Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel

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.

The Good
Let's see, I think one of the real good things you can say about this game is that it really manages to capture the Fallout feel. It doesn't feel like a forced spin-off, and it plays like a legitimate member of the family. The cursing is there, the black humor is there, the wasteland is there, essentially everything is back and it is all good. The wastelands are now seen under a higher resolution engine which gives much more detail to the gruesome post-apocalyptic cities and towns, and it's shady cast of characters who now come in much more varieties and colors with newer music and great sounds. Clearly the npc interaction is not as important as in previous games, so that aspect of the game is somewhat toned down, but what little there is, makes you feel like you are "in there" just like in the previous games.

The game has a well laid pace, and a balanced learning curve which slowly introduces each aspect of the game as missions go by. And whenever you do play a mission the battles can get really exciting when your squad faces hordes of enemies and you are forced to think of different ways in which to deploy your squad members. The amount of options and control you can have over your squad is quite impressive, especially under ITB, and it gives you a feeling of real satisfaction when you take out a bunker with the combined forces of a pincer attack or luring your enemies to a cleverly made ambush with the consequently gory results. This is not really new, since such things have been seen since the days of X-Com and Jagged Alliance, but the scale of the battles have never been like this, and the detail and destruction never looked better. The rpg element is quite fun to toy around with, since it makes it possible to get those seemingly stupid perks and options you never did before afraid of wasting exp. Now, you can have a fully thief-like character without worries, since you can complement it with a war machine-like character anytime.

As far as I'm concerned the game is immersive, fun, has a nice story (with several endings) and is an engrossing post-apocalyptic experience. Really a worthy addition to the Fallout series.

The Bad
Well for starters it's buggy. I think this is a tired subject since everybody knows how the industry treats the games nowadays (release it when it's profitable to do so and patch it up later) but really the Q&A boys at Interplay deserve a kick in the balls for this one. Even after the final 1.27 patch the game is prone to occasional crashes and slowdowns, heck I ran the thing on a 550 Mhertz CPU with 194 megs of ram and a Geforce2 MX and the thing kept giving me choppy scrolling and animations whenever things got a little crowded...It really pisses me off how they treated this game.

But well, moving on, the only big gripes I have with the game design-wise, is the fact that it doesn't really take advantage of all the features it boasts. Sure, you can have mutants, robots and ghouls in your squad. But you can be nothing but a human. Sure, you can use vehicles around the map, but not so in 90% of the missions. Sure, the game throws some subquests and bonus thingies at you every now and then, but the game is completely linear and your behavior doesn't have a lasting impact on the game (I really hated that you didn't have a rundown of how you affected each town and location based on your actions like in the originals), etc., etc.. See what I mean? The game has all the stuff to propell it to stardom, but makes no use of most of them, essentially falling short of what it could have been. Also the game has a serious lack of variety. I know the combat is good and all, but every mission can be summed under one type: assault. Go that place, kill every enemy, achieve objective, return home. There are variations thrown into that, but that's as far as it goes. You won't find any espionage mission, any ambush mission, nothing, zip, nada. Plus I really hated it that you can't return to a mission location and see what changes have occurred due to your actions, all that's different in the towns is the corpses lying around.

Since we are in the "bad" I should mention that the bundled editor is nice and all, but really misses the point. It is cool to have a powerful editing tool available, but if in order to use it you have to make a part-time job out of it then it ceases to be fun. Only the hardcore "mod-ers" will dig into this feature and the rest of us will have to learn C++ and enough programming lingo to become John Carmack the 2nd in order to fulfill the time-honored tradition of crafting a level based on our local mall.

The Bottom Line
Fallout:Tactics is a good game, it is worthy, engrossing, with lots of neat features and a great sense of style. However, a series of crappy design decisions prevent it from attaining the gaming Nirvana the previous Fallouts have and make it look like the black sheep of the family. But make no mistake, it is IN the family, and that means a lot.

The Good
Plenty of lattitude in character design, almost all the traits, perks, and skills require some sort of tradeoff. The wide variety of weapons and ammo available can be overwhelming... There are DOZENS of weapons in the game... From spears and throwing knifes all the way up to rocket launcher and gauss gatling gun, and each of them have different pros and cons. The graphics are quite detailed and interesting. Availability of both "real-time" vs. "turn-based" combat modes is good.

The Bad
The sheer number of weapons makes choosing the right one quite difficult. Tradeoff among the different character decisions are unclear at times. The bartering interface needs a LOT of work, as it's extremely cumbersome. Inventory management is a REAL PAIN. Graphics have occasional glitches that distracts from the overall detailed look. Random encounters can become quite tedious as it gets extremely repetitive. The plot encounters can be extremely long as you're essentially forced to travel every corner or the map (though the map designers tried their best to provide multiple paths in some of the maps). The story does not really fit into the Fallout universe according to Fallout "purists"

The Bottom Line
Fallout Tactics is essentially The tactical combat of Fallout, strapped to a random mission generator and a overall plot that spans 20 campaign missions, with updated graphics. For those of you who haven't played Fallout, think XCOM with a ton more weapons and no research, with possibility to improve your characters in more detailed manners.

I have NOT played the two Fallout RPGs, so I would not know how faithful the game is to the universe. This review, in any case, is about FOT itself.

The graphics of FOT is quite good... For a 2D isometric viewpoint game. However, it has several glitches here and there that distracts from the details. The nitty-gritty look is good, but then you realize a lot of the maps are identical. It also has problem handling multiple levels, as it struggles to redraw just the objects that are visible from your viewpoint. It has problem handling slopes and how to render vehicles on a slope. The tiled-look is quite obvious on slopes as characters don't walk down smoothly... They walk a bit, fall down a bit, and so on.

The sound and music are average and adequate, nothing special to them.

The tactical missions are quite impressive. The interface is VERY similar to the XCOM, except you can't reserve "action points". Instead, you must reserve ALL action points for "overwatch" mode where the chanacters will shoot if they see a target with good chance of hitting. You can do unarmed, melee (hand-to-hand), small guns, big guns, traps, mines, grenades and thrown weapons, and more.

The tactical approach are varied and is all up to you. Do you do a frontal assault? Sneak through the backdoor? Clear the room with shotgun or go for sniper attack? How about lure enemy into ambush or minefield? There are even some maps where you can sneak through tunnels and perhaps hit the enemy from behind. There are even a mission or two where you need to rescue hostages and defend a town from attack.

A lot of the equipment comes from salvage after battles, and the process can be quite tedious, as you must manually salvage individual bodies for leftover ammo, drugs, weapons, and so on. An "auto-salvage" like XCOM is sorely needed.

Some parts of the game are quite automatic while other parts requires too much hands-on. One of the activity in the game is barter with the various merchants and the BOS Quartermaster (who's in charge of all the equipment), and he drives a VERY hard bargain. To afford some of the fancier items, expect to find and give up a LOT of weapons, and the prices are dependent on the negotiator's bartering skill. So you end up transferring a LOT of equipment around. You basically end up using other characters as mules, as they haul the surplus to the quartermaster's room, then transfer all the equipment to the designated negotiator (who has the highest barter skill), and let the negotiator do the dealing. Then you need to redistribute the equipment (that you choose to buy from the quartermaster). Repeat for the medical officer (who sells drugs and first-aid related supplies)... And perhaps other merchants that you run across. Don't be surprised if you end up spending 30 or more minutes just to manage inventory at every visit back to the bunker. A far more streamlined bargaining process is needed.

The actual combat is quite well done, as the variety of weapons, who can use what, and so on. As new equipment become available (both on the field and in the bunker) and you struggle to afford them, and constantly changing ammo situation forces you to switch weapons, you'll develope a nice stash of weapons and matching ammo. The tactical line of sight is important, as scouts are needed to locate the enemy, and proper tactics used to flush the enemy out of cover. Most enemies use cover effectively, though they don't really attack you. Most of the time you're on the offensive as you simply clear the entire map of enemy presence. This makes a lot of missions quite tedious as you move carefully from corner to corner, maintaining overwatch and firing lanes to prevent friendly fire, only to find nothing there.

Some times the battle sure gives you a great sense of satisfaction. In one engagement, I need to kill three bandits in the first burst without them raising the alarm to the rest of the compound. I decided to sneak three people near them (they're behind a bar), then have all three pop-up, weapons blazing at point-blank range. When your plan unfolds perfectly, and the three bandits fell to the floor, spraying blood all over, perforated with bullets and birdshot, you sure felt as if you accomplished something.

The game also left the final ending up to you... There are actually FOUR different endings, depending on what you chose at the very end.

All in all, Fallout Tactics is NOT a classic. It is a very decent isometric squad tactical combat game with a random mission generator and some plot missions. It reminds me a lot of XCOM, but some of the interface issues needs serious work, and thus, it is only an average title overall. If you need your XCOM fix, give Fallout Tactics a try.