Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel

The Good
If I'd picked up Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel off the shelf having never heard about the Fallout series, I would have enjoyed it immensely. The game is fast-paced, with smooth, attractive graphics, great sound effects and ambient background audio, a huge range of weapons, armors, and items, and of course the endlessly configurable Fallout SPECIAL game system, which is so involved that it makes AD&D character generation look like a third grade multiple choice math test in comparison. I could have had a great time blasting away muties and evil robots if I didn't have preset expectations. However....

The Bad
... that wasn't the case for me. I, like most people who have played this game, was an avid Fallout addict long prior to the release of Tactics, and, like most Fallout fans, was seriously let down by this sequel. The heavy emphasis on pure all-out combat, the distinct lack of RPG interaction or dialog, the paper-thin storyline and the shift away from Fallout's traditional turn-based combat leaves Tactics a real let-down for Fallout addicts and RPG fans alike. Furthermore, there seems little serious emphasis on "Tactics" whatsoever - "Fallout Assault" might have been a more apt title, since most missions are significantly easier accomplished by charging in miniguns blazing than actually utilizing any type of combat strategy.

The Bottom Line
When I bought this game, I played it for an hour or so, then put it aside in disgust. It seemed like a betrayal to the Fallout name. Months later, I dusted it off and played it again, this time trying to appreciate it on its own merits, not as a sequel to Fallout 1 & 2. And you know what? I loved it. Fallout Tactics really is an enjoyable, playable game for what it is. So long as you remember that it's not supposed to be Fallout 3, or even an RPG at all for that matter, you can have some really good fun with this one.

The Good
I don't care if Fallout Tactics isn't Fallouty.

I don't care that Fallout Tactics isn't an RPG.

Most people seem to care a great deal about those two areas. Fallout Tactics is a squad-based strategy game set in the Fallout universe. It takes place between the first and second games, but takes place in the Midwest rather than the West Coast. While not an RPG, FT does use the SPECIAL attribute system and the other RPG devices used in the Fallout games. At times, FT feels like it could be an RPG, with your squad acting as a party, but the linear design and lack of conversation options will remind you that this is a combat centered game.

FT supports three modes of gameplay. A turn-based mode similar to the original games, a squad turn-based mode (where all your members move then the enemies move), and a real-time mode called the continuous turn-based mode. Each method has its advantages, the turn-based mode allows for complete control over your squad while the real-time mode makes for white knuckle game playing.

There are 20 primary missions in FT and they show some variation early on in the game. One mission has your squad escorting a supply vehicle down a sniper alley, another one has you defending a town. The best mission involves a series of hostage rescues which must be carried out covertly or the enemies will sound an alarm.

Fallout Tactics preserves the wide range of weaponry and armor, it favors combat centered characters, although you'll want a medic along most missions. They also have a number of vehicles. Sadly, only a few levels actually allow for vehicle use, usually they only help in getting around the map faster.

The Bad
I loved the early part of the game and disliked the end. At the beginning, you can only withstand a few hits. Caution and stealth are rewarded, once you get towards the end of the game, your characters are basically tanks. Enough shots will kill them, but it's rare. Level design reflects this too. Early missions are varied, later missions are all about combat. Early missions seem to have more avenues towards completion, but end levels are extraordinarily linear. My biggest complaint is that missions never deviate from what is stated in the briefing. Some games (Tie Fighter comes to mind) had missions that varied wildly from the briefing, you had to use your best judgment and play it by ear, not here.

Squad members are personalized by portraits, but don't have any personality. At least in the earlier Fallout games they used floating text to communicate. Because they aren't personalized, it really doesn't matter which ones you pick. Even the nonhuman characters that open up don't matter. Mech Commander, flawed as it was, personalized the characters with animated faces and messages. Also, while in turn-based mode, you have complete control, there is no control in real-time. Fallout 2 had a customizable combat option of members of your party, I wished that I could have told Jax to stop hitting me with the damn Uzi. Also it would have been nice if they had the initiative to heal themselves or switch weapons if they ran out of ammo.

RANTS

Bandaging isn't funny! Performing first aid a lot does NOT turn people into mummies.

Enough with the random encounters! I would have loved to have adjusted the frequency of random encounters.

Four endings is nice, but getting the best ending is so hard I consider it a major bug!

WORST MANUAL EVER! Fallout games should at least have kick ass manuals. This one sucked. Cheaply made, lacks vital information, and has many typos (as the in-game text has too). "Levle 9"?

SPECIAL NOTE- The game has a tough guy option that gets rid of in-mission saves in return for much more experience. While missions are very long, I can see using this option for all the extra xp BUT this game tends to crash so keep that in mind if you choose that option.

The Bottom Line
Bottom line, Fallout Tactics is mostly good, and well worth the $20 I paid for it. It isn't an RPG, but were you pissed when LucasArts released Dark Forces instead of another X-Wing game?

Oh, get the latest patch (God help you if you need the 80 meg one) the game will still be buggy, but at least it's playable.

The Good
Having played Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and greatly enjoyed them, I had kept on the look-out for a copy of Fallout Tactics and eventually found one in a bargain bin, sans manual alas. The lack of a manual was annoying, but the familiar interface made up for it. You soon figure out what's what, and the designers are to be commended for having stuck with what worked, with only minor changes, easily guessed without having to turn to a manual.

I had read that the game was so buggy as to be almost unplayable. Not so in my experience, and mine is version 1.13. In perhaps 20 hours of play it might have crashed four or five times on me, not enough aggravation to have me try and download the mammoth patch, an impossible task for someone like me with only a snail-pace copperwire connexion.

So there I was, happy with my purchase, eager to play.

The Bad
It takes a while to figure out the three combat modes in practice, and that the individual-turn mode is quite useless: you must spend all of an NPC's action points before you can issue your orders to another NPC.

It is exceedingly easy to make a wrong move. I discovered that in my first encounter with wasps. I clicked on the target-like icon beneath a wasp. Silly me. Instead of shooting at the wasp, I found myself running towards it. Even armed with this dearly acquired knowledge I made the same mistake again and again even against more obvious opponents. You have to watch the cursor very carefully: am I going to shoot that, or to run towards it? It is a matter of a few pixels off. And a matter of life and death. Worse: there is a dead Raider there, and you want to move there where he lies in a pool of blood. If you are not careful, if you do not pay close attention to the mouse pointer, you will likely find yourself running and looting the corpse, and wasting precious action points. Once again, death for a fistful of pixels. In the excitement of the action, who is going to engage in pixel hunting? I even managed to destroy our Hummer twice, clicking the wrong mouse button.

Keeping your NPCs in formation is also impossible but in the most trivial of circumstances and on plain terrain. For instance, I had Farsight standing behind Stitch crouching, weapons at the ready. When I instructed them to move ahead, Farsight ran ahead of Stitch! Then Stitch slowly crawled ahead of her. Another time I had Farsight, Stitch and Buffy (shades of Fallout 2!) in a room encumbered with benches. The paths they took to move to the other end of that room... rats in a maze, and very dumb rats too. Formation is not conserved either when the lead NPC goes to loot a corpse or to activate a switch. You have to manually return him or her to the proper hex. Do not even ever consider moving your squad up or down stairs or ladders, even a three-men squad. More often than not, one will end up stuck under the stairs, another half-way up, and you will have to re-group them manually.

All this makes for difficult, tedious play. I have seldom been successful in catching enemies in a cross-fire. It is all hit-and-miss pixel hunting, and you never quite have a clear knowledge of how many action points you will have left after your carefully planned move. This is unacceptable for a game that calls itself "Tactics". Soon, you find that you are often much better off trusting the computer with your moves by switching to CTB mode.

Fallout 1 and 2 suffered from incomprehensible line of sight. You had to pace to and fro past a window until you hit a line of sight that allowed you to shoot that ghoul inside. You could see the ghoul, but you could not draw a bead on it. Fallout Tactics suffers from the same flaw. Again, this is unacceptable for a game that calls itself "Tactics".

Fallout 1 and 2 had engaging NPCs. Think of Sulik and his Grampy Bone! You had many ways of dealing with each "mission", rather, each location. You could become a slaver in Den, you could... I have even seen walkthroughs were you did not kill anything, not even a rat. No such choices here. In Osceolla I was hoping to join up with Gimmon. I was thinking in terms of Fallout 1 and 2. No such opportunity here. The game is linear. No choice anywhere. You cannot even get out of a location before you have completed your mission. In Macomb you meet a Raider who offers you information in exchange for food. You have none. There is none to be had in Macomb. So what do you do? You cannot leave Macomb and get some, as you would have done in Fallout 1 and 2. When you roam the wilderness you will never, ever, come across any town. Their locations have to be revealed unto thee by General Barnaky or General Dekker when and only when thou hast completed thy assigned mission. Grotesque. And roaming the wilderness is a pain in the... yes. Random encounters galore, over which you have absolutely no control. I got so sick of it that I downloaded an editor and pumped Buffy's outdoorsman skill up to 100%. Even so, every few millimetres on the world map, I had to click "No" to every encounters. I tried hitting Escape, but the wretched thing misunderstood it as "Yes" :-(

The Bottom Line
Compared to Fallout 1 and 2? A disaster. You might enjoy it otherwise, but the only half-interesting way to play it is through the trainer by NM!LS/EYM. You don't have to resort to God mode. Ctrl-W (W for "Warp") will save you enough boring running around when, your mission completed, you have to wend your way to evacuation point. And don't forget to pump yourself up to 100% outdoorsmanship using a character editor. Otherwise you will die of anger and frustration moving from town A to town B on the world map.