Ive been hearing a lot of negative remarks about this game from people on irc. =\
I'm going to side with warz here. The storyline was pretty engrossing but that's all it had going for it. My negative remarks:
- side quests are pretty boring. That being said, Oblivion side quests were linear and simple too. But Oblivion side quests often had twists to them (e.g. "WAIT! I DIDN'T KILL HIM! HE'S A WEREWOLF!!") and they were easy to access/didn't pull you away from the main storyline too much; Fallout ones are kinda far out and can often detract from the main storyline. There's also the lack of an indepth side quest (e.g. Oblivion's Fighter/Thieves/Mages Guild quest lines) but I'm not far enough to say that's the case; of course, Oblivion had the Arena as soon as you stepped out of the sewers so maybe I'm expecting too much.
- combat blows. I won't lie: I'm biased towards swords and shields. Combat with those is often easier to do and you don't take as much damage. Don't get me wrong, Fallout has melee weapons, but against a guy with a rocket launcher (whom you can't sidestep or strafe around) you lose unless you get point blank and cripple his arms. Ammo is pretty scarce (almost as scarce as money), condition is a bitch to repair (WTF @ not being able to repair anything to 100% right away...) and aiming is a bitch too without VATS, and you only get VATS if you do things without it. (VATS = aiming for specific regions and it automatically shoots for you.) Oh, and the two guns that would be useful at this point (a shotgun for aiming in a general direction and a sniper rifle for shooting long distances) aren't available right away (or at all?) so it makes combat dumb. On a personal dislike, people's body parts splatter off too easy. One shot to the arm shouldn't knock half an arm off.
- for its steep requirements, it looks pretty mediocre. It's as good as Oblivion, maybe a bit better tops. And I'm set for high graphics...
- they definitely designed the menu system with a console-oriented approach in mind. It's a pain in the ass to navigate; I'm guessing with a controller it could be a lot more fun.
I pumped about six hours into the game and got nowhere, and I don't really have any drive to keep playing it except for the hope that it'll get better. I got to [spoiler]
Galaxy News Radio and that huge fucking Mutant Brute[spoiler] and got bored, tried some sidequests, got bored with that, and quit.
But as an aside, I never really got pulled into Fallout 1 like everyone else either. I beat it, sure, but I never really went back. The post-apocalyptic world doesn't fit well with me I guess. Even the towns that I am around frequently don't commit to memory, and I constantly find myself looking around on the map for places I'm constantly going. :/
