It’s strange. I’ve tried to play Fallout: New Vegas twice now, and both times I had to stop my playthrough when I inevitably get softlocked out of the game. Even when I could actually play it, it was still plagued with constant crashes and bugs. But for some reason, the only thing I could think of while playing Fallout 4 was how much I’d rather be playing New Vegas.

Very strange decision for the latest entry in your roleplaying game franchise to strip away most of the roleplaying aspects. It ends up feeling more like an action-survival game than an RPG. The simplified roleplaying systems seemingly come in exchange for more in-depth survival mechanics, like weapon and armour customisation, settlement building, and so on but I never actually engaged with these unless I was forced to. The main gameplay loop is based around exploring the map and completing quests, so these overcomplicated systems just kind of exist for the sake of existing, and hunting down resources just to build a guard tower or whatever is just tedious. The moments when I was forced to build a settlement or whatever to complete a quest were some of my least favourite parts of the game, and I hated repairing and upgrading power armour so much that I just sold all of my power armour parts and abandoned it in Diamond City.

I personally like it when an RPG gives you a voiced character with preset details about their backstory, core personality, and motivation. I think it works really well in games like Cyberpunk 2077, the Witcher, or Mass Effect. But the thing about those games is that their missions and narratives are constructed around those characters. In Cyberpunk, V is a mercenary, which justifies why they're taking all of the sidequests in the game even when they don't directly contribute to the main questline. But in Fallout 4, the Sole Survivor doesn't really feel like they belong in this game. Their mission is to save their son, which creates a dissonance when you're taking sidequests or doing anything that doesn't directly contribute to that goal. Their personality is simultaneously blank enough that they aren't interesting to follow but defined enough that they can't really be played as a self-insert or roleplayed in any different ways.

I probably would’ve finished the main quest, but then I was forced to build up the defences at the Minutemen castle and I just don’t want to spend the time scrounging for the resources to do that, taking me away from everything I’ve enjoyed about it. Combat is fun, the soundtrack is pretty good (though New Vegas has a better one IMO), and some of the characters are enjoyable, but the world is kinda disinteresting. It feels like they put so much effort into the settlement building and survival mechanics that they didn’t work on any towns except for Goodneighbour and Diamond City. I could see myself returning to it someday, and maybe I'll like it more if I finish the story, but I don't think I will for a little while.

HacX: Twitch 'n Kill is a 1997 FPS by Banjo Software using the Doom engine. Given it was released in 1997, well past Doom 1 or 2 release, and amid Quake 2's, this game was rushed out in an unfinished state for an asking price of $15. Nowadays it is a free game playable on GZDoom, kept alive by Xaser, who improved and finished the game.

That being said, I remember digging the vibe of this game when I found it back in 2012. What stood out to me is the creature designs, like the Monstruct and the ICE (the latter being my favorite creature of the game). But now that I've replayed it, while the creatures are still cool (for the most part, the robots feel like they're from a completely different game given how they're drawn), the game still feels very unfinished. The level design feels amateurish, with most levels making it hard to find out where to go. I legitimately had to noclip at one point because I couldn't see the button to a lift because of the missing textures.

The difficulty spike in this game is ridiculous, I played on the easiest difficulty and I was still getting my ass handed to me on multiple occasions. It isn't until later in the game that they introduce a powerup that gives you 400% health and 200% armor, which helps with most of the monsters (especially the Monstructs which are plenty in the levels).

I'm wondering how things would've played out if they released this in a finished state a couple of years earlier. This game could've been the start of a franchise. They were going to work on a HacX 2 3D using the Unreal engine, but all that exists of that are a couple of screenshots because they couldn't find a publisher. As a result of that Banjo Software closed its doors. The employees behind this game did go on to greater things though, working on games like Doom 3, Halo 4, and Quake 4. They were just in a bad situation when releasing this game, so I can cut it some slack.