I haven't played the previous Fallout games, so this review is
completely unbiased in that sense, but I have played Baldur's Gate:
Dark Alliance, and other games of that ilk, and really don't like them,
so take that for what you want.
I thought the graphics was a
complete step back from Dark Alliance (a three year older game). The
character models looked like crap. The three main avatars in the game
are completely faceless through out the game because the only time
they're shown is in cutscenes when they're walking into the new area
when a new chapter starts (and there is three of them). Theres no real
connection with your character. So it really doesn't matter which one
you pick, outside of their special abilities.
There's a ton
of weapons in the game, so that's nice, but you don't really learn new
attacks or anything. All the skill points you invest in are "boost your
attack with this weapon" or "boost your treasure drops" or something
completely faceless to you. Plus you don't get points to distribute to
your stats, so I was never to excited to gain a level like I would be
in a Dark Alliance game.
There's only a handful of mission
variations: Kill everything, get key, or baby sit mission. That's it.
It gets old, plus fighting giant spiders for 2 hours gets old after a
while.
Overall, the gameplay is a total Dark Alliance clone
in every sense, and if you liked or hated that, then that is how you'll
feel about this. The dialog is the biggest offender of this game. It
tries way to hard to be shocking or extreme or hip, I can't tell. You
know when someone thinks they're funny and they're not? That's how I
feel about this, and even the new Bard's Tale game. I get it, I'm not
12 years old anymore, it's not funny. Please stop.
----------Battle System----------
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is a generic hack and slasher RPG.
Fallout uses the same game engine as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, so
if you've played that then you know what to expect.
At the
start of the game you get to pick between three characters. The male
character is strong but slow, the female character is fast but weak,
and the ghoul character is in between both of them. I picked the Ghoul
because of that, and inside the booklet they claim that you can learn a
skill for him that lets him heal in radioactive waste, but more on that
later.
Your character gains experience for each monster killed
or quest finished. After so many points he gains a level, after each
level he gets a few skill points. The skill system is exactly the same
as Dark Alliance, or maybe even X-Men Legends. You can see all your
skills right off the bat of the game. You can then decide which skills
you want to invest in. I like this system quite a bit, but they took
out the stat points, so you can't boost your characters strength,
defense, intelligence or anything as you want, so it's slightly more
stripped down than Dark Alliance, but I still liked this system.
My biggest complaint is with the Ghoul character, the promised "Heal in
Radiation" thing mentioned in the booklet was a waste of hope for me.
The skill costs 48 skill points, which is extremely tough to get early
in the game because they only give you between 2-8 skill points for
each level (and gaining levels takes a LONG time), by the third and
final chapter in the game they start giving you 32 points for each
level. That's nice and everything, I can get this sweet skill in only
TWO levels, but by the time you get to the third (and final) chapter
there isn't any radiation, so the skill is entirely POINTLESS. I'm glad
I didn't buy it early on, or else I would be pissed.
On the
positive side of things, they got rid of the whole "weight limit" thing
about Dark Alliance, so you don't have to constantly jump back to the
HUB world to sell your garbage. The enemy item drop rate is very rare,
so when they drop something it's either a good item, or a useful health
item.
Your character can only equip four pieces of armor and
no accessories, which sucks. When the merchant is selling a higher
piece of armor, it's always better than the cheaper one, so there's
nothing to debate over. There's really just isn't alot of armor in the
game. There's a TON of weapons in the game though. There's a blunt
hammer type weapon, knifes, guns, shotguns, rockets, miniguns,
grenades, blah blah blah. Guns require bullets to use, and monsters
drop those often enough. I never ran out of ammo, so that's good. I
mostly used melee weapons through out the game, but had to use miniguns
during some boss fights. I expect more gunplay out of the game, but it
was a little slow.
You can equip three weapons at a time and skim through them with the White button for quick access on the fly, that's nice.
----------Characters / Story----------
Story? Characters? was there one in such a game? I can't remember. I
picked the Ghoul, whatever his name is, but you can also pick a generic
badass female or a generic badass dude, I doubt there's much of a
storyline difference outside of a few dialog tweaks. Anyways, whoever
you pick is on a mission to find your fellow "Brotherhood of Steel"
buddies, who are some kind of elite militia or something. Yeah that
basically sums up the game.
The storyline was pathetic and
the "character development" was non-existent. The dialog is extremely
corny, juvenile tripe written for 14 year olds, by 14 year olds.
----------Graphics----------
Ugh. How did they manage to make this look worse than Dark Alliance?
This came out three years after the fact, and it just looks plain awful
and dated. There just isn't a huge variety of monsters to fight..
Mutants, giant bugs, robots.. uh that's it. Heck, even the Boss battles
look like crap because I can barely tell the difference between what
the boss is and what a normal enemy is.
The game is dark, so
the backgrounds end up always look the same no matter what. The
character models during cutscenes are boring and forgetable. All
cutscenes are made with the game engine, so they also look like vomit,
but I enjoyed the opening movie to the game since it used real stock
footage and had a convincing storyline hook.
----------Sound----------
Everything is voiced out, so that's a postitive, but there's nothing
outstanding about the voices, the bad guys sound gruff, the good guys
sound European or Southern... nothing you'll remember and most likely
will want to forget. The music is ambient as possible, and you won't
remember anything about it. A cool fact I learned while reading the
final credits of the game is that Devin Townsend wrote all the ambient
music, to bad most of it sucks. The boss battles have generic metal
tracks from the worst of the worst of labels like Century Media,
Roadrunner and Earache. Do I want to listen to Skinlab while I kill a
giant scorpion? No thank you. Luckily the vocals are cut out of these
tracks while in game.
----------World Map----------
The
world map is exactly the same as Dark Alliance or Champion of Norrath,
as there's barely a map at all, and the game is broken into chapters,
each chapter has a safe Hub world, with NPC, merchants and crap, with
doorways to dungeons. After you unlock one dungeon, you'll get a key or
something to unlock the new one that you couldn't reach earlier. This
is a very linear game because of this. Not only that but you can't
travel between chapters, and sometimes you can't even travel between
stages on the chapter, so you're usally stuck in a linear game.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
10:13
This was the final save point before the end of the game (but I think
after the final "boss"). The ending was a short grainy CGI ending,
things blow up, the end. You unlock three new characters after beating
the game.
