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I mean, it’s more Fallout if that’s you’re thing, right?
I appreciate the Fallout games. I really do. I have just never liked them. It may not entirely be the Fallout series’ fault–they come from an era where sandbox~ish role playing games were practically non-existent and so any game (Fallout) that fit the bill, regardless of how obtuse the HUD was or how insanely difficult it was to figure out how to make the plot progress or how simultaneously breakable-yet-balls-hard the combat was, it was usually considered a godsend. It also came off the tail-end of an era of gaming where “difficulty” was more akin to countless hours of trial and error rather than intuitive problem solving. This generally was not a problem since, due to small number of games available for purchase (relative to today’s market) alongside the even smaller availability of solid open world RPGs, gamers were just happy to get their hands on anything.
However, that was then and this is now, and unless you have hours on end to waste figuring out how to proceed or you want to suffer through playing the game straight from a guide, I would guess that you aren’t going to have a very good time. My experience with the Fallout games could be described as “potently dry.” If you didn’t play these games as a kid (and I didn’t) going back now and trying to muscle through them is hard. Very little about the games are intuitive and even less is quickly and accurately understood. I’ve beaten Fallout 1 as well which meant I was already familiar with the mechanics, stubborn HUD and general flow of the game (it’s all nearly if not identically the same to the original Fallout) but even then I didn’t make it out of the starting dungeon with anything resembling speed.
It probably doesn’t help that I’ve never enjoyed the post-apocalyptic setting on its own. I love the survival aspects and I love survival games, but the old Fallout games have never really been about survival per se. They’ve always been more about roleplaying a unique character through close encounters with mutated monsters, stat balancing and dialogue choices. These all sound great, but once again the overall dryness of the experience and required hours of aimlessly wandering around before you realize you needed to click on some obscure item in the environment or use an item from halfway across the world a seemingly random other object halfway around the world ruins it for me.
Hah, and here I am, just complaining about Fallout as a series when this is supposed to be a Fallout 2 first impression. So what of Fallout 2? Well, as I’ve said already, mechanically and gameplay-wise it’s barely been changed from the original. You even create a character from the same set of perks and skills. The story this time is that you are a villager from the same community where the hero from Fallout 1 settled down in. The world is desolate (not much has changed I guess) but specifically for whatever reason, even normal means of food are becoming scarce. Even the two-headed brahmin cows are dying out. This leads to your village elder asking you to find the G.E.C.K., some gardening kit from the pre-apocalypse that everyone in the post-apocalypse thinks will magically make everything grow again.
After throwing what felt like an endless supply of sharpened toothpicks at an equally endless supply of oversized ants and scorpions, I eventually succumbed to the poison running through my veins and died the death of a true hero of the Wasteland–forgotten, un-thanked and buried in sand. Yeah, that’s about what I expected. I can admit that Fallout 2 is probably deserving of Tier 2 but I can’t help but place it in Tier 3. Once again–it’s not a bad game, nor is there anything that it did “wrong.” It’s just simply a product of its time and not one that any but the most devoted of Fallout fans, post-apocalyptic lovers or the nostalgic will enjoy.
