Fallout 4

Fallout 4 drops the player into the post-nuclear ruins of Boston, where the sole survivor of a vault wakes up to find someone has kidnapped their child. The search for the lost son is the pretext that opens up the Commonwealth: a vast region full of ruined factories, radioactive swamps, settlements, raiders, and factions with very different ideas about what the world should look like after the catastrophe. The choice among them forms the backbone of the story and leads to markedly different endings.

Compared to previous entries in the series, the game shifted noticeably toward action. Shooting is snappier and more precise, but the tried-and-true system of slowed-down targeting of individual body parts remains, adding a tactical dimension to combat. A major new feature was extensive crafting: the player breaks down found junk into raw materials, uses them to build weapon and armor mods, and above all builds their own settlements, which must be supplied, defended, and managed. On top of that, players can upgrade power armor, gather companions with their own opinions on the player's actions, and lose hours to simple exploration, since almost every building hides its own small story told through the environment and found records.

On PlayStation 4 the game ran in an open world without loading breaks, though it paid for its scope with occasional frame-rate instability and technical quirks that have long been associated with the series. The atmosphere is held together by a retro-futuristic 1950s-style design and radio stations playing period swing songs whose cheerful mood forms a sharp contrast to the wasteland outside the window. Reception was very positive, though some players criticized the simplified dialogue and the reduced role of role-playing in favor of action and building. Today Fallout 4 is above all a giant toy in which you can vanish for hundreds of hours, and thanks to console mod support its content can be expanded even further. Anyone looking for carefully written roles and consequences of decisions should look elsewhere, but anyone who wants to explore every basement and build their own village will find a home here for many months.