Posted May 03, 2009
Fallout 2 is a true sequel to the original Fallout. Those who loved Fallout, will love Fallout 2 (and those who did not, will not). It looks, sounds, and feels the same, though the story and characters are fresh. It has the same freedom of action and range of possible play styles, the same engaging universe and dark sense of humor.
Unfortunately, it suffers from the same clunky interface and awkward gameplay, though with a few minor improvements.
- Using and manipulating your inventory is a chore. The most commonly-used items (e.g. money and stimpacks) tend to get buried below more recent items, and the only way to sort your inventory is by dropping or moving items to a container, then taking them back again. Moving stacks of items requires selecting the number to pick up every time. Thankfully there's a button to set the number to the whole stack, but the engine would benefit greatly from a more convenient way to pick up the whole stack easily.
- Interacting with the world is awkward. Important items and characters can be obscured by walls, so you must move next to them to cause the wall to fade before you can click on them. Even when items are in plain sight, they can be difficult to notice or click on, because they are often only a few pixels thick and blend in with the scenery.
- Combat is tedious, especially against large groups of enemies. Combat is turn based, which is not in itself a bad thing, but makes for a lot of waiting for your turn to come back around. And the UI is completely unresponsive while it's not your turn, so you can't even load the game if things go wrong, or pan the camera when the action has moved off-screen.
- Party members get in the way out of combat, and do stupid stuff in combat. Despite the addition of the "push NPC" mechanism, party members often get in the way, making it difficult or impossible to move in tight spaces. In combat, NPCs have a tendency to do stupid things, like chase down and kill a fleeing bystander, or switch to a knife against a well-armored foe. There is no way to direct party members during combat ("Move here", "focus on this guy", "protect me", etc.), although Fallout 2 does add a crude out-of-combat system for tweaking future in-combat behavior.
- There are a variety of UI quirks. For instance, clicking the same tile twice in a row causes you to break out of Sneak and run there -- even if the two clicks are minutes apart. Using the number keys to select a closing dialogue option will cause you to use a skill when the dialog closes. Selecting an item to use on an in-world object will often make you walk to the tile at the same place on the screen that the item was in the UI.
So why, despite these issues, does Fallout 2 get so many 4- and 5-star ratings? Simple: it oozes character from every pore. It's filled with grit, dark and irreverant humor, drug and alcohol abuse, gratuitous violence, moral quandries, and that distinctly Fallouteqsue charm. The depth of the story, the whole of the world, characters, events, and possible actions and interactions, is incredible.
Just like the original Fallout, it's plagued by a tedious interface and lackluster gameplay. But just like the original Fallout, the charm of Fallout 2 shines through.
Unfortunately, it suffers from the same clunky interface and awkward gameplay, though with a few minor improvements.
- Using and manipulating your inventory is a chore. The most commonly-used items (e.g. money and stimpacks) tend to get buried below more recent items, and the only way to sort your inventory is by dropping or moving items to a container, then taking them back again. Moving stacks of items requires selecting the number to pick up every time. Thankfully there's a button to set the number to the whole stack, but the engine would benefit greatly from a more convenient way to pick up the whole stack easily.
- Interacting with the world is awkward. Important items and characters can be obscured by walls, so you must move next to them to cause the wall to fade before you can click on them. Even when items are in plain sight, they can be difficult to notice or click on, because they are often only a few pixels thick and blend in with the scenery.
- Combat is tedious, especially against large groups of enemies. Combat is turn based, which is not in itself a bad thing, but makes for a lot of waiting for your turn to come back around. And the UI is completely unresponsive while it's not your turn, so you can't even load the game if things go wrong, or pan the camera when the action has moved off-screen.
- Party members get in the way out of combat, and do stupid stuff in combat. Despite the addition of the "push NPC" mechanism, party members often get in the way, making it difficult or impossible to move in tight spaces. In combat, NPCs have a tendency to do stupid things, like chase down and kill a fleeing bystander, or switch to a knife against a well-armored foe. There is no way to direct party members during combat ("Move here", "focus on this guy", "protect me", etc.), although Fallout 2 does add a crude out-of-combat system for tweaking future in-combat behavior.
- There are a variety of UI quirks. For instance, clicking the same tile twice in a row causes you to break out of Sneak and run there -- even if the two clicks are minutes apart. Using the number keys to select a closing dialogue option will cause you to use a skill when the dialog closes. Selecting an item to use on an in-world object will often make you walk to the tile at the same place on the screen that the item was in the UI.
So why, despite these issues, does Fallout 2 get so many 4- and 5-star ratings? Simple: it oozes character from every pore. It's filled with grit, dark and irreverant humor, drug and alcohol abuse, gratuitous violence, moral quandries, and that distinctly Fallouteqsue charm. The depth of the story, the whole of the world, characters, events, and possible actions and interactions, is incredible.
Just like the original Fallout, it's plagued by a tedious interface and lackluster gameplay. But just like the original Fallout, the charm of Fallout 2 shines through.