ways.
Score: 4.5/5
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