The problem with this game in one example:

I was working with The Railroad, an underground movement attempting to take down the Institute.

The Institute made me their leader after I infiltrated them for the first time.

I thought, okay, now I can go back and relay to the Railroad that I'm now the leader of the Institute. You know, the group that our whole goal is to take down.

You can't. I felt like I was going insane when I walked back to the Railroad base and desperately tried talking to everyone to reveal this critical information about the war I was participating in. In that moment, the veil was lifted. This is not a world, it's a shooting gallery.

What is the point of even having a dialogue system if this very common occurrence that the main quest forces you down creates this level of dissonance due to a lack of options? Why even have factions? Why have dialogue? The game would not be any better or worse than it is now.

Update:
So, revisiting the game now in depth for the first time since it came out, I realize: there IS a whole side section of quests dedicated to exactly what I was talking about but it didn't trigger for me on my first run! This does make me feel less insane and I'm glad the game is more functional now, but it's insane that a bug occured nearly ten years ago and colored my perception of the entire story so strongly.

Why is it that the itty bitty sprite-based Fallouts let me blow up a locked door or pry it open with a crowbar, but this shiny, hundred million dollar PS4 game doesn’t?

I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.

This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.

Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.

To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.

I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.

Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.

The level deign in this game is peak but everything else is good.




























I hate Blight Town

For years I have put off playing Dark Souls, primarily because of the notorious difficulty of the game. When I eventually started playing, I realized the lack of information was harder for me to adjust to than the hard enemies. The game explains very little of its mechanics and doesn't hold the player's hand very often. Many times, I had to look on the internet for answers to my questions. This sounds kind of bad, but eventually I just accepted it as a part of the experience. However, the areas and fights I did without any outsider help felt the best to complete.
I didn't really focus on or get engrossed in the narrative, but the game isn't really asking you to. The best worldbuilding consists of the environments and enemies you encounter along your adventure. Many areas have a very strong atmosphere and great boss designs are effective at intimidating the player. In combination with the music (which I want to give a better listen as a whole), the best bosses in the game felt incredible to take down.
The first half of the game just captivated me and every time I was excited to see what I would find next. The interconnected world is genius and already etched into my mind. The moment you arrive at Anor Londo was probably my favorite moment in the game. Gameplay-wise, the area itself wasn't particularly different from what came before, but seeing the "golden city" for the first time was very memorable.
Sadly, the last hours of the game aren't as exciting. There were multiple bosses in these areas which weren't that fun to fight and some could only be properly beaten by exploiting the game. It is obvious these late game areas have a lot of potential, but the execution is just flawed in comparison with the earlier areas in the game.
Dark Souls is a game with high highs and low lows. Ultimately, I'm really happy and satisfied with beating the game. Due to the difficulty of the game, it really feels like you earn every victory and beating the game felt great. I'm excited to eventually play the other souls games, now that I'm finally getting into the series.

I don't have too much to say about Peakmin 4 but I'm really gunna miss Oatchi going back to play 1 and 2 ...

Biggest complaint by far is that some late-game cave enemies are super BS and can devour far too many piks at once if you don't have the right crew/approach (I'm ngl I soloed half the final cave as Oatchi) -- This wasn't bad for most of the game but it got to a point where I'd only have a couple dozen of one type and I'd lose all of them instantly if I got licked or knocked over or screeched at the wrong moment. Skill issue I'm sure but still a bummer.

In terms of positives though, everything else! Level designs were great, music is beautiful, having so many pikmin types was fun (even if half of them were so rare it was easier to use Oatchi) -- This was really fun to just sit down with before bed and I really can't believe I spent nearly 30 hours on it before reaching the true ending. There's something so addicting about figuring out how to get stuff done and then watching cute lil guys put the work in.

Really recommend this to anyone interested, super chill time (until it was the most stressful thing ever, but that's over now, it can't hurt me 😌) - easy to get into and honestly just buy it regardless so we real gamers can get a 5th one :p
It even has hands down the most hateable villain in all of media 🥹

That'll do it anyhow, thanks for reading folks, hope you're all well! I'm 110 hours deep in Infinite Wealth so hoping to finish that this week, review will likely end up similar to this one but we'll see -- Until then! 🙏

Might be contentious but this is probably my favorite in the series and comes the closest to what I feel Pikmin should be. I never fully felt like previous entries fully utilized the whole "you're a tiny and normal sized things feel giant" thing until this one. This game is beautiful and I found myself constantly just looking around due to the awesome micro/macro environments. The quality of life and mechanic changes REALLY improve gameplay and remove frustration. Controlling Pikmin feels smooth and you're not constantly worried about losing half your population in one mistake. Oatchi is a MASSIVE addition that completely changes the dynamic and makes the game way more interesting. That does mean the game can be too easy and too forgiving at times but I do feel like the trade off is worth it.

This game is still filled with the usual Nintendo junk that is almost always frustrating though. Constant hand holding and interrupting to teach you stuff. The game kinda feels like it goes on for just a little too long and I wish the game wasn't super cave/dandori heavy and leaned more on overworld exploration. Also the split screen during dandori battles can fuck off lol.

Glad I finally got around to playing this and I hope we get a sequel some day but if not this feels like a pretty good sendoff.