More than anything, just the start of a lot of the series' bad habits and an absolutely bloated game sitting precariously on top of Fallout 1's great base.

Both easier and harder than the first in different places, but it mostly gets credit for being the only one in the series to get charisma actually right. Play with stat modifiers for long enough and you can get an army of up to 5 companions (6 if you use an exploit). The companions are given a lot more characterization this time around some having unique scenes and endings but again, like the first it's entirely uneven. The world in general is entirely uneven, but unlike the first instead of blank spaces theres gags. Lots and lots of gags. I know 90s PC nerds ate up pop culture references and 4th wall breaks like candy but this is just so fucking obnoxious. Look we had a character acknowledge how little sprites we have instead of scaling down the to focus on making existing locations interesting. Look at the star trek reference you dumb fucking rube.

Storywise its like if you tried to make the worst possible sequel to the first. Your character from the first went off to establish his own civilization with a bunch of his other vault dwellers who left, but over the course of literally one generation they regressed to tribalism??? Everyone in the starting village speaks as though they are from a different era despite their parents being some of the most educated people in the world, but your character can opt out of this and choose to instead speak in detached sarcasm. Its so wimpy. We made our world really obnoxious and nonsensical, but don't worry, we gave you the ability to show how cool you are by not engaging with any of it.

The cool bits everyone uses to show you how cool the game is are few and far between and almost never relevant to how you'll play the actual game. The enclave are fun villains but you don't really get to do anything with them until the end of the game. The master in the first comes a bit out of left field but theres plenty of clues about what hes doing before you actually uncover him, the enclave just sort of show up and gun down some people occassionally and then the brotherhood finally decides to tell you what they're up to at the end before disappearing entirely. The final act is decided by a conflict between a scientology riff and a giant reference to chinese kung fu movies. Why should I care about anything when so much time is dedicated to joke characters whose schtick can barely survive one dialogue but dramatic moments like Goris' entire family getting killed get one or two lines max.

Going back to this, I don't really see how anyone could see a distinction between this and Bethesda Fallout. If anything, Bethesda has been markedly more reserved with it's tone!

Beautifully written, incredibly dense and thought provoking but overall a bit limited. A medieval murder mystery about different points in a small country town's history that is ultimately more about the impact and the history surrounding the murders than the mystery.

Timeskips are whats needed to be even remotely accurate to a medieval setting like this, but the lack of interludes between them hurts even when the suggested emotional impact can hit hard anyway. Getting to decide how the main character Andreas feels about his estranged wife is a fun concept, but it's ultimately a veil for an emotional beat that will happen regardless of what you pick. There's a lot of moments like this, and it's not like previous obsidian games or games like this one were totally transformative with their choices, but for an entirely narrative experience theres just very little difference in anything. What's left feels more like a visual novel with all the most annoying parts of a 90s adventure game tacked on.

Regardless the plot is very, very engaging. The mystery and the uncomfortable guilt of probably knowing you're going to finger the wrong person is sort of thrilling. The main problem, again, is that half of Andreas journey happens offscreen and as more and more information is recalled it feels less and less "focused on the town" and more "budget." I feel like even just one scene in any of the provinces you picked or even at home would've connected the story a little better, because otherwise you're left with these disjointed and sudden "mind palace" scenes where different characters explain Andreas' emotional state to him. It's a fun play on medieval theater at first, but as time goes it just feels confused.

Again, an absolutely fantastic story that's gotten me very interested in a lot of the history surrounding it (kudos to the devs for including a reading list) but not one I can imagine going back to.

Definitely a lot to like especially compared to a lot of other CRPGs from the time but progression is so bizarrely obtuse at times and while still pretty forgiving the time limit is an unknown stressor that put me off the game for a good while. It took me four playthroughs to actually get a game going because frankly I didn't know what the game wanted from me and with how much time exploring takes I felt like I didn't have time to figure it out.

It feels very low budget at points despite an assumedly expensive (somewhat) star studded cast rounding out most of the voice acted characters. Important characters or objects often times don't have unique sprites and sometimes don't even have unique descriptions to signify to interact with them. Definitely a "click on everything" game, which gets pretty grating when most of what you get is repeated flavor text and empty containers. The rope on a random bookshelf (which has incorrect interaction collision in some places) in a random corner of shady sands being the difference between basic progression at the start of the game or a few days off your timer is just one example of how much you'll need a guide here.

There are a lot of compelling and fun characters but the story gets lost and sort of meanders by the time you get the water chip and go to LA. Theres a couple good town quests and dungeons to be found but it's very limiting, which works for the tone but combined with how little a lot of the fun and interesting characters have to say it all feels a bit rushed. There are multiple quests referenced or mentioned that are straight up not in the game or entirely unfinished, and finding the final boss ultimately comes down to a crapshoot bumming around a random location given to you by the worst follower in the game. Some endings are either entirely impossible or determined by seemingly random factors.

The soundscape is pretty dull, the droning ambience and whispers are good for some areas but get grating as they repeat. I don't mind the repetetive attack sounds but at some point I gave one of my followers a deagle or something that is so loud it manually lowered other sounds on my computer every time he fired???

Combat is infamously bullshit at some points but often times way way funnier than later entries. The brutal and well animated death animations combined with your followers accidentally doming you in the back of the head every 5 seconds paint this sort of bizarre portrait of chaotic gunfight that none of the games really capture afterwards. The animation in both the actual game and the cutscenes is generally very detailed and impressive for the time. Bosses have insanely brutal death animations and characters accurately display dismemberment based on what direction of a blast they were hit by, though there was one part where dogmeat turned into a man because he didnt have an animation for being killed by flames.

TLDR play with a guide if you want to have any fun, just watch some hack talk about the lore on youtube otherwise