This review is from someone who played over a hundred hours of Fallout: New Vegas and 3 and loved both. I also just finished Fallout 1 before this game and wrote a mixed review on it. From the beginning I could tell this game was special in a way Fallout 1 wasn't. The story, characters, side quests, and companions were so much more interesting and nearly every town had cool stuff to do. The UI is improved (thankfully I can see my action points a bit better now), the animations are a little better and the game seems to run a bit smoother. But, as I was having a blast I also had lots of things holding me back from having as good an experience as I wanted to. Just like Fallout 1, this was a wiki game for me. I was frequently checking it to see: who do I talk to about this, where can I find this item, is it possible to open this locker if I have less than 20% in lockpick? I did this because I just don't have fun wandering around for hours looking for what I'm supposed to do next to solve a quest or find an important location. I still had to backtrack like crazy, encounter glitches, and get bombarded by far too many random encounters. One general problem I had was that there are just too many NPCs across the board. In combat, instead of fighting three or four enemies like FO1, I'm fighting ten or twelve. And even with max combat speed there's way too much downtime for a single player RPG while I watch each individual enemy move and attack. Then when it is my turn maybe I miss, maybe I hit, but it's unlikely I one-shot an enemy. So combat takes forever. Also, in towns there are so many NPCs to talk to and they all look the same so it can be hard trying to find the important ones. Some characters you can talk to have nothing interesting to say or just repeat the same stuff over and over. The game takes just as long to get going as FO1, but I recommend you play that first because this game builds on it. These games are old, but they sure are fascinating.
This review was written by someone who first played over a hundred hours of both Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 and loved them. I've read lots of hyperbolic reviews and opinons on this game from people who say the newer fallouts are bad in comparison. I've also read lots of reviews from people who started with the newer fallouts and say this game hasn't aged well and isn't as great as people claim it is. My experience with the game was one where even after getting some general suggestions as to how the interface worked and starting game tips, I did not enjoy the first three hours or so. It got better the farther I went. The UI is very clunky, the music is kind of lifeless(I get that's part of the atmosphere but later fallouts at least had radio stations that played music or talked about the world if you wanted). I came in accepting the graphics for what they were, but they're not great. This game doesn't hold your hand at all and that's not always a good thing. I didn't realize some towns had additional areas I could explore until much later because the grids are dark and hard to see. It was hard to tell how many action points I had because the dots go from dull green to slightly darker dull green. The skill checks seemed few and far between. I couldn't tell you how much speech or science even mattered and it seemed sometimes dice were being rolled in the background that they never told me about. Talking to characters in the wrong order or sometimes for no reason dialogue options just disappear from conversations. I was quick saving all the time just in case I messed up talking to an npc or somebody blocked me from doorways. It's also a small game especially compared to later ones with nothing too crazy going on outside the main quest. But with all that said it was cool to see where it all began and I enjoyed the last couple hours. I just couldn't point to almost anything this game did and say it did it better than the later Fallouts.
