Fallout

The Good
In the early 90’s PCRPGS were not so hot. Sure there was the occasional Ultima, or Might and Magic, but the market was still lacking. Enter Fallout, from Black Isle, a different type of CRPG. And one than would usher in a new era of fantastic CRPGS.

In Fallout, your are a inhabitant of Vault 13. The world above is dead, and those lucky enough to be saved, have not seen the surface for a long time. You are sent above to find a water chip, little do you know that this simple quest will change your life, and that of all the surface dwellers forever.

Topside a few scattered groups of people have banded together and have built up a primitive new world. Akin to “Mad Max” and the Phillip K. Dick novel, “The Penultimate Truth”. On your quest to save your Vault, you will meet hundreds of shady characters, and many will offer to join your cause, it is up to you who if anyone to trust. You will also uncover a city of mutants, they were once human but no more thanks to the nuclear wastes, that they have made home.

The plot is well written and full of mystery. From the awesome opening, till you achieve one of the multiple endings Fallout, will keep you glued to your monitor, as you explore a dystopian society that is more than it seems. Several factions have appeared in the new world and it is up to you to join or ignore them.

In Fallout you make your character. From basics like Male/Female, to stats, and cool perks. Perks include, being extra lucky, to the funny and bizarre spontaneous combustion. You can accumulate a party, or not, it is entirely up to you, as are the factions join one and gain the perks of being a member or be a loner. Or even betray your own Vault. This can all be overwhelming at first, but after an hour or so, you will wish all RPGS were this open-ended. This also lends to high replay value.

Skills include which weapons you are proficient with. You have many choices here, swords, guns, hand to hand, blunt, etc. Gun combat is probably the most satisfying. But once more it is up to you. There are skills you must “use” as well, from medic to increased defense. There are passive skills as well.

The combat can either be set to turn based, or real time. Turn based is somewhat easier, but the basics remain the same. You have action points or AP. Doing things in battle consume these points, from attacking, running, reloading, etc. In battle you will face mutants, humans, etc, all with a certain weakness.

You explore towns made of scrap, ruined Vaults, a Necropolis, and that is just scratching the surface. The setting makes Fallout one of the most unique RPGS out there, and give the game much personality. Rivaled perhaps only by Planescape: Torment, ShadowRun, and Arcanum.

The graphics are good for the time, and while a little dated today, they are still passable. The areas are well detailed and have a certain charm. The character graphics are nice and well detailed, such as when you equip a new type of armor or weapon. Lighting effects help convey dark areas, or the brightness of the wastelands.

The sound effects are nice. But the music and the voice acting steal the show in Fallout. The music is often just audible in the background, and never pretentious. The VO’S are all top notch.

The Bad
Getting Fallout to run on newer machines is a chore. Why can't there be an easier way?

Why couldn’t there have been full voice acting?

If you stray to far early on, you will be sorry.

The Bottom Line
Fallout helped get Black Isle off the ground, and remains as one of their best games. If you were not old enough to play the “Wastelands” CRPG, Fallout, is a good alternate. I cannot wait till Fallout 3!

The Good
I am generally not very fond of CRPGs, or RPGs in general for that matter. I have always held the firm, conservative belief that RPGs should be limited to fantasy (AD&D) and CRPG to hack'n'slash (Eye of the Beholder 2). I know it's lame, but that's the way I always thought. That is, before I played Fallout.

To tell the truth, I never knew of this game (well, maybe by name) before a friend of mine urged me to play it late in the year 2000, about three years after it came out. I was definitely not disappointed. Fallout is an extremely unique game that has much going for it, with good reason:

• Fallout's game engine is, basically, very advanced. Utilizing a decent SVGA resolution along with some clever palette optimization techniques the game is able to draw an extremely detailed playfield. While not absolutely visually astounding, the engine does the job very well and puts out a fairly smooth framerate without sacrificing quality. Good thing.
• The atmosphere in this game is superb. It is difficult to say which supports which, the story or the atmosphere, but the two work in tandem to create one of the most realistic and frightening experiences I've ever had the pleasure to play. I recall one of the reviewers complaining about the lack of colour in the game (something along the lines of "nature will survive") - that's fair enough, but I believe that the uncolourful graphics in Fallout corrolate much better with its plot, and one also has to consider that the world you move about in Fallout is referred to as The Wilderness. The graphic artists did an excellent job of conveying an appropriate image of the outside world, as I would have imagined it had Fallout been a book. The dreary, for lack of a better word, visual design in Fallout contributes to the atmosphere tremendously. The lack of many visual stimuli actually contributes to the game.
• Aside from the outside world, the visual design in Fallout is incredible. The effort that went into the various structural types (desert village, vault, city, sewer etc.) is evident every step of the way. Everything looks exactly as it should - shattered cities bombed back into the stoneage; the high-tech, metallic look of the vaults; the claustrophobic, eerie Necropolis; the old, decaying Cathedral. This point cannot be overemphasized, as the contribution of proper visual design to the overall atmosphere in a game is simply something that cannot be described in words.
• The storyline in this game is worthy of a decent novel. While it won't earn its author a literary prize, it is definitely worth noting that depsite the seemingly banal nature of the story (post-nuclear world, mutants roaming about), the execution of the story in the game is - despite being partially linear - extremely rewarding.
• The three primary characters are well-rounded, plus the ability to generate your own character provide for a varied gameplay - where in one you run around beating people into a bloody pulp, in the other you must rely on charisma and quick fingers to get what you need. The amound of personality traits and special abilities is seemingly limitless, and the radically diverse nature of the various perks is truely genius (my personal being Bloody Mess - it's funny as hell). The effect each and every one of your character qualities will have be detrimental to the process of the game.
• Fallout is one of those games, one of a select few, whose introduction sequence leaves me with a feeling of DAMN!!!. It has one of the most memorable intros I've seen in my whole life - funny at first, profound and amazingly touching later. I will easily place Fallout's introduction sequence right up there with the likes of Dune 2, Reunion, The 7th Guest and Star Control 2. Trust me; coming from me, that means a lot.
• Where it actually features it, Fallout enjoys excellent background music. Unfortunately these tracks are fairly scarce, usually limited to an eerie tune playing in the background; however, as already said - whenever there is music in Fallout, it is definitely worth hearing.
• The ending sequence (though not the ending itself) in Fallout is absolutely magnificent, giving you an account of what you have done and what the ramifications are. The ability to play the game as either a good or evil person also makes it a lot more interesting.
• Fallout is littered with injokes (did you know the Brahmin sometimes utter "Moo, I say"?) that add a lot of flavour to the game; for example, if your character is lucky, you just might run into a crashed alien ships during your travels, where you will find (a) an alien weapon (literally, a Death Ray), and (b) make note of this: a picture of Elvis!

And in summation, I will only say this: Fallout is one hell of a game.

The Bad
Despite its greatness, Fallout is not without its flaws.

To begin with, it is basically a very difficult game, at least in the beginning. You'll have to be extremely careful not to run into too many fights at first, simply because you might not make it out alive. This changes over time, but the Super Mutants towards the end of the game will still give you a major run for your money.

More importantly, the interface in Fallout is not very intuitive; it makes a lot of sense basically, but the learning curve is extremely steep. I had my brother (who finished the game before I even got around to playing it) to give me a kickstart (in the ass), but it still took a good few hours to get used to it. Occasionally, due to loads or whatnot, I still make stupid mistakes using it, that quite frankly should not occur. I wouldn't call the interface cumbersome, but there's definitely room for improvement.

The NPCs are spectacularly... useless. Ian will do all the work for you at first, or should I say, you're as good as dead without him. Towards the middle of the game, however, he becomes a bloody neusance (constantly shooting you in the back etc.) and not much help, and in about two thirds of the game the only justification to keeping him around is as a human baggage (or cannon fodder). The NPC AI in Fallout is extremely handicapped, and it is quite unfortunate.

Another major drawback is that some of the parts in Fallout are very trial-and-error based, for example: The Glow. It took me three tries to get the damn thing right, and I still didn't go as deep as possible into the complex. The military base also took some work, as you will have to find a way to move about the troops without making too much rockus (five Super Mutant Guards with SMGs are not to be trifled with, even when fully armored and with the best weapons). Getting the damn Powered Armor working also took quite a while. This is unfortunate, because it puts an unnecessary and unwarranted blemish on what could've otherwise been nearly flawless gameplay.

Last but not lesat, your nemesis, The Master, is not a very good character IMO. To begin with, it looks like it was taken directly out of Phantasmagoria 2 - it even sounds the same. Second, it's damn near invincible (I couldn't kill it no matter how hard I try; I hear other people managed though). I also gave it about 30 tries and still couldn't convince the bloody thing that I was right. I had to blow up the entire cathedral, which was an incredibly bothersome ordeal. This basically makes the actual ending of the game very unsatisfying, at least for me. I feel the same way towards how the designers chose to end the game (won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet though).

The Bottom Line
A spectacular game that gave me a new taste for CRPG. Depsite some flaws, it is an overall extraordinary experience that I recommend to any computer game lover.

The Good
Yes, that's right. Orcs are now ultra-technological mutants. It seems that Interplay got bored of the classic recipe for RPG's, the fantasy world, filled with all kinds of elves, orcs, ogres, goblins, giant snakes etc... Interplay created a SF world, similar to the one in Mad Max. I usually hate SF/Mecha stuff, but Fallout was the only SF game I liked. Why? I will tell you here: First: This is the most interesting world I've ever seen in any game. The first reason would be that the planet on which the action takes place is Earth. Yes, our beloved planet. But it's something wrong with it. WE have destroyed part of it's surface during the 3'rd World War with nuclear weapons. Sounds kinda weird, but believe me the atmosphere present in this game is simply AWESOME.

The graphics and sound/music makes you believe that you are really alive in that world and you're not a simple player.

During the game, you can interact with most of the objects on the map, most of them being used for one of the available quests.

Also, each NPC in the game has something to tell you, and that makes the game even more realistic. You won't run near an NPC without seeing a message on top of his head.

The game uses for the intro sequence a classic song "The Ink Spots-Maybe", which, in my opinion, makes the FO1 intro one of the best i've ever seen. The intro itself is divided into 2 parts. One presents the world, and the other one presents the reason for the destruction of the world.

In order to start the game you must first create your character. You can use one of the 3 pre-defined characters, or you can create your own, choosing the name, perks, skills etc.

The available skills for you are more than enough, and that applies to perks too. You will never get bored while level upping your character, and you can finish the game using other skills everytime. That way, you will never get bored. The character's attributes are the classical Strenght, Dexterity, Perception etc...

The world you play in is quite big, and for travelling you will use system similar to the one present in Baldur's Gate.

Each town in the game is different from all others, and in a town you can recieve missions/buy stuff/sleep etc... The missions available for you are quite numerous so fun is guaranteed.

I also liked the weapons, variating from pistols, to rocket launchers.

One of the good things in this game would be the "healing system". Apart from all other RPG's now, you have some more ways to die. If your health falls below 0, you die. If you get radiated more than normal, you die. If you get sick because of chem. using, you die. And more.

The game is divided in 2 parts. What I liked about this aspect was that in the first part, when you are "under time pressure" you quickly explore the world, and after you finish the first part, you are under no pressure, so you can complete the quests you found during P1.

I liked the idea of saving your people from damnation but it's kinda used too much and ... well... it offers you a deja-vu sensation :)

There are some characters in the game that use voice, borrowed from famous actors. The voices sound perfectly! Simply put, the characters even seem to be real!

The Bad
It's hard to find something bad in this game. Maybe the tons of bugs... but most of them are now fixed with the new patches.

The Bottom Line
Humans destroyed the world and now mutants think they can make the new world a better place by transforming humans into other stinky mutants?! What the hell! Take 'em out now!