Fallout 4 is an engrossing game that lures you in with mystery and the promise of adventure. Its wretched wasteland can be captivating, and you never know what odd person or settlement lies around the next bend. Fallout 4 uses its dark world as a canvas for exciting combat and gripping stories, and when you dig deeper into its post-nuclear-apocalypse version of Boston--defending yourself from violent scavengers and using your wits to climb social ladders--you become attached to the new you, and ultimately invested in the fate of your new world.-------------------------------------You transform into an influential wasteland warrior over the course of a multitude of dangerous quests, but this is difficult to imagine at the start when you're a well-to-do citizen of 1950s-esque Boston. The game begins on a peaceful morning at home with your spouse and child; a robot butler provides upbeat banter and a glimpse at what America might have become if the World's Fair era of invention and optimism from the 1930s persisted into the 21st century. Life is pleasant, until a distressful television broadcast. Your family is quickly rushed underground. It's within Vault 111 that you spend the next 200 years, frozen in cryogenic-stasis until your eventual rude awakening in the year 2277.
When your hibernation is over, you first realize that your son has been kidnapped, but you also discover a world still reeling from nuclear warfare, centuries after the bombs fell. Two-headed deer drink from irradiated streams, and your home, the once great city of Boston, lies in ruin. Fenway Park has become a shanty town that plays host to underground crime rings. The historic Freedom Trail lies broken and nigh untraceable, more likely to take you into the maw of a drooling mutant than to the foot of an important monument. Your desperate need to find your son draws you into this hell-on-earth, but you eventually become an important player in its political and social landscape. Your decisions have real impact on your journey, but perhaps more importantly, on the fate of others.
Fallout 4's story regularly challenges you to make compromises. Nuclear war further complicated life in Boston; everyone wants to survive, but nobody wants to work together. The weight of this horrible reality caused some people to go mad, but for others, it's the radiation that turned them into seething abominations.
The instability within Boston seems permanent, but if one company--The Institute--has its way, life could be better; life could be controlled. The Institute is a twisted homage to Cambridge's famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it's the source of Fallout 4's bioengineered androids, known as Synths. Some Synths look like animated mannequins, but The Institute recently began producing ultra-realistic models, and people are concerned with the presence of secret, robotic agents. The conflict between synths and humans is Fallout 4's defining plotline. Taking a page out of sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner, Fallout 4 tests your moral compass by challenging you to define the meaning of life. When the line between organic and synthetic is blurred, what does it mean to be "human?"
Nuclear war further complicated life in Boston; everyone wants to survive, but nobody wants to work together.
Fallout 4 is the story of the "perfect" vs the "imperfect,” where your decisions influence the victories and tragedies of not just the two overarching groups, but all of the smaller ones that get caught in the middle. Picking sides and doing favors is, at first, about finding your son, but it becomes more complicated as time passes. It's not as simple as choosing between the right and wrong thing; you are almost always sacrificing something, and the decisions get harder over time.
Though many of the secondary quests amount to dungeon raids or fetch quests, these challenges thrust you into combat, which is a dynamic and thrilling mix of shooting in real-time and carefully selecting your targets in an RPG-rooted command system known as V.A.T.S.. While in this mode, you aim for specific body parts and get to see how likely you are to hit your mark, and how much damage you will inflict if you do. It lacks the immediacy of straight shooting, but it helps you be a more resourceful and effective warrior. It's an extension of the same mechanic from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, but activating V.A.T.S. in those games paused the action completely. Now, it merely slows down time, and you're more vulnerable as a result. The mix of utility and strategy that it presents is gratifying, unlike the real-time sh ooting, which is functional but lacks the finesse found in dedicated shooter games. V.A.T.S. also frames your actions with cinematic flair--far more so than any other aspect of the game.
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