Fallout 4 Ps4 Review: "An unfriendly and confusing experience that failed to grip me."

Fallout 4 Ps4 Review

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Patch Version:  1.16

Fallout 4 is a game that a lot of people are still playing, and considering it was released in November of 2015, surely this is a sign of quality to come, right?

Having never played the previous iterations, all I knew about Fallout 4 going in, was it is a post-apocalyptic first person shooter set in an alternative version of our own world.

However, after a brief opening cutscene that didn’t really grip me, the starting sequence was very slow.  Had I booted the wrong game?

No, this was definitely Fallout 4, and clearly this beginning was designed to set up the story and introduce the characters in a manner meant to form a bond, but it does it akin to games such as Heavy Rain, where you are tasked with mundane chores to fill the time before something interesting happens.  I’m rarely a fan of such openings, they bore me and I can't for the life of me understand why developers believe players will enjoy it.  

The only interesting aspect throughout this entire introduction was the way they weaved into the story the sense of assigning your initial set of skill points. I'd never played a game before where you are given some skills points before you even start playing.  It was a unique concept to me and I liked it.

This interesting concept aside, it’s not too long before the rest of the opening monotony ends, and when reports over the TV come in about nuclear detonations all over America, you and your family rush to the nearest vault to take shelter.

It would be hard to describe the stories main focus from here on out without giving away a  minor spoiler, but I don't think it will ruin anything for you, still, all I’ll say, having been frozen in a cryogenic-stasis-chamber, you awake and discover your infant son to be missing.

From here, your character is driven to find him and as to why he was taken, problem is, having been playing now for three hours, I’m not terribly drawn in or enjoying myself. The world is huge, that much clear, and from an art perspective it does look impressive and holds true to a world that was ravaged by nuclear explosions and the aftermath of the proceeding fallout.

However, as you would imagine, a world afflicted in such a way looks exactly the same no matter where you go, or so far at least having pretty much remained in and around the starting area because I’ve been doing all the side content as and when I find it. 

But that’s not biggest problem I’m having with the game, I hate the total lack of guidance in regards to nearly every facet it has to offer.  If Fallout 4 was trying to make me feel like the main character, a man out of time in a world that does not make sense, then it hit this mark perfectly.  If not, it fails immensely to make a game where the features are intuitive.

I will say this though, features it has, features a plenty, and in fairness once you do understand some are really good, but I think that this is part of the problem because I feel overwhelmed right now. There is so much to it so soon.  Then again, this is Fallout 4, emphasis on the four!  Perhaps if I had played the previous versions I’d be more familiar with the systems I’m encountering.  Still, nothing gameplay wise is jumping out at me as particular special or engaging, and it's not really making me want to play on.

I wonder if this will change as I persevere?

Initial Score after 3 hrs of play

Full Playthrough Score after 20 hrs of play

Overall Impression

Having now completed Fallout 4, or at least completed the main story, I have very mixed feelings about it.

As I have stated in other reviews, I like to complete side content where possible before moving ahead with the next step in the main story.  However, in Fallout 4 the side quests were a mixed experience.  Some were truly engaging; two in particular revolving around a flying ship that was stuck within a building, and another that saw me deep in some mining cave fighting the ghouls of the once living who belonged to some cult, but on the whole, the majority consisted of:  find the item that the townsfolk need, or go here and kill these raiders that have been stealing from the townsfolk.  Rinse repeat.  Repeat rinse.  And sadly, there’s more of the latter than the former and gets boring very quickly.

But that isn’t the worst of it.  The questing system is extremely confusing.  Firstly, it fails to distinguish between what is side content and which is main, (if it does, I didn’t notice) and as I have stated in other reviews, when the cutscenes fail to grab me I just skip them.   Problem is, with the exception of the starting cutscene and the end cutscene, which aren’t particularly interesting either, the story moments are completely told in what I call stand and deliver moments. This is where your camera pulls out from the first person and you see your character in front of other characters in 3^rd person discussing the particulars.  To be fair, everything is fully voice acted, and I have no complaints about the quality, but it’s hard to feel connected to a game sometimes when the story unfolds like this.

But getting back to my point, as I didn’t know which missions were the key ones, I felt forced to watch all the stand sand delivers in case I missed something important, but because most are side mission related, my attention eventually began to drift.  And by the time that I did reach the final few missions in the latter stages of the campaign, I felt completely disconnected and in all honesty didn’t care one iota about the pivotal build up, the plight of the characters and the choice that is thrust upon you, which I might add, felt almost forcibly done and out of the blue.

Aside from the boring missions, the lack of focus and not knowing which would end my drab experience,  one aspect that was interesting, at first, was the fact the story revolves around four groups of people.  The Minutemen.  The Brotherhood.  The Railroad and the Institute.  After encountering these groups and being tasked with an initial job to carry out for them to gain their trust, you will then be asked if you want to align with them or not. I had no idea of the repercussions of doing so or not doing so, but it seemed as if I could align with them all, and assuming this would open up new side content, I did just that.

However, later, at the point in which the story did start to get slightly interesting, the confusion really set in.  One mission in particular had me scratching my head and was the point in which I really had given up with the game.  Why? Well, this mission saw all four sides battling it out between themselves.  My objective was singular, however, all of sudden something very strange hit me; or didn't hit me, which was kinda the problem because no one was shooting at me.  I did a double take a first.  Was it bugged? Could they see me?  I didn’t know what to do!  In the end I just ignored everyone because they were ignoring me and ran through the mission with no challenge or hindrance.  It felt cheap.  I felt robbed.  And I imagine, had I not aligned with everyone in the start that this would have been a total different experience.  Probably a good one!

However, it gets worse, when I did reach the end objective of that particular mission, though it was clear WHAT I had to do, it WASN’T clear as to what would happen if I did.  So I made a choice to do something that perhaps I shouldn’t have done as I was not told I could do it, but when I did do it, part of the mission magically updated telling me to talk to someone not at the location, yet the main mission was still active along with all the objective markers. Confusing!

A lot of the latter stages are like this.  There are choices and decisions that you are given, but likewise, there are choices and decisions that you are not.  I have to admit, it’s an interesting concept, cleaver in away.  However, when you spend the whole game being trained to follow the missions to the letter with no deviation, being suddenly able to break from this norm felt odd and alien.  What was worse, this started me wondering if I had missed other moments of choices that were not presented to me.

I didn’t like this.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be hand held throughout an entire game, but I do want to know when I am in such a moment when a decision will have irreparable and drastic consequences.   Again though, perhaps this was something done in previous titles, and had I played them I’d be better educated for the experience that is Fallout 4.  Still, that’s a pretty piss poor defence to cling to, which is a real shame because you do meet some rather interesting characters and places along the way.

Sadly, this confusing aspect to the mission system bleeds into every other aspect too.  Take the companion system for example.  You attain one rather early on, but I had no idea that it even was a companion, and by the time I had acquired more than a few, it wasn’t until much later that I discovered completely by accident having almost completed the game that you can equip certain items and gear to your companions to increase their abilities!  There’s not even a cool interface that reinforces this feature, nor is there a way to see what they are good at or which companion is better than the other that I could tell!

Apparently, there are also missions related to your companions too that only become available as you befriend and get them to like you.  How you do this, or how you even tell how friendly they are towards you, I had no idea? The only hint you get is when you do something they like or dislike, but it would have been handy to know how close I was to them warming up to me.  And even this aspect gets boring, for example, every time you get in and out of the power armour, one particular companion will voice his dislike of this every damn time.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not new to the whole companion concept,  having played games like Star Wars the Old Republic by Bioware for example, so not only am I well versed in the importance that companions play, but also in how they work.   I take great pleasure in not only getting to know them, but also in gearing them up just as much as I do my own character.   However, I couldn’t be bothered in the slightest to do this in Fallout 4 because of the horrendously unintuitive implementation.  Take gearing them up for example, as far as I could tell, the only way to know what they can equip is to transfer items from you to them, and then scroll through them one at a time and see if the ‘equip’ prompt becomes available.  Really?  That’s the best they could do?

Another aspect where the companion system falters, is that when you dismiss one to replace them with another, you have to send them somewhere.  You get to choose the where, which is fine, problem is, if you want to make a dismissed companion your active one again you have to remember where you sent them and track them down in person, and even if you do remember where they are, when you get there you have no idea within that location as to where to find them as they can wander.  However, what makes this even worse is that they are not marked on the compass or on the HUD in any shape or form when close to them!

This was EXTREMELY frustrating for me when I wanted to track them down.   I figured that I must be going crazy, because no game would be released with no way to track down a key feature, right?  Turns out, not only did they release Fallout 4 with no tracking ability for companions, but they actually released the ability to do so in a paid DLC!  Let that sink in.  A key feature of a game was missing!  To attain it, you had to pay for DLC content to get it?!  I don’t normally swear in reviews, but what the fucking hell?!   This should have been either in the original game OR at least included in a free patch!  Disgusting!

I’m starting to depress myself, so let’s talk about something Fallout 4 did do well; the open world.  Not only is there a day and night cycle, but as I lightly touched upon early, it is truly a massive world to explore.  And where Fallout 4 does excel is when you ignore the story and the side missions and just explore it.  There are so many hidden areas and points of interest.  And more often than not you will be rewarded with something cool or some target to kill or interact with.

Saying this though, it’s not perfect, and as a side effect of it being so big, you’ll often find yourself traversing the world to a given location with nothing much occurring in between, which makes the game one of highs with a lot of lows in regards to pacing.  You can fast travel in the world once you have unlocked the locations, which can be done by accessing the map on your pipboy, a device that is attached to your arm, but oddly, if you have entered a building you cannot fast travel out.  I assume this was for technical reasons, but still, I found it annoying.

Reinforcing this aspect of exploration though is that there is no level cap.  You can keep levelling up indefinitely, or at least till you have attained all the skills and skill upgrades, which, by the way, is another aspect of Fallout 4 I think was exceedingly well done and liked a lot.

Not only is there a healthy array of skills to choose from, 77 in total, and each one can be further upgraded, but what makes it even better is you have total freedom to spend points where ever you like, as long as you have unlocked the prerequisite.  It is a shame really that the main campaign left such a bad taste in my mouth, had it not, I might have continued playing after completing it to fully explore every nook and cranny and boost my character by unlocking new skills.

Sadly, I now have to return to the common theme of not liking Fallout 4.  So let’s discuss the weapon and gearing system. Well… it isn’t all that clear, (I know, right, shocker!) but in Fallout 4’s defence, it truly has an impressive variety of weapons and gear for you to loot.  The problem comes when you are trying to figure out what is better for you because the only hint you get that the item is, is by equipping it and seeing what the effect will be.  There is no comparison interface at all to pre-vet the change or any colour grading system suggesting the item is better than normal.  What there is though is a little stat indicator, but even that’s not really obvious.

This is only compounded when it comes to the weapons, because the only way to weed out the poor from the great is to sort them by a particular stat. Problem here, to do this you can only sort them by one stat at a time, which doesn’t really give you an overall idea if the weapon is better than whatever your current favourite is.

It was a shame really, because this is normally one aspect to these types of games I enjoy, the hunting and equipping of gear to maximise my character’s power, but in Fallout 4 it was such a confusing hassle that I ended up not really caring most of the time as to what I had equipped armour wise, and weapon wise, if it had ammo I used it.

In regards to the campaign length, you could probably complete it in around 10 to 12 hours if you ignored everything but the main missions, if you knew what the main missions were that is.  When I think back to my playthrough, I can’t quite work out if this confusing mission system was purposely designed like this to slow down player progression, or if it was just a bad design. What did seem clear though is that they truly intended people to carry on playing after completing the main story; because once you do you are free to carry on your experience.

In regards to the ending, no spoilers, don’t worry, it seems there is multiple endings depending on your choices in the final few missions.  This is normally another aspect that I love in games, as it makes me want to replay it and see how much those endings differed, but due to my horrible experience with Fallout 4 I won’t be replaying it to experience those alternative endings whatsoever.

In regards to combat, it again is a mixed experienced.  For the most part the A.I. appears super simple, which can be fine if the combat is fluid and fun, problem is it isn’t.   Melee feels like you are wildly slashing at the air with hardly any feedback whilst enemies lurch and clip right through you as they melee attack, and until you do get a decent melee weapon, close quarter combat is severely lacking in the DPS department making it practically a handicap.

What does make a difference to your melee capabilities is the power armour that you get access to.  These are suits that you climb into and operate like you are some sort of battle bot. I really liked this and it really changed things up for me melee wise at least because not only do you hit harder, but you have more armour so take less damage.   These suits function similarly to the armour that you wear.  You can equip different parts, but as mentioned early it suffers from not being clear as to which parts are actually better.

The suits themselves are powered by a nuclear battery that slowly depletes as you move about.  Picking up more batteries will allow you to be in the armour longer, but the best way is to spend points in the skill that makes the suit more efficient, in essense allowing the batteries to power you longer.  If you do play this game, I really recommend you doing this as soon as possible.  I had the most fun when I was wearing power armour, but I use the term ‘fun’ extremely lightly.

Gunplay was better, but there didn’t feel like there was much of a difference between the projectile type weapons.  Though there’s an impressive array with different calibre bullets, firing one felt like firing another.   And when I did find weapons that were fun, like the energy weapons for example, they were always the hardest to attain ammo for.  It makes sense considering this is a post-apocalyptic game, but you’d think that this would be a good reason to make the standard projectile based weapons at least feel different.

You can also mod your weapons.  I was surprised that THIS had an interface!

The combat systems also has an independent critical targeting system, but it took me a while to understand and get to grips with it, so much so that I hardly used it, and when I did understand it, using it made the experience jarring and slow, bordering on redundant in the latter stages as my damage output was more than enough.

What this system does though, is allow you to slow down time to practically a crawl, during which you can target specific regions of an enemy.  The amount of times you can target depends on the weapon being used as each targeting region consumes a portion of critical energy.  Once you have selected the regions to target, you can end the critical mode and the game will switch to 3^rd person and you’re character will fire on those regions with a chance to crit.  This crit chance of course being modified with better gear and skills.

In regards to enemies, as I said, their A.I. felt extremely primitive. One benefit to this was I rarely saw them doing silly things, and I must admit that there was a multitude of different types to contend with.  From humans to robots, to mutants and beasts of all varying shapes and sizes.   I was very impressed by the beast to be honest more than anything else; they were animated well and felt real.

One aspect of Fallout 4 I have to admit I had heard about before playing it was the building aspect.  But for those who don't know, it has what I would call a Sims like construction system only in first person.  I grew to like this, but only because I gave it a fair shake.  It’s very clunky to use and again, not really explained.  So much so, that certain aspects like connecting wires to things I had to google and find out how.

How you build though is, for the most part, simple.  All you have to do is find a workbench.  These workbenches are normally situated in locations where there is already an established outpost.  Sometimes though you can find an abandoned outpost where you can, if you choose, build it up and attract new settlers to it.

To build items you need ingredients, and getting the base items is easy, as upon entering the construction interface you can dismantle practically everything you need. This is fine for items like walls or roofs, but if you want to construct more complex items like generators or defence systems you'll need to find more technical parts which you will randomly find whilst exploring the world as you play.  There is a lot to this system in all honesty, and I really grew to love it more than actually playing the game itself towards the end.  They become living and breathing entities that will even get attacked as you build them up tasking you with defending them in person, unless you are confident you setup adequate defences.

Overall, I really wanted to enjoy my time with Fallout 4, clearly some people love it, and in all fairness it has some really good aspects that are worthy of praise, but for me, there were far too many flaws and misgivings to overlook.  To me, it was a clunky, unfriendly experience from start to finish that frustrated me more than anything else, and sadly, bored me.

Who knows though, perhaps Fallout 4 is a game that wasn't meant or designed for newcomers to the franchise, it certainly felt like a bridge too far for this gamer.

As for fans of the first three, 4 might be more of the same, but only you can answer that.  All I can do is tell the story of my own experience, and in this case, Fallout 4 was a world away from a good one.

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