Review of Fallout 76 – Failure on Almost Every Front Review

You are forgiven if your thoughts of the early hours of Fallout 76 do not really survive. The radioactive playground of West Virginia is (in Fallout's terms) brilliantly and richly filled with missions, random encounters and bizarre discoveries. Because you enter this world only 25 years after the great nuclear war, there are still enough traces of civilization. Country roads are therefore an irresistible attraction for all explorers, who assume a mixture of familiar and strange costs along these routes. It does not take long before the tourist approach leaves room for survival.

In the 25 years since the nuclear apocalypse, the world has changed a lot. Of course, you have to worry about mutated animals, people and other woes, but a weapon is not your best friend. Then what? A back like a donkey and a backpack the size of a horse. Surviving is not a passive affair, even without fighting. You must constantly provide you with drinking water and nutrition. In addition, for your less pleasant meetings, you also need a small shop with anti-radiation drugs or Stimpaks. And then we do not even talk about the nine million things you should learn by default.

Thankfully, you are not the only Grylls bear to psychotic rage in this world. Your fellow residents of Vault are not NPCs this time, but real teammates. With gestures and your microphone, you can communicate with each other, but of course you can always have a fingernail decorated with nails that speak for you. Fortunately, not everyone is eager to help his former roommates wake up early in the world. Players often cross or avoid each other as the game progresses. It's just too risky to start the confrontation.

It's a pity, because Fallout 76 is at its best when you play together. For example, with a group of three people at the foot of a roller coaster, we end up in an abandoned amusement park, filled with radioactive excursions, to discuss the first to climb. After firing a ticket, the most fearful of our group was promoted scout through a short session. He gets the best weapon of the group and some additional Stimpaks. We follow at a safe distance until it becomes calm. With palpitations, we investigate ourselves on the scout, which, in addition to a bunch of corpses, scares us as a reward for his shortest ticket. Laughing, we walk fraternally, we fall into a trap and all die. We growl, we laugh, we decide to never go to an amusement park again.

These kinds of adventures are not the only things you can share in Fallout 76. You can trade products with other players, which keeps the gameplay fluid. A roll of tape can make the difference between a homemade weapon and a heavy shotgun. The problem is that the collection of raw materials quickly becomes a tedious and tedious job. This means that after collecting XP, a second gravel is created. And although these go well together initially, replenishing your backpack quickly becomes boring.

It may be logical for this double gravel to tarnish over time. For the umpteenth time, combining a hangar, because there is usually ammunition for your specific weapon, it quickly becomes boring. Fortunately, the world is vast and rich, which gives players the first hours or the first days of distraction through the various missions and parallel missions that the game presents. However, the many stories and side missions become so numerous that the theme of the game is unclear. This is due in part to the fact that this game does not set you a final goal from the first moment, unlike its predecessors.

The result? Players get lost in the content offered by the game. There are simply too many options. In addition to the meetings, scenarios and secondary missions already mentioned, you can also build bases, gather new skills and even shoot your own nuclear bombs. With an abundance of choices that all require a bit of your time in a different way, you will soon get lost in West Virginia. In other words, if you want to experience all aspects of Fallout 76, it is best to suspend your work or studies on willows.

If you can at least resist the profusion of bugs. In Fallout 76, you'll find more bugs than under the average sidewalk tile. The videos of gigantic players, mutants crossing walls and players exploding spontaneously are not only hilarious, but also numerous. Most of these bugs do not affect the game, but those who do it are deadly. We played missions that could not be completed because of a bug and we discovered an hour later that a good fifteen or so side missions underway had been spontaneously demolished. But it could be worse: what would you do if you lost your connection with the server and suddenly lost an hour and a half of your progress? With us, the controller almost flew into the room.

In addition, Bethesda's servers are designed to allow many players to walk around the same world. At first glance, this makes sense, since a large world must be filled with players, you want to meet from time to time. However, Bethesda also wants the content, such as a barn full of zombies and mutant shoots, to be available to all players. This means that loot and enemies respond relatively quickly. It may be that you have hardly given the enemies of this handing a single ticket for the radioactive hell, after which they respond immediately at the opening of the first box. And … we are dead.

And Fallout has a number of problems that we have not even mentioned yet. The lack of interaction with the NPC, the framerate that goes in all directions and the total uselessness of the V.A.T.S. system. in an online environment. All these things are boring in themselves, but coupled with the many bugs and periodic control of this game, they are deadly. In this respect, our Fallout 76 game has the same fate as the world in which this game takes place: an early end.