Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game Review (charlescragar)
This was my first CRPG and I would argue it was a great place to start (especially if you are like me and can't run Baldur's Gate III). I went into this primarily as a fan of Fallout: New Vegas and that's kind of how I'm framing this review (no major spoilers though). I had come to understand that despite being in an entirely different genre, the rich and believable world of Fallout: New Vegas, along with its willingness to present tough choices with real consequences, could be traced back to the original game in the series. I wanted more of that universe and its choices, and Fallout 1 more than delivered.
That being said, the game asks a lot of you. It requires far more patience than just about any modern game I've played, and even then the reward for this patience is less tangible than, say, defeating a boss in a soulslike. This game asks you to do a lot of reading, with the reward ultimately kind of being... more reading. However mundane that sounds, the dialogue here is among the best rewards in any game I can think of. The writing is subtler than New Vegas, the comedy a little more sparse (yet equally funny), and the tone more focused... and what a tone it is. This game is *bleak*. It hasn't yet been 100 years since the bombs fell, and it shows. Civilization is only just beginning to rebuild. Fallout 1's characters take this world very seriously, because it appears they have no other choice.
Having given all that praise, on a first playthrough, I did feel like I was waving a cane in the dark. Stats are everything, so build a character poorly and you could be SOL, especially given the time limit on the main quest (the timer is actually quite forgiving, but it definitely didn't feel that way without knowing how far along the quest I was). Dialogue choices with major consequences are often not presented that way, and combat encounters come out of absolute nowhere at times. I learned to save frequently which mostly circumvented these problems, but there was definitely a good deal of frustration, especially at first. I also had to use a guide a few times, with some clues for progression being just a little too cryptic in my opinion (oldheads may disagree).
Ultimately, all of the resistance that came along with this game only made it that much more rewarding to complete. The feeling of finally taking out a Deathclaw, or repairing a robot using context clues alone and watching it clear a path forward, or realizing that the once-unintuitive controls had become second nature, or random-encountering a crashed alien spaceship, or losing a companion and choosing to let the story go on without them. Each of these moments meant a lot, and there were countless others like them.
This is definitely not a game to come home to during a stressful week at work, but it *is* a game to fall in love with on a long weekend. I highly recommend.