Fallout 2

The Good
I consider Fallout 2, first of all, a better game than Fallout 1. My biggest reason for this was that the world is a much bigger place - not just in size or number of cities, but most every town or area was built around the idea that a role-playing game SHOULD contain more places where you're able to choose a different path. In many places, these choices can interlock, especially without you knowing or even including implications you didn't think of. This creates much more of an immersive experience, implying things are going on behind the scenes, without you knowing it.

As is my usual opinion, the game uses a skill-based characters, therefore I almost immediately love the game. This allows deeper characters, and more interesting situations that generic classes. Skills are used quite a bit in individual locations throughout the game, i.e., special places where the skill is put to story- or quest- based use, rather than having generic situations where the skill is used (combat skills, speaking skills...) One situation that I liked involved lock-picking a safe, checking your perception to notice the trap, and trap disarm to see if the bomb was disabled. Of course, you could find the combination to the safe by wiping out the raiders who have the combination...

These two points, the skill system for character growth, and original and involving situations, really make for some cool moments when playing Fallout 2. Cool in the role-playing sense and the way it makes you say out loud "That's AWESOME!"

Something else that I really appreciated about Fallout 2 was the "Mature Subject Matter". Black Isle really handled these issues well, constructing situations where characters not only had to deal with grey areas, but required the player to think about their character to proceed - is drug use really that bad if it makes life worth living again in this radiated hell-hole? If no one's hurt from it, is it okay then? If perfecting the effects of the drug required human subjects, but works out in the long run, is it still okay? A lot of areas treat adult themes with taste, depth, and most of all, originality. It's great to see such an attempt to put art into a computer game.

The Bad
One of the biggest criticisms about Fallout 2 was the bug count, which, for me, wasn't that bad. True, a lot of annoyances crept into my games, but the diligent patching by Black Isle fixed tons of reported problems (including all of mine). Due to this, I can't really berate Fallout 2 on the bug count, but your milage may vary.

Unfortunately, some areas in Fallout 2 seem to be the product of inconsistent designer meetings. Some areas are lacking in explanations and necessary details, or require a certain type of character, which your character may not be. One of the better examples of this is the Toxic Caves, a fairly necessary area to resolve the early town you visit. This area is seemingly a dungeon crawl, with tons of tough enemies and very little chance of getting through without being really really good at combat. This simply makes the region frustrating. Another spot that bugs me, to this day, is a ghost - yes, a ghost. This is a wholly unoriginal quest where you have to find the "lost item of great personal value" so the ghost can finally find eternal rest. I would tolerate this in a fantasy game, but come on - this is a futuristic, post-apocalyptic journey across a scarred America - and the designer resorts to tossing a quest like this in? Pardon my ranting. My point here is that there a few, glaring, sores on Fallout 2 that could have easily been fixed with some overall game design philosophy and directing.

The main plot, in my eyes, could have been better. It serves the purpose, quite nicely in some places, but isn't quite as original as it should be. Figuring out what is happening in the world, and what the evil guys' plot exactly IS, is a cool mystery that you discover as you progress through the game. But it could have been better, especially considering the great moments and situations your character and party get through in the game. Also, even though different paths are possible in the game, none seem to be available in the final parts of the plot.

The Bottom Line
Fallout 2, if I may make an analogy, is the girlfriend with an okay body and a really fabulous personality. She's deep (sometimes amazingly so), she's funny (sometimes hilariously so), she's a perfect companion. But, she does have a few sores that sometimes bug you. But come on - if all you're going to look at is the surface, if you want to look at just the bad stuff, you won't see the great stuff underneath, the stuff that really does make Fallout 2 a GREAT game and not a time-passer.

The Good
Many of the best things from the original were kept and improved upon: Although there was a main plot, you really did feel that you were travelling and exploring a complete world. You had real, meaningful choices in character design and development, both mechanically and in roleplaying - and your actions toward NPCs had realistic lasting effects - without an artificial "alignment" system. Virtually any character development path was entirely playable, even to the extent that a reasonably clever player could complete the whole game with a pure diplomat player, barring bad luck on random encounters. The worst mistake of the original - the hard gametime limit - was avoided cleanly.

The Bad
The larger map and longer gameplay did expose the biggest weakness of the Fallout team - their sophomoric (and arguably misogynistic) mentality. While much was made of the fact that your character could actually get married in the game, in fact the only marriage available was a shotgun marriage to a useless wimp, and all the roleplaying choices related to the spouse after that emphasized a really grotesque parody of the worst and most misogynistic teenage male ideas about it. The clever melding of memes and imagery from the Cold War 50s that characterized the first game was exposed as a happy chance, as the sequel broke continuity in various ways (especially in computer technology) and threw in some trendy antiauthoritarian government-conspiracy themes. The original story seemed to be set in the future as imagined during the Cold War, and worked very well. The sequel's backstory is a pastiche of 1998-era X-files influences, random gaming memes, sophomoric humor, and shreds of the original, that really doesn't hold together unless you forget the original entirely.

The Bottom Line
Purely from a gameplay standpoint, it was an excellent game, better than the original and a lot of fun. From the standpoint of storytelling and worldbuilding, it was clumsy, sophomoric, and terribly disappointing. If you have the chance, play both Fallout and Fallout2 in proper order. They are landmarks in real roleplaying on a computer, and very fun to play. In particular, if the shoddy worldbuilding and sophomoric culture and character portrayals of Fallout2 overshadow the fine gameplay for you, you might find the mix in the original game more to your taste.

The Good

First of all, it's still Fallout. Everything that was great about the first one is present in the sequel as well, from the brilliant SPECIAL system to the overall feel of exploring a gritty, dirty and cruel world without any hope of it getting better anytime soon. And it's all just as great as it used to be, even with some minor tweaks of the interface (like the very useful "take all" button when searching containers).

There are already very comprehensive reviews stating why is it so good here on MobyGames (Zovni's, Unicorn Lynx's), so I won't go any further into that. Let me just say that I do love the first Fallout and large parts of Fallout 2. But there are flaws in the sequel, oh yes, and quite a lot of them.

It's much larger than Fallout. That sounds like a good thing, given Fallout was one of the best games ever and so on. But there's a problem with that, an unheard of problem with a video game - it is simply TOO large.

So large, actually, that toward the end of the game, whenever anyone mentioned one of the locations I've already visited, it took quite a lot of effort to remember which one it was. Probably because so many locations had to be designed, they no longer have the delicately crafted feel they had in F1 and are, therefore, much less memorable (and, of course, some of the locations of F2 are simply bigger versions of F1 locations). As a consequence, the whole 'what happened next' sequence after the endgame (just like in F1) is very, very long and informs about cities and people I didn't really care about in the first place. Exploring the world toward the end of the game became a very tedious experience, because every location is more or less the same and the ending is nowhere in sight.

Interestingly, even the least interesting parts of Fallout were blown up to much larger scale. Remember the first fight in Fallout, with the rats? Not that much fun, was it? Well in Fallout 2, there's a whole 'Temple of Trials', teeming with such exciting foes as large ants and small scorpions, and when you finally finish it, you reach the lovely town of Klamath where you get to enter the sewer system and fight three times more rats than in the whole of Fallout! Hooray!

Contributing to this is the fact that the SPECIAL system remained virtually unchanged. That also sounds like a good thing, because the system was ingenious, but it was designed for Fallout and Fallout was designed for this system. At the end of F1, your character was typically somewhere around level 21 (this is a rough guess, I can't remember the exact number and it's not important) and he/she was an unstoppable powerhouse. In F2, your character reaches level 21 towards the second third of the game and is a (slightly weaker) unstoppable powerhouse. And the enemies are not much stronger than in F1, can't be, really, if you want the game to be more or less realistic, because there are no more supermutants, just humans in good armor. The result? All the battles in the later parts of the game are extremely easy and the final boss' stats are sky-high (and not realistic at all, I should say).

There is another huge issue with F2 and that is humor. Of course there were moments in the first Fallout that were funny, but it never distracted from the atmosphere. With F2, someone decided to throw in as many jokes and pop-culture references the designers could think of - which went way over their heads in the special encounters -, and what's much worse, the humor became much more stupid, including scatological humor (blow up the toilet and see the whole town covered in feces! how hilarious!) and incredible amounts of sex jokes (including the infamous 'become a pornography actor / actress' scene and the 'shotgun wedding', available in gay, lesbian and heterosexual flavors). One of the nice things about F1 was its maturity and how it presented sex as something that happens now and then between people. Fallout 2 treats sex as a teenage boy desperate to get laid. A major disappointment. And there's also Myron, a character who was apparently supposed to be the source of comic relief and the designers spent quite a lot of time on him, but a) he sucks in combat and b) he is not funny, so there's absolutely no reason to have him in your party. Talk about wasted effort.

Talking of NPC party members - yes, the game engine was vastly improved there (simply because it was by far the weakest point of F1), but they are all still next to useless and it is possible, better, even, to play entirely without them. They are only good to carry items and who needs that many items, anyway?

There are also issues with the story elements - supermutants of F1 were cheesy, but acceptable. In F2, you have, among other things, the 'aliens', who are obviously inspired by the Giger monster and probably came from outer space (what the heck? I know this is sci-fi, but not that kind of sci-fi!). And the whole story arc, revealed only at the very end, is simply idiotic, with a twist explaining the secret purpose of the 'vaults', which I really, really hate, because it is exceedingly stupid, it corrupts even the story of the first Fallout and... let's just pretend we never heard of it, shall we?

There are also some smaller issues, like insane save/load times on the computers of that time (that was also bad in Fallout, but more locations in F2 meant that on my P166, the load times toward the end were somewhere around 90 seconds and no quicksave / quickload) - not a problem anymore thanks to more powerful PCs; bugs galore (I never finished the game in my first try, because at the final location, it kept crashing to desktop every five minutes and with the already mentioned load times... you get the idea) and some balance issues (my character was an unarmed expert, killing even the toughest opponents in one hit, but when fighting the final boss, she could hardly bruise him, so I had to resort to the non-combat way of dealing with him).

Many people love Fallout 2, because it is gigantic and allows them to do much more than Fallout did, while still retaining everything that made the original one of the finest games ever crafted. I've had a lot of fun with Fallout 2, but I suppose it pales when compared to the times Fallout 2 annoyed me and bored me with its sheer size. It is not a bad game, but it is just a teenage, less smart brother of a mature genius.