Really fantastic story with a great critic of the American dream and other great satire. It can be a pit of a pain to get working on PC but you can force it into vulkan and it works really well. The gameplay is pretty fun but my biggest gripe is that it feels like they really did not put as much effort into the side things that really make a GTA game like they did in San Andreas. The DLC is a fun addition to game but overall it still only took me about 25 hours to finish the entire package. With the lack of anything other than a great story and some really impressive tech to this day, there is not much to do.

A game that is pretty much a modern cornerstone of the western RPG market and for good reason. Pretty much every inch of this world oozes with care and attention. With mods it becomes a flawless experience with a fantastic and believable world with many things to do and people to see. It allows you to create your character to be who you would want to be and feels different almost every time. Only after about 8 playthroughs have I put this game down but I usually end up picking it up again every once in a while and doing yet another 50 hour playthrough of everything. Highly recommend.

This game is really stream lined and boring to me and very half hearted fallout theme park with ok graphics and decent shooting with light rpg elements as well as stripping choice and role playing from the game. Heavy spoilers ahead. I played this game for some 150 hours but after coming off the looting high, its hard to play a minute more.

For some reason, Bethesda loves to have these stupidly intricate and painfully long starting sequence that is absolutely a slog to get through. It also a terrible way to start a role playing game because Bethesda practically says, you can make your own character but they will always be alive before the war, have a wife/husband with a kid and go into a vault. Compared to the other games where you are a courier who is fresh out a grave, a vault dweller fresh out the vault or a tribal on a quest, this game is so linear and on rails as far as the start is concerned.

There is very little world building and not to mention a slimmed dialog system. If you have a mod that expands the dialogue options, most the options boil down the 3 ways to say yes and then an information button to get a line about the quest. For example, in the first part of the game when you meet Preston Garvey, even if you say no to helping him, the game continues the quest as though you said yes. The voiced protagonist just adds flavor text to saying yes. The four factions are also very boring in the theme of little choice as they are practically a just a graphic to the end game and faction rewards along your way through the game. The factions are also uninteresting in their goals as 3 of them just want to destroy the institute and one of them is the institute so it would be silly to destroy themselves.

The minutemen is meant to be the "good guy" faction but its just a scheme in order to get you to do infinite radiant quests for Preston Garvey. He asks you to do all these quests and he will even say he can not help you find your son until you do these quests. Overall the minutemen have got to be the most boring faction since its the Bethesda patented go here shoot the guys quests instead of an interesting quest. The minutemen are a representation of the game as a whole as you go to a place, shoot the guys, get a settlement and upgrades to go further into the world. Overall the worst faction

The railroad are my second least favorite as their motives are confusing at best. They risk life and limb for a bunch of robots from the institute and also have a literal path to their secret base where their very secret password to their very secret spy base is "railroad". It seems laughable and utterly unbelievable that the institute have not put in the tiny effect it takes to finding out this mystery or they really mustn't care. They also end up destroying the institute which could be of major help in freeing the synths and keeping them free as well as having the bounty of technology. It really makes more sense to occupy the institute instead. They also have the first quest of retrieving an important thing from the old railroad base instead of having done it already. While the allegory to slavery is painfully obvious its done with little nuance and little thought with the railroad. The spy and covert themes are also done really poorly as a child could crack some of the codes and procedures these guys practice. Overall seems like a goofy not well thought out faction.

The brotherhood of steel has also been a pretty silly faction in Bethesda games as well. Bethesda made the technophilic cult into a weirdly helpful good guys of the wastes in Fallout 3 and this new brotherhood is a weird mix of factions. They have the mutant hating ideas of the Enclave with the technology hoarding of the brotherhood. They are also weirdly open as they just let a guy who killed a couple ghouls into the ranks and gives the guy a laser rifle after he does two whole missions for them. They are practically just gear dispensers for the player as they just have vague goals and act nothing like they would in the other games. They are really just the brotherhood in name only with some weird mash of ideals on top. They also use the lore breaking T-60 power armor which in the other games had not other games and is needlessly retconned with a terrible excuse in the lore.

The last faction is the Institute which is the ruins of the long gone C.I.T. and by far makes the least sense out of all of the factions in the game. First off they do not want to be involved in surface world as they see it as dirty. They send synths out on missions to try and get more power for the institute since they are in a power crisis but they also involve themselves in kidnapping and replacing many people with these generation 3 synths. These synths are confusing in their own plot holes and lore. They replace people with synths to try to ease tensions with in the common wealth how ever by doing this, they cause more chaos and destruction in the process as well as destroying lives. They have synths with free will that are some how programmed in a way that would make them want to run away and defect the institute. This makes no sense as if you are the ones programming a robot to do work, why even let them have free will in the first place? Why even give them the chance of running away from the institute. They also have to make more robots in the form of coursers , teleport them to the surface which costs more power to get a robot that should not have run in the first place. Then in one of the DLCs it is established that these coursers can also decide to defect from the institute so now they have to repeat the cycle or lose resources. The synths also run away as far as DC and Maine and they still go to the lengths to track down the one in DC in fallout 3. Washington DC is 486 miles away from the Commonwealth and during a time where they need power they track a synth that far? The Institute also used FEV to try and perfect the synths. This makes no sense as how does the institute have FEV when in Fallout 1 it was restricted to the Mariposa base? Also they do teleport these mutants to the surface which would interfere with their own missions on the surface, use huge amounts of energy, and over all a pointless thing to do. They claim to do this for the good of humanity but it really only seems to further the institutes goals for themselves and their need to research everything. All of the other factions also choose to blow up the institute should you choose to side with them even though its for the benefit of anyone if keep it alive. The institute has years of research and prototyping different technology that, the brotherhood could hoard, the railroad could use to help synths, and the minutemen could use help farmers in the waste land.

Bethesda also goes out of their way to make pointless retcons to the series to only services weird plot points or moments. In the other games you had to have training for the power armor before you could use it but in this game they literally give you a set of t45 power armor on the first major mission of the game. They try to limit this with the use of fusion cores but fusion cores are reasonably plentiful around the world and its hard to believe that some people haven't picked these places clean for the cores in the first place. There are also random sets of armor around the map just waiting to be taken, some out in the open and we are supposed to believe they were just sitting in a forest for 210 years? Anyone with a fusion core a bit of know how could easily get to most the suits in the game. They are also level based so you could come across high level armor in the late game in areas where it could be easily taken. They also retconned the Enclave power armor which originally was made by the enclave in 2220 and now it is called the X-01 power armor and can be found around the world and even in a prewar nuka world display.