Fallout 76 by Bethesda - PlayStation 4

I've been holding out on reviewing this game since I didn't want to just jump on the hate bandwagon ride that it's been enjoying lately. I've made it to level 42 now and have joined in on some of the nuke-zone endgame content, so I feel like I have an adequate amount of experience to give a fairly accurate review. The good: > Multiplayer - Having the ability to jump on with a friend or two is nice. Randomly running around finding events was the highlight of my play time. Honestly though, I would have just preferred a mainly single player fallout game that had a co-op option. > The world size is good... The neutral: > graphics - not good, but not as terrible as many people are saying. I experienced nothing mind-blowing at all during my play time, but there was nothing that made me feel like the game was trash simply for this reason. This is kind of irritating, since fallout 4 with fan-made mods that could have been implemented here looks significantly better than this game. > The locations - There are several regions in the game that offer a small degree of diversity, but overall, everything begins to feel the same. There are many, many assets that are just copy/pasted from location to location, which leads you to blur all of the smaller towns especially together. If you're playing now, just look at the single "church building" model that shows up in literally every town near vault 76. > The survival aspect - pointless. Adding a thirst and hunger factor just feels meaningless. All it does is tie up a little bit more of your limited inventory space to hold food and water items. I never found it difficult to locate food or water, it was always just a chore to have to keep them in stock. I almost added this to the "bad" section, but it's just so meaningless that I thought it might fit better here. The bad: > Single-player - I honestly do not understand why Bethesda marketed this as a potential single-player game. It is a barren and nearly lifeless sandbox that I found to be completely un-enjoyable without a friend playing alongside me. It is a much, much worse version of fallout 4 in this regard. Virtually no story, no NPCs to interact with.. etc. > The enemies - repetitive and unintelligent. Whoever made the decision that even the "scorched", which comprise the majority of enemies you will face, wouldn't have any dialog should be fired immediately. There is nothing interesting about them, they are just fodder to waste bullets on. You will also quickly find (unless they patch this) that most enemies will fall into one of two categories, either they will die in 1-3 shots from most single-shot weapons, or they will die in 40-60 shots. There is very, very little variation in this. Enemies also just tend to rush at you, regardless of whether or not they are using a melee weapon or a firearm of some kind. Why is this single-shot sniper-wielding scorched rushing me instead of keeping his distance? Who knows. I could go on for a long time about this, but I'll stop now. > The bugs - Among many, many "small" bugs (which I expected from a Bethesda game, sadly), I have not had a single play session that wasn't interrupted by either a complete game crash, or a mass server disconnect. There is also an awful glitch where your attacks will just do zero damage to certain enemies, which is very irritating if you are using slower firing weapons. Sometimes, enemies that you have almost killed will heal to full health, or just disappear altogether. There are many instances of massive frame rate drops, or just 2-5 second freezes. I've never been able to turn my light on when in power armor, so I've just decided that I wouldn't use it at all. There are too many more to list here, so I'll stop myself. Just know that this is not a stable game currently. >The PVP and random player interaction - Truly abysmal. PVP is meaningless and just not fun or fluid at all. There is nothing to be gained by killing another player except to steal their junk items, which are basically worthless unless that players happens to be carrying a mass amount of them at the time. Having no 'push-to-talk' option at launch was just an unbelievably bad oversight. Players will just randomly scream or you'll just hear background noise from their living room when they're near you if you don't disable it completely. I also dislike that you can always see every players location on the world map. This takes out any sort of randomness that should come with encountering a real player. >The "Story" - By far the worst story (or lack thereof) in any fallout game that I am aware of. What exists here is delivered in the form of text displayed on random computer screens, or holotape recordings found throughout the world. The problem with this is that the text on computer screens is extremely uninteresting, and holotapes are incredibly long. Also, you will not be able to hear the holotape recordings if any action is happening, or if you are in a group and someone is talking. It's like trying to listen to 4 uninteresting podcasts at the same time. >The UI - Not good. Within 3 days of release, there were already fan-made mods on PC that fixed a lot of the issues with the UI. Unfortunately, those don't trickle down to console so quickly. The pip-boy menu worked fine in previous games mainly because it also paused the game while you slowly navigated through to find what random item had caused you to become encumbered. This DOES NOT WORK in a game that cannot be paused. It is awful. You can make the menu transparent so that you can at least see while using it, but there is a glitch currently that does not allow you to listen to holotapes while using transparent mode. >Item durability - I just wanted to add this one since it was a constant irritation while I was playing. Weapons and armor constantly break. This means that you will need to carry quite a few weapons at all times, which ties up most of your very limited inventory space. You will also need to be collecting junk at all times, particularly adhesive and aluminum, which will fill up even more space. This is a terrible gameplay loop. I should not be forced to repair my weapons every 5-10 minutes. Conclusion: I was going to give this game two stars originally, but the more I played it the worse it seemed to get. It is very clearly not in a passable or complete state currently, and especially not when it was released. I imagine that a year from now, If Bethesda commits to steady patching, this game will probably be pretty enjoyable, but it is just not there currently. It is glaringly obvious from the outset, especially when compared with fallout 4 (which came out in 2015), that this game was not given the time or effort that was necessary to make an acceptable game and still charge 60+ dollars. This makes me worry about the future of Bethesda games, which I have always looked forward to in the past.