Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Adventure

Schmaltz4
Violence8
Romance4
Plot8
Buckets o' Blood7
Control Congruity7

Link at GameFAQs


Game Information

Synopses: They did it. They finally did it.
In a beautifully Baroque future -- where black and white newsreels and vacuum tubes sit side-by-side with laser weaponry and powered armour -- Nena's 99 balloons finally went up and the bombs were what came back down. Only a handful of humanity has survived this nuclear cleansing of the Earth's surface, most of them having lived inside massive underground Vaults, specially created to help a few lucky survivors continue to be survivors aprez-bomb. You're one of the Vault-born, having never before seen the outside world, and you'd likely stay one of the Vaulted survivors except for the failing of your shelter's Water Chip, which is in charge of providing fresh, clean water by which you can make delicious crystal drinks out of ready-to-mix powders... oh yes, and not die, too.
    So out you go, into the wooly wilderness to see what, exactly, has survived... the Fallout (dun dun DAAAAAA!).

Controls: Please, please, please keep in mind that this game is many moons old. It came out in 1997, at which point it revolutionized the world; or at least, the RPG market, which had fallen into something of a serious slump of bad games at that point. That having been said, the controls are a mixture of good and bad. Controlling your character in the isometric world of Fallout is extraordinarily easy, and you can perform almost all tasks without lifting your hand to the keyboard (you can even set your character to auto-run, should you be like me and wish to zip zip zip everywhere you wanna be). The display is (as mentioned) in true XCOM isometrics, which I've always found to be very comfortable as a playing field; though sometimes it gets annoying when level design forces you to walk behind a wall that's blocking your view. Fortunately, your character possesses the Aura of X-Ray Vision: everywhere you walk, a little peep-hole is cut out in the landscape, so you can view what's around and behind walls, so long as you go there. That, unfortunately, is the flaw with this plan: sometimes you just want to be able to survey the map at a glance, and that's pretty much impossible to do in Fallout.
    Combat is a breeze. You use a turned-base system (which is fortunate, as real-time combat games are 90% of the time the work of Satan himself) of action points, which determines both how far you can move and how much you can do (rather like your post-secondary education). You can shoot things, you can spend an extra point to shoot things in a specific location (the eyes works wonders, if you're that accurate; and failing that, the groin does horrible things to male characters. having said that, I can't imagine any male player of Fallout even considering taking melee weapons to that particular combat location on a male enemy. Somehow I just winced at the thought every time I tried). One common complaint in this game is that towards the end, combat gets a little bit too easy. Well, it does, but that's at the end of things, so bite me. By that point, you've earned a little breezing through things!
    The bad in this game, however, is how inventory is managed. If you pick something up, it goes to the very bottom of your inventory stack. If you unequip something, it goes to the very bottom of your inventory stack. If you look cross-eyed at something, it goes to the very bottom of your inventory stack. Worse, there's no way to use slider-bars to go to the very bottom of your inventory stack; there are only two arrows, which will veerrrrry sloooowwwly scroll down through all your various possessions.
    To make matters worse, while you have a wonderfully innovative 'active hand' system which allows you to keep two items 'active' and available to be switched between, it works far less well than it should. For instance, let's say I have a gun in active hand #1 and a healing item in active hand #2. During combat, I want to switch hands because I've been badly hurt and need to heal. I press the button and for just a tiny action-point cost, I can now use the healing item. I do so and switch back the following turn. Here's where the problem comes in: if I switched hands again, the other active hand would be empty, even though I had more of the same healing item. Even though the game groups items by type. Even if common sense would indicate that I should have my entire supply of similar healing items in that other active hand, I do not and must now take a serious action-point hit to open my inventory, place a healing item in the other hand and use it. Narf, hunh?
    Fortunately, I'm informed (by myself, as I've just started playing) that Fallout 2 has fixed most of the problems with its predecessor. Yay!

Overall: Don't let my controller gripes fool you; if you have any wuv at all in your soul, you will play this game. If you care at all about modern-day RolePlaying Games, you will play this game. If you think of the children, won't somebody think of the children???, you will play this game. Fallout is an RPG in every sense of the word. You create your character from the ground-up; what traits you give to him/her determines how you will proceed through the adventure; and the game is incredibly open-ended. Let's take those one at a time, shall we?
    Character-creation is deceptively simple. You give yourself a name, age, Traits, Tag Skills and Statistics. The first two are for flavour. Traits (which are optional to take) give you very character-spicing double-edged swords to round out who you are. For instance you can be, by some quirk of genetics, highly resistant to becoming addicted to the various stat-adding medications in the game... but the drawback is that your character has a lowered effect when s/he takes them. You can be jinxed, which means that you score tons and tons of criticals on your enemies, but your luck will swiftly turn because they score lots and lots of criticals on you. These are all very well balanced and make for a truly unique character each time you play. You then Tag three skills. Those three skills are what you're Goodest at. If you spend skill points later in the game on those skills, they'll go up much faster than any non-Tagged skills, which is a great system of showing where your natural aptitudes lie. And you can rob Piotr to pay Paula in Statistics, making weak but intelligent and charming characters; or strong but dumb; or strong and smart but clumsy; or well rounded; or whatever characters!
    Now, you might say that this seems similar in many ways to other RPGs, and you'd be right. But. Consider this. If you have a smart and charming character, you will find that 90% of the quests on which you must go have provision made for you to defuse them by talking. Yes. You heard me right. You can negotiate your way out of many situations. Sometimes you have to use your brain and disguise yourself in order to do so, but the times when you must do this are usually obvious. Likewise, if you have a stealth-based character, there is provision made for you to sneak around, robbing the world around you blind, and taking the back door route to your goals. There are some missions where only violence will do, but by and large those are optional, and are marked with a great big plot-flag reading VIOLENCE AHEAD. And just in case you're worried that this game will penalize you, even a bruiser with high weapon skills and absolutely not a single social grace can find his or her own route through this adventure.
    Lastly, the game is open-ended. What does this mean? To put it simply, it means that (save for the time-limit on getting the water chip, which does not in fact end the game on you once you do so) you can solve this game in any freaking order you want. Unlike the wonderful, but strait-jacketed, Final Fantasy series, you put together your own sets of goals. You decide when to make assault x and attack y. Best of all, the world does change as time passes. So delaying can have consequences (both good and bad) which change the nature of the game for you.
    The final tally of this all is that Fallout is nigh-infinitely replayable. Best of all, it's being offered with its sister game, Fallout 2 in double-packs at stores like Wal*Mart. Go out and pick it up, because you ain't gonna see a game with a gorgeous plot/setting/etc like this anywhere else.


Moments to Watch For

Recommended? Yes. Buy it. Now. I'll wait.



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