Warning: Minor Spoilers Ahead

Here we go ladies and gentlemen, after playing Fallout 4 for roughly 9 hours, I am prepared to give my first impressions on the latest post-apocalyptic RPG.

But before I do that, I want to emphasize one particular point in regards to the title of this article. While it does say ‘console edition’ I did not actually play it on a console, I played it on PC. There is a point to the title, and it is one of the sticking issues that I have with the game but I’ll get to that point later.

So where to begin? Let’s start with the visuals which are, in my opinion, very well done. Bethesda has a track record for making beautiful environments and Fallout 4, despite being a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is no exception. Even though I did not manage to explore much further than the Sanctuary (not even reaching Diamond City) I did find that I was both amazed and chilled as I looked around the ravaged environment and explored the ruined settlements, even entering ruined supermarkets and assembly lines was a treat, and it demonstrates just how much energy the art team at Bethesda put into this game. The way they managed to blend the 50s visual style with futuristic technology is also quite amazing, especially during the prologue which sees you move around your characters home before the nuclear fallout, at least until you are forced to move on toward the vault to begin your real adventure. Character creation is also fairly solid, you have a choice between creating a male or female character, and the amount of changes that can be made, especially to your characters face is extensive. Almost every part of the face can be sculpted or altered in some fashion, allowing you to create the character you want to be.

In saying all that, however, I did experience my fair share of issues with the visuals in Fallout 4. There were times when I would look at certain areas of the game world only to see poor quality textures despite having the texture quality set to ultra. This was especially true when it came to the enemy NPCs. Some of the ghouls were extremely low quality, and that quality level did not improve as I continued to fight or after the fight was finished. Also, despite how well done the character creation is for detailing your character’s face, the body gets a very bare bones customization by comparison. You can choose between making your character muscular, thin or large by using a simple scaling element, but you do not have the ability to sculpt individual areas of your character’s body, which is a real shame as it is primarily what you are going to be looking at when you play this game, unless of course, you play in first person mode all the time.

Enough with the visuals, let’s talk audio. 

I thought that the audio within the game was fairly well done, at least for as much as I experienced. I didn’t encounter any glaring issues in the 9 hours that I played, although your individual experiences may vary. The dialogue seems to be on point, and the voice acting is decent, although I do wish your main character showed some more emotion. There is a portion within the prologue where you watch your baby being taken as your spouse is executed (which one gets executed entirely depends on what gender you choose to be. If you choose to play as a male, your wife is executed, if you choose to be a female, your husband is executed) and you show next to no emotion as you take the wedding ring off their lifeless finger. Some small emotional bits are played when you speak to your old robot within Sanctuary but that’s it, there is no real sense of grief coming from your character, despite the fact that being witness to something like that has the potential to cause serious emotional and psychological damage.

Now let’s focus on the meat and potatoes of the game, and by that I mean the gameplay. What you’re going to be doing as you play through this title, spending hours upon hours moving through post-apocalyptic wastes. This to me is what matters the most because in my opinion sandbox games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim are just like MMOs. As one of my favorite youtube personalities said in his review of Guild Wars 2 (that personality being AngryJoe), the most important part of an MMO is not the story, the voice overs, the graphics or the cinematics, it’s the gameplay, because it is what you’re going to be doing for hours on end, and that holds true to sandbox games as well. If the gameplay is stale and boring, or bugged and unplayable, then the experience with the game is going to be poor, and no amount of good storytelling or excellent cinematic quality is going to change that.

Sadly, this is where my experience within Fallout 4 fell short. Controls on PC are horrible. Overall character movement is fine, but trying to aim with a mouse is slow compared to other titles in the genre. Even Skyrim allowed for faster mouse movement than what I experienced in Fallout 4. Dialogue options are streamlined to an almost excessive amount. Where in Fallout 3 and Fallout NV you had multiple dialogue options with each character, in Fallout 4 you only get 4 options, which you have to either select with the mouse or with the arrow keys (at least by default). This type of streamlining, combined with the horrible mouse controls, makes me feel like this game made for consoles first and PC second. Remember right at the start when I mentioned that ‘Console Edition’ would play a part in this post? This is why. The game feels like a console port, especially in ‘workshop mode’ the new system in Fallout 4 which allows you to build your own structures and provide for refugees in specific areas of the world. Rotating items is far more precise when using a controller, allowing you to get that minuscule angle adjustment, which is very important if you are trying to place furniture inside a house, or trying to get a workbench to line up flush with the wall of whatever building you’re putting it against. And on the subject of moving items, there apparently isn’t an option to move items into the ground, which may not seem too bad, until you try to build a fence or a house and have entire sections of it floating above the ground because the object snaps keep the construction completely level, without factoring in where the ground is.

And then there are the bugs, ahh yes. Bethesda has a track record for buggy releases, and they did not disappoint with Fallout 4. In my 9 hours of gameplay I have had enemies attack me from inside my body preventing me from hitting them, I’ve had enemies fall through the floor or through the ceiling at random. I’ve had my entire display flicker when positioning items in Wardrobe mode. Enemy detection also seems bugged at times, because enemies will engage you completely differently depending on how you alerted them and where you were standing when you alerted them. I have had groups of six ghouls race up stairs to try to slaughter my character, yet by standing three steps further inside the building (same floor, just three steps closer to the enemy I was fighting in the first place) no ghoul attack.

Now maybe that’s intentional, in which case, that’s at least one bug I can remove from the list, but only one, there are many others and that’s not even touching on all the bugs that other players have experienced in different areas of the game.

So what do I think of the game in brief?

I think Fallout 4 is certainly a competent game. It has done extremely well for Bethesda and the game does many things right which will resonate well with fans of the series and new players jumping into the Fallout universe for the first time. However, for me, the poor PC controls and streamlining of dialogue has essentially crippled my enjoyment of the game, not to mention the many bugs that I encountered throughout my nine hours of gameplay.

Sadly, while bugs can be patched out and PC controls can be improved, the streamlining of the dialogue is not something that can be changed in a content patch, and that to me is always going to leave a black mark on this game compared to previous games in the franchise.

Editor’s Note: This post was ported over from Tumblr.