Fallout is something extraordinary. We do not speak only of its setting, can show us a possible future in which the atom has supplanted any other source of energy, but also of its ability to create strong dichotomies. The Vault, the safes underground where a part of humanity was locked during the great nuclear war, but trap protect man from an outside world where freedom seems to intrude into anarchy, in which those seeking to do is order viewed with suspicion. A land where the remnants of the world have suffered irreversible mutations that have taken humanity by those who have not turned into a radioactive monster.

The world is falling apart, and we walk on its shards.

So, after a long wait, here we are in front of the fourth chapter of this saga. A title for which the players have remained in suspense for months, hoping it turns out to live up to its expectations. I’ll say it now: Fallout 4 is exactly the game we expected, for better or for worse.

Two hundred years later
We start from the story. As happened in Fallout 3, even in this chapter he tells the story of a man fled from a vault. The perverse experiments of the Vault-Tec are clarified in the first minutes of the game, after the background that will bring the player to relive some phases of pre-war to find themselves two hundred years after the nuclear war that devastated the world. Sanctuary Hills, the city where we started a family, is reduced to a pile of rubble, and the people we love is gone.
From here – from the search of the pieces of our past – begins the adventure of the lone survivor of Fallout 4. A story that will lead us to have to deal with the wreckage of the Commonwealth, the Massachusetts today, now inhabited by marauding, outcasts , wild animals, super mutants and ghouls, but also by people who are trying to survive and artificial creatures whose role, for the first time in the series, will be crucial.
We stop here: it is not our intention to reveal what happens in the course of this story, but we can tell you that the main story will keep you busy for about twenty hours very intense, where the plot twists follow one another and in which you will be called to make choices radicals. Three quarters of the main story, in fact, the player is faced with a dilemma that led him to forever change the fate of the Commonwealth and, of course, in an important way to change the last missions of the game. The presence of three different factions incompatible with each other, plus a fourth “impartial”, enriches the substrate narrative of Fallout 4 just enough to put the player in front of important choices, preventing him to find a solution that puts all agree. You will be asked to make sacrifices, you will be forced to give up friendships, professional relationships and to choose between reason and feeling.
Although the script falters in some places and at least one plot twist is found to be granted, Fallout 4 can make the player reflect and to do so repeatedly questioning the choices made. From this point of view, therefore, the work was a complete success: Fallout 4 is a role playing game that puts us in front of the crossroads and shows us in a concrete result of our actions.
Outside of the main campaign – as always it happens in games Bethesda – there is a plethora of storylines, quests and miniquest that help extend the hours of play over the two numbers and that, in many cases, turn out to be extraordinarily deep or very original. Some missions are assigned by the people he met along the way, while others find themselves fortuitously, by intercepting a radio station or simply visiting a site out of curiosity. Thanks to the deep-rooted mythology Fallout and this structure, the player is naturally driven to visit every place in the Commonwealth, often finding little stories, slices of life before the war, the community trying to survive between hope and despair, or an extremely disturbing or full secrets. Already in the first ten hours of play they are literally overwhelmed by the amount of things to do and, even after having finished the main campaign, you’ll find yourself holding a world explored only a small part. There are faced with a game map extraordinarily wide, but incredibly dense places visited: forget the desert of New Vegas and the Wasteland of Fallout 3: Boston has hundreds of points of interest.
For obvious reasons we have not been able to complete the game 100%, but we believe that the 400 hours of gameplay feared by the lead designer of Fallout 4 is an estimate and likely that the absence of a level cap goes well with the huge amount perk to unlock and upgrade. This game, in other words, is immense.

home Sweet Home
One of the great innovations of Fallout 4 is the possibility of making the Commonwealth home. Not to mention the usual mechanical housing, already present in the two previous chapters, but a mechanism that distorts the concept enabling us to build entire villages, to populate them with allies and to defend them from enemies. In certain designated places, in fact, you can create an outpost and change through the construction of buildings, either prefabricated built from scratch by the player. Then there is the opportunity to build shops, defense facilities, electric generators, farms and water purifiers. The rebirth of civilization post-atomic also passes from your hands.
The construction of the villages goes along with various mechanical crafting in the game, finally giving meaning to junk retrieved during our explorations. Each object found, in fact, can be recycled to obtain materials, to be used both in the construction of the villages in the creation and modification of weapons and armor, as well as of food, care, drugs and explosives.
This part of the game can not be ignored by the player, because at least one occasion you are forced to use them to continue the adventure. This aspect, which will test the speed runners and at the same time could frustrate those who will be forced to retrace their steps to recover the missing materials in order to conclude the adventure in the shortest possible time. But no matter: the crafting in Fallout 4 was much more fun than expected, and we spent several hours to beautify our villages and to build facilities for our residents. Although, at present, there is only a handful of assets to draw upon to build our cities, we believe that the mods – this time also supported on consoles – will soon turn into a very important aspect of this game.

Firepower
Regarding the shooting, Fallout 4 does not distance radically from the previous chapters of the saga. We find the VATS system, this time made it a little ‘more dynamic by the presence of a bullet time. In other words, once activated VATS our enemies continue to move, leaving less time to think, but at the same time, allowing us to find the right moment to pull the trigger. The success rates of the blow, in fact, vary with the position of the opponent on the battlefield, and the bullet time does nothing but entice them to wait or hurry to get the most damage possible.
The critical damage, this time, is not determined randomly but by a bar that fills up every blow with VATS. As the bar is full, the player can activate the critical damage with a 100% chance of success: some perk and the parameter of luck, therefore, change only the speed with which you recharge the bar of the critic and the possible damage inflicted , but they do not affect the success of the same. The critical hit thus becomes an additional resource in the hands of the player, to be used at the appropriate time in the face of an enemy particularly difficult.
The shooting outside the VATS system works similarly to Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, but our weapons are very different depending on the changes installed. Since each weapon can be dismantled and rebuilt through the crafting system, you can turn an ordinary gun 10 caliber weapon in the long silenced, or a gun tube equipped with telescopic sight to hit from long range. For the vast majority of firearms there are hundreds of possible combinations, and is almost impossible to have two similar weapons in its arsenal. The player can even put a name to his own creations, creating for themselves their own unique items.
The same applies to the armature, which can be changed in each parameter for proved more resistant, capable of absorbing a particular type of damage or, more simply, more read or capable of giving a bonus to the weight transported.
This variety, however, has had as a direct consequence a dramatic decline in the type of weapons and armor available. In the game you will find a few basic models and thousands of variations, with the result that much less interesting research objects on corpses. In partial relief from that, there is the introduction of the legendary enemies, versions tough opponents and capable of changing during the fight, which always offer a special type of drop. Even the legendary weapons and armor obtained from these particular enemies are based on the basic versions, but offer bonuses very difficult to get through the crafting and, to make matters worse, it can still be changed through a workbench. So, in a few hours, you will be in hand some trinkets really powerful, but for the most part of the adventure will continue to use part of the equipment obtained at the beginning of the game, suitably modified. It may surprise you, but we finished the main campaign and never take off the overall Vault 111, collected at the beginning of the adventure and we applied some small but significant change in the course of our travels.
We must also report the disappearance of equipment damage. You read right: our guns and armor does not wear out, and the player never has to do with inefficient tools. Again, therefore, it emerges strongly the relative lack of interest by the player in the drop of the opponent, a time to collect useful material to patch up their armor and adjust their weapons. If you loved this, and you are not prone to crafting, Fallout 4 will leave you a bit of a bitter taste.
There is also to open a small but important parenthesis on the presence of armor Atomic: what was a kind of ultimate weapon in Fallout 3, Fallout 4 will be made available right away. Also, needless to say, it can be changed (and repaired) through the crafting system, but its use is limited by the consumption of a rare fuel, a radioactive nucleus recoverable only in some places in the map and-dropped by some particularly tough enemies . In short: You can not wear armor atomic all the time, but at some stage of the game we are almost forced to use them in order to survive. Radiation Fallout 4, in fact, have most obvious and are much more common than in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and armor Atomic turns out to be an indispensable tool in some places on the map. You just think that even a simple ghoul can poison you with radiation, and we are not surprised that they have used in the first three hours of play the same amount of Radaway used throughout the campaign Fallout 3.

Dogmeat & co.
Travel companions, always in this series, they return in Fallout 4. From Dogmeat, our furry friend that can sniff out enemies and secrets, our network of knowledge will lead us soon to have available various allies. Each one has a unique personality and characteristics very different, and our actions contribute to shaping the type of bond between our alter-egos and who accompanies him.
The Companion also provides access to unique dialogue options and take part in our discussions in some missions, making the gaming experience very different depending on the companion chosen. Add to this the presence of this unique activated under certain conditions by our allies and, in some cases, very long and intriguing, there is more of a reason not to move by themselves in the Commonwealth.
Although some comrades meet during the main campaign, some of them find themselves in an almost random, or during a side quest. In the game there are fourteen, and our adventure we have discovered just seven: another indication of the magnitude of this game.

Bugthesda?
Moving on the technical side of Fallout 4, we had inevitably collide with one of the trademarks of Bethesda Softworks: bugs. Let’s face it: a game with open world structure of this scale and without technical problems is absolutely implausible, however desirable, and Fallout 4 is no exception. The Creation Engine, already used for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has its limitations with penetrations polygonal ridiculous Ragdoll enemies spawn allies in elevators, animations unrealistic and other minor issues related to the location of some waypoint (a a point that was made less severe by the presence of a perk that allows us to find the way through a path of light visible from VATS).
At the same time, we noticed a greater finishing quests and a presence of game breaking bug really thin. During the review we have been forced to reload the game once after a problem with a waypoint inaccessible, and there is ever die or fail a mission because of a technical problem.
The limits of the Creation Engine, if anything, can be seen in the impact graph of the game consoles have the pop-up elements in the distance, some very low resolution textures and models certainly not very detailed, which add up to the obvious problems of frame rate version Xbox One.
In short: Bethesda with Fallout 4 has decided to invest more on the content by choosing to maintain (and refine) your Creation Engine. The result is an experience unable to make us turn the head from a graphic point of view and with some technical problems, although far less severe than seen in previous Fallout and even in Skyrim.
This, probably, will discuss at length the players; we believe that faced with such a breadth and variety of content, the look and feel overshadowed in the final judgment.
The variety in the environments, the enormous amount of hours of play, the unique atmosphere, the presence of dozens and dozens of hours of dialogue entirely dubbed (good) in Italian – for the first time also with the voice of our alter ego – They are sufficient to make us forget that, on balance, Fallout 4 from a graphical point of view is not so behind the times.
Add to this the stratospheric soundtrack composed by original songs and a variety of famous pieces of American music of the forties and fifties – in some cases recycled from Fallout 3 – it takes little to go into raptures when they started to take its first steps in the contaminated area.

Written by: admin