FalloutFan85
First time out of the vault
IGN Review:
www.ign.com/articles/2015/11/09/fallout-4-review
"After a brief glimpse of pre-war life in Fallout’s familiar-but-strange near-future and a retelling of the events on the day the bombs fell in 2077, we barely have time to get our hands dirty in the post-apocalyptic era before Fallout 4 throws us into a big action moment: You’re given a suit of the big, stompy power armor and a heavy weapon, and put into an intense brawl against the series’ most iconic monster."
"Another major change to personal protection is that Fallout’s distinctive power armor behaves almost like a walking tank that you climb into and out of (with a great Iron Man-style animation as it closes around you) instead of wearing like clothes, and its fuel is a limited resource you have to find in the world. It’s a bold design move that makes these hulks’ appearance on the battlefield feel like a big event. However, since it’s always just a fast-travel away, in practice, having to run and grab it when the going got tough became more of an inconvenience than anything - two loading screens between you and resuming the fight. It also forces you to use fast-travel to conserve fuel, which would mess with a no-fast-travel play style"
"On top of that, loot has been punched up in a very Diablo-style way: even better than the typical spoils of battle and foraging, every so often you’ll come across a Legendary enemy who will drop a uniquely named special weapon or item with a modifier. You might get a pistol that refreshes your action points when executing a critical hit, an arm piece that makes lockpicking easier, a flamethrower that deals extra radiation damage, or any of dozens of others."
"Melee combat is still disappointingly basic, though - real-time hacking and smashing now includes the ability to block and do a heavy strike (similar to Skyrim) but in VATS you aren’t able to target specific body parts, which makes it useless for crippling the limbs of tough enemies."
"A fully voiced male or female protagonist is a first for Fallout, but I frankly don’t feel like it added much beyond the convenience of not having to read as much text when playing from the couch. It doesn’t get in the way, either - performances are fine, if somewhat bland - and would only be objectionable to me if I’d envisioned my character’s voice as something outlandishly different. So it’s successfully unobtrusive, at least."
"Building up rickety shacks, crops, water pumps, power generators, and defenses to create settlements in predefined areas with the finicky build mode interface definitely adds something to fiddle with beyond quests, but my network of towns almost never contributed meaningfully to my adventures other than somewhere to hang my vast collection of looted hats. Part of that is that their higher-level workings, and how they interact with the Leader perks in the Charisma column, aren’t well explained, but it seems that in Bethesda’s drive to make settlements unintrusive to anyone who doesn’t want to bother with them, it ended up making them mostly irrelevant."
"Fallout 4’s performance on both consoles is tolerable, but sometimes disappointing. We’ve seen frequent frame rate slowdowns well below the target of 30 when simply walking around the world, and hitches of a second or more that arise mostly after loading a new save or fast-traveling."
"On all platforms we saw occasional crashes (the auto-save system prevented any major loss of progress), and every so often we hit a side quest that won’t properly begin or end due to scripting bugs"
They gave it a 9.5.....
www.ign.com/articles/2015/11/09/fallout-4-review
"After a brief glimpse of pre-war life in Fallout’s familiar-but-strange near-future and a retelling of the events on the day the bombs fell in 2077, we barely have time to get our hands dirty in the post-apocalyptic era before Fallout 4 throws us into a big action moment: You’re given a suit of the big, stompy power armor and a heavy weapon, and put into an intense brawl against the series’ most iconic monster."
"Another major change to personal protection is that Fallout’s distinctive power armor behaves almost like a walking tank that you climb into and out of (with a great Iron Man-style animation as it closes around you) instead of wearing like clothes, and its fuel is a limited resource you have to find in the world. It’s a bold design move that makes these hulks’ appearance on the battlefield feel like a big event. However, since it’s always just a fast-travel away, in practice, having to run and grab it when the going got tough became more of an inconvenience than anything - two loading screens between you and resuming the fight. It also forces you to use fast-travel to conserve fuel, which would mess with a no-fast-travel play style"
"On top of that, loot has been punched up in a very Diablo-style way: even better than the typical spoils of battle and foraging, every so often you’ll come across a Legendary enemy who will drop a uniquely named special weapon or item with a modifier. You might get a pistol that refreshes your action points when executing a critical hit, an arm piece that makes lockpicking easier, a flamethrower that deals extra radiation damage, or any of dozens of others."
"Melee combat is still disappointingly basic, though - real-time hacking and smashing now includes the ability to block and do a heavy strike (similar to Skyrim) but in VATS you aren’t able to target specific body parts, which makes it useless for crippling the limbs of tough enemies."
"A fully voiced male or female protagonist is a first for Fallout, but I frankly don’t feel like it added much beyond the convenience of not having to read as much text when playing from the couch. It doesn’t get in the way, either - performances are fine, if somewhat bland - and would only be objectionable to me if I’d envisioned my character’s voice as something outlandishly different. So it’s successfully unobtrusive, at least."
"Building up rickety shacks, crops, water pumps, power generators, and defenses to create settlements in predefined areas with the finicky build mode interface definitely adds something to fiddle with beyond quests, but my network of towns almost never contributed meaningfully to my adventures other than somewhere to hang my vast collection of looted hats. Part of that is that their higher-level workings, and how they interact with the Leader perks in the Charisma column, aren’t well explained, but it seems that in Bethesda’s drive to make settlements unintrusive to anyone who doesn’t want to bother with them, it ended up making them mostly irrelevant."
"Fallout 4’s performance on both consoles is tolerable, but sometimes disappointing. We’ve seen frequent frame rate slowdowns well below the target of 30 when simply walking around the world, and hitches of a second or more that arise mostly after loading a new save or fast-traveling."
"On all platforms we saw occasional crashes (the auto-save system prevented any major loss of progress), and every so often we hit a side quest that won’t properly begin or end due to scripting bugs"
They gave it a 9.5.....