Not What I Expected: Fallout 4 Review

Warning: There will be spoilers.

Bethesda made us wait 5 years for Fallout 4, and the day that they announced it, I couldn’t have been more pumped. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were some of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had, and I have replayed those games numerous times as well as earned my Platinum trophy in both games. Never once did I find the story dragging, and even on future playthroughs, I still found myself enjoying the same missions over and over again.

I picked up Fallout 4 at midnight launch, and if I didn’t have work the next day, I would have stayed up all night to play, but I was responsible (for once) and let it run the install while I slept, then powered through my work day ready to go home and load right in to post-apocalyptic Boston. Work could not have felt slower that day.

I knew what to expect with the opening mission as I had seen footage from E3 and followed the release religiously, but it was still great to get to play it through myself. I started off with a female character, focused on sniping, stealth, and breaking into things, as I usually do on my first playthroughs of any RPG.

I thought the opening cut scenes recapping the war were great, and the opening sequence of running to the Vault literally as the bombs were dropping had me hooked right from the start, even though I knew it was coming.

I  was genuinely surprised as I watched my husband get killed and my baby taken, and when my character woke up, it was sufficiently disorienting enough to not understand how much time had really passed since both the bombs and the taking of my son. You are brought right back to your now destroyed home town where your Mr. Handy bot is waiting to tell you the bad news – it’s been 200 years.

At this point, I am still pretty hooked, and I am excited for the prospects of evolving missions, learning the stories of Boston, and experiencing the settlement building. In fact, the moment I had a chance to start working on Sanctuary Hills, I spent a good few hours just scrapping objects and messing around, before I even moved ahead with any other missions. I never even knew there was supposed to be a tutorial for it after you started some Minutemen missions.

I also thought it was pretty sweet that in no time at all they gave you your first set of (crappy) power armor, so that you could start getting used to the idea of modifying it. I never felt like power armor was particularly great or useful in the previous games, but now that I could mod it to be stealth-friendly, it suddenly had more appeal to me. Plus jet packs! Even though I knew I was a long way away from that.

I knew from the start that I would side with the Brotherhood no matter what, even as time went on, and I realized they were kind of assholes in this game, my characters in Fallout have always been tried and true followers of the Brotherhood, and I wasn’t going to let that change. Screw the synths!

Anyway, I won’t go into a play by play of my game start to finish, but I did accidentally do the final mission with the Minutemen only to realize it failed my plan to complete the final mission with the Brotherhood (no warning!). It was good either way, and I eventually loaded up a save and played through all the endings, mostly trophy hunting, with a plan to clean up trophies on this save, and then start a new melee-based power armor character who was just ridiculous.

This, however, never happened. I had my Fallout 4 strategy guide, and I was ready to go, but once I started, I just…lost interest. Very quickly.

This game I had been looking forward to for so long and had anticipated highly had just lost my interest after my first playthrough. I didn’t even want to start that new character anymore and go again – which is something I had done almost right away in the previous games. It was a little disappointing to say the least. I usually look forward to getting a Platinum trophy on Falllout games, and now I had just lost interest altogether. I just don’t feel like picking it up and playing right now. I got burnt out.

The repetitive “dynamic” missions and somewhat clunky dialogue followed by the okay storyline and similar anti-climatic endings and the increasingly tedious settlement building started to make me lost interest. Sure, there were some great moments, like escaping from the research facility or exploring the witchcraft museum, but overall, I found myself just not driven to play again.

Alternatively, I decided to finally buy the Trespasser DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition, another of my favorite game series and developers. From the second I stepped back into the character I had made some time ago (my 4th, but that I stopped playing to catch up on other games), I was instantly hooked again. When I bought the DLC, I already knew that I had wanted to do a new playthrough rather than start one of my old ones and get to the DLC from a fairly fresh start. This particular save was not very far, so I decided to continue with it. I am right back in it, and I want to complete every little thing all over again. In fact, I find it so compelling that even though I know I can skip side missions in my quest to reach the DLC, I simply don’t want to.

Inquisition was another highly anticipated game of mine, and after a few playthroughs, I thought that there was room for improvement in some ways, but compared to the hype I felt for Fallout 4, Inquisition, at the end of the day, feels like a better game to me. The music still gives me chills when it loads up, and I just can’t get that feeling from Fallout 4. It took this new playthrough to realize how disappointed I really was with Fallout, and I just didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to like it so much, but the truth is, it could have been a lot better.

I will now wait for my Fallout DLC, for which I have a season pass, and hope that it can bring some of that magic back. For now, I will keep playing and enjoying my replay of Inquisition.