This has taken me a long time to write and I hope I've covered as much as possible and given reasons for my fairly negative opinion of this game that I've sank far too many hours into and I hope this review doesn't get deleted like the last one.

I had fallen for the hype, hoping that Bethesda had seen what Obsidian had done with Fallout New Vegas, not to mention the looting game system that had me hooked in previous games, only even useless loot had value in it being crushed up due to the settlement system and needing any and all basic materials to help build homes for those who are planning to live there.

The story starts out strong with you, your spouse and child all heading off to the vault before the bombs fall and then getting frozen in time, only to awake briefly to witness your child being taken and your spouse being killed whilst the kidnappers escape and you're powerless to stop them. Once you wake up, you find that everyone is dead and you get to witness the world as it now looks after being destroyed by nuclear weapons and that you're going to find and track down your son!

Though it starts out strong, the story gets kind of boring and uninteresting. You get bogged down with the settlement system, which Todd Howard had promised was totally optional, that when I finally got back to the main story I was like "Wait, who's Shaun? Oh, my son!" I had legitimately forgot that was the main story that started out everything as I got distracted from other things, building settlements, trying to make them all happy and helpful, doing related missions and pursuing other story paths too.

The settlement system was clearly too much for Bethesda's ageing system and it was falling apart at the seams even before they made this game anyway. The system isn't optional and such a huge part of the game that you even need to take part in it to actually progress the story, regardless of if you care about the Minutemen or not. It also makes being encumbered feel even more pointless in the game, which has been a recent discussion in the gaming space.

The game still scratches that same itch of the previous games made with the same engine where you want to look everything and everywhere you go and the gun-play is fun, though, much more thanks to VATs. Beyond that there isn't too much to really take notice of in this game and the story is pretty boring along with the world that at moments feels alive, but most of the time feels pretty dead and uninvolving. There's many locations that it feels should've been more interesting, like the robot racing ring or the combat area where you meet up with a companion, however, it seems these were cut and many dialog bits are still in the game that suggests these were neutral meeting areas, but now they are just filled with bandits who open fire on you as soon as they see you for no reason other than "Raiders Bad" which adds to how many other areas have uniquely named enemy bosses that you can't talk to, but reading the computers, it sounds like they might have been quest givers once, but the system struggled or they didn't have time to program something like New Vegas and the earlier Fallout Games with a reputation system so you can side with all kinds of people and groups.

Even ignoring these issues, we have moments where Bethesda tried to make Paid Mods a thing, but called them "mini DLCs" and expected us all to accept this BS. It was thankfully kicked aside and along with how Bethesda have it set up that achievements get disabled if you use ANY mod, I think it's fairly obvious that they do not like modders. People point to the past when they used to hire modders into the team, however, that time has passed and they are now getting angry that modders can fix their broken games and are getting really salty over it as Todd Howard made a point of when talking about how they don't have a touch-point with customers who are still playing the older games, but heavily modded. These days they are truly, Bethetic.

I liked the ideas of the synthetics and the Railroad, along with the arguments of what is human, making me think of the stories of Issac Asimov and how the line between artificial and living life forms can get so blurred that you can never really tell the difference in the end.

I feel there was a lot of potential squandered here and that potential is being filled in with mods and one or two specific DLCs that they released, but the rest of the stuff they added was crap and so glad Paid Mods failed, but you can bet they'll try to bring it back again one day!