With the release of Fallout 76 dawning on us like Ea’s loot boxes, I have decided to do a review of Fallout 4, the, up to now, newest game in the Fallout franchise.

Fallout 4 is an action/rpg where you take control of a person who you can create, which brings up my first point. The character creation is in depth and you can do a lot with it. But without saying any spoilers, you get thrown into an apocalyptic wasteland with only the clothes on your back. As you struggle to survive, scavenge and defend yourself, you can find friends to help, and you can join one of the many factions. But again, to avoid massive spoilers, I will only talk about 1.

The Minutemen are usually the first faction you run into, and they give junk items a huge purpose. After you save the small faction you send them back to a small suburb, where you can build them defenses, crops, and other things fit for people to live in. This, of course, requires you have resources, and that's where junk comes in. Different junk has different resources. So I might drop a weapon just to pick up a toy horse, if that toy horse can be scrapped and used to build a turret. It is honestly a great way to use the junk tab and completely optional. So if you just want to run and gun, thats okay, if you want to build up a city and expand the Minutemen, that's awesome as well.

Not only can you choose how to play with other factions, but your own character as well. With 70 different perks with varying levels you won’t feel restricted. Let’s say I found a really cool sledgehammer, and I want to use it more. I can upgrade in a perk to make it do more damage. Same with automatic weapons, semi automatic, pistols, and even big guns. The creativity is endless.

But, after all of this, we discuss some of the bad parts. One bad part is the complete lack of role playing available. For example, in one of the DLC’s you can become a raider, but with your character’s background it makes no sense to be evil. They also removed the full options choice with text, giving you only short summaries of what you will eventually say. It feels less like an RPG with shooter elements and more like a shooter with RPG elements. The DLC can also feel lackluster and very straight-forward. You have to look harder to find a story you care about and everyone else's stories of their bombs by reading through a lot of terminals (I love this but a lot of people hate it). To finish off the bad things, no matter what you do, your character always asks about Shaun, who you will learn about. It’s always “Where's Shaun” or “He’s missing”. There is one point where you meet someone you have been chasing, and you can’t even ask him questions! It’s just “Where’s Shaun?”. It’s annoying, because what if your character doesn’t care about Shaun? It’s not even an option.

But, to end this all off, we talk about the saving grace of all Bethesda titles out there… mods. Mods make it so you can do literally anything, and they are pretty self explanatory. But this gives Bethesda games a lifeline over all other. I still play Fallout: New Vegas! The modding community is huge and can make the game a lot more fun.

In conclusion, this is not a bad game. It is pretty different from past Fallout games, but you can definitely still tell it’s a Fallout game. The main story could use some work, but it has an interesting narrative and mods are just the cherry on the perfectly preserved pie.

Soon we can talk about Fallout 76, when it releases because the beta times are horrible.

But that's just my opinion, what it's worth is up to you.