I love the MoH series (Frontline and Airborne being the top two, in my opinion), and I made my way through Allied Assault, Spearhead, and Breakthrough. I was surprised at how much fun a 15 year-old FPS can be--mowing down Nazis never gets old, I suppose. But the game doesn't mask its age well: you will run into some annoying conventions that have all but disappeared from modern shooters. Infrequent checkpoints (you had better quicksave often), annoying deaths (such as getting clipped by a slow-moving object), and some infuriating objectives that require many reloads to accomplish will frustrate you. I also ran into some compatibility problems. Sometimes the game would crash over and over at the same spot, so I had to run it in Safe Mode (which fortunately the game recommends when it notes it has crashed previously). Overall a nice blast from the past, but unless you've played these games before (old FPS games in general), you'll be in for a few hiccups that mar an otherwise enjoyable experience.
Plenty has been said about this game since it was released, so I'll not pretend to think that I'll be adding anything to the Fallout "zeitgeist" by speaking on its story and mechanics. However, as a first time player, I had the misfortune of two decades' worth of game development since Fallout's release to use as a basis for comparison. I did expect that the game would be patched to a degree (given that I'm downloading this on GoG) and removed of certain game-hampering bugs. For instance, oftentimes certain characters will refuse to speak to you if you have bad karma, something for which I was given little notice of. In the Brotherhood's base, I went through the process of stealing a certain key component of a suit of power armor, following the directions of a Brotherhood Knight, only to discover that he refused to talk to me on my return. In the same base, I was told to talk to the Brotherhood Elders, whom I was told would give me support for the assault on the military base towards the end of the game. However, even after getting in good graces with the Brotherhood by becoming an Initiate (via the Glow quest), the Elders simply refused to speak with me, something that basically destroyed the quest for little reason. Playing the game today can be an exercise in patience and understanding, but it's a journey well worth undertaking.
