Fallout 4 on PS4 – The DVDfever Review

Fallout 4 is here and it’s now time for this Christmas 2015 heavyweight to enter the ring, facing off against the likes of Assassins Creed Syndicate, Star Wars Battlefront, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 (review is coming once the PC version is fixed), and the newly released Just Cause 3 to name but a few. So here we have another time consuming massive open world to explore and save, just like Bethesda’s previous open world games (The Elder Scrolls series and previous 2 Fallout games), there are gazillions of things to see and do and of course if you have the time try and sort out this areas issues for the local inhabitants!

Much like how The Elder Scrolls always starts with some form of captive who will become the saviour of that given area and game, Fallout sees a resident from one of the vast vaults where survivors live underground with full amenities leave for a specific reason. In the case of Fallout 4, the vault is a lot smaller than Vault 101 from Fallout 3. This time there are cryo chambers – a few rooms have these in them but nothing on the scale of Vault 101 to really explore as you are virtually guided out of the vault.

After creating your character (choice between male or female) and doing a full on facial configure in the same way as prior open world games from Bethesda, you are quietly living in one of the Nuketown type places you used to see on the old nuclear tests – space age-looking TVs and a servant robot. This small home will have you interacting with a few different objects and people. You then get a knock on the door. It is a vault salesman and you and your family have been awarded free entry into the local vault, given your time as a soldier if nuclear war breaks out. A few seconds after signing the paperwork, a rather large explosion happens in the distance and you have to run for the vault. Once getting to the lift, you see the nuclear mushroom as you descend to safety. Here you follow a corridor and are asked to step into a machine to test vitals – little did you know that yourself, wife and son are being cryogenically frozen. You wake from sleeping to see someone opening your wife’s chamber, take your son and kill your wife. Of course you are helpless and end up drifting back off to sleep after seeing the carnage. Once awake and saying goodbye to your wife, swearing revenge on the killers and a promise to rescue your son, you work your way through the vault back to the surface and the wasteland around the Boston Massachusetts area.

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Fallout 4 Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 [1080p 60FPS PC ULTRA Settings] – No Commentary
– MKIceAndFire

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Gameplay in Fallout 4 is essentially a rinse and repeat affair, almost identical to the 2 prior Fallout games (Fallout 3 & New Vegas). It is also very similar to The Elder Scrolls series with the large open world and hundreds of locations to find and explore. You will notice an icon appearing on your compass at the bottom of the screen so you can either go visit it to see just what it is or memorise for later – personally I love going on these small expeditions as you never know who you will meet or just what you will find, but more importantly it unlocks a new fast travel location, and this can be handy when doing missions getting closer to where you may want to be instead of long treks through the hazardous open. Granted, sometimes you will hit a brick wall and come across enemies that are way to tough to tackle presently (super mutants etc) but at least the location will be stored for when you have levelled-up and are ready to tackle what is there.

Now, like I said, your story is to avenge your wife’s death and rescue your son. The thing is, there are so many other things at play – shortly after getting your companion dog, you will be heading out towards Diamond City. On the way, you will come across a small town and it is being attacked by raiders. Here, you can just let the raiders get on with it or you can decide to help out, the latter opening up a whole new set of missions and The Minutemen (Check out their history on Wikia), another faction that used to be quite large until something went wrong and citizens lost faith in them. So here is where you get the Brotherhood of Steel Power Armour and fend off the raiders. This then moves the NPC to your starting point and it is now named Sanctuary. So, you head off doing small menial tasks for various people recruiting for the Minutemen and telling people to head to Sanctuary etc.

I have to say that I didn’t even touch the main quest until around 12 hours into the game!!

Once again, you move through the world in first-person, or you can – if you wish – go for third-person. Combat can either be completely live or using just the VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System). Personally, I tend to use a mixture of both systems in place. If just using the VATS, then your action points need to be at a certain level to be able to attack – this can be a bit time – consuming and survival can be tougher. Use VATS to get a few shots off at enemies heads or torso etc, which will stagger or kill them, allowing you to concentrate on another enemy and so on. There is also a base-building mechanic – early in the game, you are asked to put rooves on some of the houses and build some beds. I found this side of things quite irritating, having to salvage stuff I didn’t want and then mess about trying to position stuff in first-person. At one point, I had a stream of square metal roof pieces, linking two buildings just to meet the requirement of the quest to get it over and done with. There is also an early mission for the Minutemen, where you have to put up a propaganda speaker and then build a generator. Next, you must stand outside of the work table and access the build menu and link power from the generator to the speaker – not a big task but it took me over 20 minutes to figure out just how to do it, with the game constantly telling me to power the speaker – understandably becoming became infuriating pretty quick.

Go to page 2 for more thoughts on the game plus conclusions.

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Fallout 4 Gameplay Walkthrough Part 2 [1080p 60FPS PC ULTRA Settings] – No Commentary
– MKIceAndFire

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Visually, the game represents a world that is pretty bleak. You are not looking at, say, a Mad Max-style post apocalyptic world with wild and crazy characters and colour which would put ’80s neon to shame. This is more of a rundown feel to it; more like the Stalker games and the characters that aren’t trying to kill you are carving out an existence and just trying to get by. There are some great landmarks like the Public Library, USS Constitution, Trinity Church & Boston MIT. I even came across a bar that appears to be paying homage to the old sitcom Cheers with 2 skeletons (one of which has a postal worker’s uniform on), sitting at a bar (Prost Bar Easter Egg after some research). All in all, there are some nice long view distances. Graphically, things up close can be a little low-resolution at times but the world feels full, worn and lived in.

The performance I have found at times can drop a little. Exiting your Pip Boy, occasionally, has frozen the game for a few seconds if in an area with numerous light sources and things like active terminals. Thankfully, when there is quite a bit going on, the action and framerate is pretty stable, though. The effects on various guns like the laser weapon you get and the firing rocket on the Brotherhood member, as examples, look really good. For example, Dylan’s armour briefly glows orange when the burner stops. It is small attentions to detail like this that helps build the world around you. My only gripe with the rocket scene, though, is that Dylan isn’t wearing a helmet so it broke the immersion slightly (or a mutation that allows him to put his head into his torso like a turtle!). I have also found at times the camera can be in too close – when you find the robots near the water growing plants, the camera zoomed inside the robot head when talking to it.

The sound is much like all Bethesda’s open world games – you hear wind when outdoors and the footing of your companion and dog (at times when indoors it sounds like walking through water). Weapons all sound different and you can hear enemies when you start getting a little closer to them like the flicker of a Bloatfly’s wings. You tend to find spot-type music – going through the building with the Brotherhood of Steel sees music fade in and out depending on the situation; it makes it tense and adds to the atmosphere nicely. Cutscenes are fully-voiced and people chatter when just going about their lives. I have found, for some cutscenes, the voices became out of sync completely and kind of stopped working; not just with lip movements, but also with subtitles and character movement. It will suddenly go silent and I had to press a button to skip through the dialogue to keep things moving.

The voice talent used are some of the industries finest, you have Stephen Russell (Thief, Thief II: The Metal Age, Thief III: Deadly Shadows – Garrett), System Shock 2 & Arx Fatalis), Claudia Christian (Babylon 5 – Cmdr Ivanova), Starhyke and numerous single TV roles), Courtney Ford (True Blood, Parenthood) and way too many others to list that do work on games and have done for a good few years.

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Fallout 4 Gameplay Walkthrough Part 3 [1080p 60FPS PC ULTRA Settings] – No Commentary
– MKIceAndFire

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Conclusions

All in all, Bethesda have created another living, breathing world. Yeah, there are a few minor bugs like camera zooming into an NPC head during a cutscene, or the cutscene, itself, stopping and voices appearing out of sync – these are minor niggles, though. There is also another minor gripe where you could walk into a door to look in an empty room to see if there is anything worth salvaging – at times your dog will be right up behind you and won’t move out the way, and you can get a bit stuck.

I personally don’t like the Sanctuary base-building only doing the bare minimum to succeed with the quest. I feel they should have maybe changed it up a bit and zoomed-out and let you build as if a Real Time Strategy game.

Much like the previous Bethesda open world games, there is so much to distract you from what you are planning on doing. You are to head to the city in the centre of the map to get the main quest flowing. I spent hours doing Minutemen and Brotherhood of Steel quests (BoS was listening in on a radio frequency, initially). Then after visiting the main city and talking to various people, I went off just exploring things that looked interesting in the distance of icons that were appearing on the compass at the bottom of the screen.

There is literally just so much to see and do. At times, it can be a little overwhelming but once you start getting icons on your map and quest markers that push you out further, you will find yourself running around the wasteland, taking out bigger and badder enemies like Death Claws etc. Not forgetting you find game holotapes with games like Red Menace (Donkey Kong clone) and numerous other classic games on which you can spend hours.

If you love Bethesda’s open world games then this is a no brainer… go get it if you haven’t already. If you want something open world that requires a bit more thought than, say, Just Cause 3, then Fallout 4 could be right up your street.

I guess my biggest gripe is that, apart from the base-building, you can say there has been barely any innovation – it is just like the previous two games with new story and setting. Gameplay is exactly the same.

On a positive, I did grab the Pip Boy app for my Android device and that synced up with my PS4 once my save game had loaded in, and I could manage the inventory and use meds etc direct from the app, which I found pretty cool and different. You cannot play the found games though on your phone – you still have to play them on the main game!

This is one game that I will be losing another 100 or so hours to (much like Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout: New Vegas previously).

All gaming footage featured is from the MKIceAndFire Youtube channel.

Fallout 4 is out now on on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

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Fallout 4 Gameplay Walkthrough Part 4 [1080p 60FPS PC ULTRA Settings] – No Commentary
– MKIceAndFire

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Important info:

• Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
• Players: single player

GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT	8.5 8.5 8.5 8
OVERALL	8.5

Director: Todd Howard
Producers: Angela Browder and Kevin Kauffman
Screenplay: Emil Pagliarulo
Music: Lynda Carter, John Jarvis, Kerry Marx and Inon Zur

Cast:

Sole Survivor – Male: Brian T Delaney
Sole Survivor – Female: Courtenay Taylor
Nick Valentine / Mr. Handy / Codsworth: Stephen Russell
Piper Wright: Courtney Ford
Paladin Danse: Peter Jessop
Preston Garvey: Jon Gentry
Desdemona / Mrs. Whitfield / Mistress Mysterious: Claudia Christian
Deacon / H2-22: Ryan Alosio
Hancock: Danny Shorago
Cait: Katy Townsend
MacCready / Z1-14: Matthew Mercer
Curie / Miss Edna: Sophie Cortina