A game to instantly fallout of love with
Fallout 76 PC, XBox One, PS4
MUCH like the nuclear wasteland in which it is set, the fallout from the release of Bethesda’s newest game has not been pretty. Fallout 76 is the franchise’s first foray into multiplayer gaming, the action taking place in a vast, open world torn apart by nuclear war.
The problem is, that world is unstable, and incredibly buggy
– and I’m not talking about mutated cockroaches.
The game starts with you being urged to leave your underground shelter, venture out and rebuild America from the nuclear ashes.
On your journey through Appalachia, you have to scavenge weapons and armour to help you survive not just the wasteland, but the mutants, robots and other monsters which now roam the Earth.
You must also manage your character’s food and water intake to survive – and untainted provisions are hard to come by.
It sounds an exciting premise
– and it should be – yet there are so many things wrong here it takes the shine away from the experience.
As a multiplayer, there are no AI characters (apart from the creatures, of course) in the wasteland – every other person you encounter is another player who, if you’re lucky, will just ignore you and go about their business, or will be a lone wolf who attacks you.
The nuclear inhabitants however, are most decidedly hostile, so getting yourself armoured up is a priority.
It can be pretty lonely in the wasteland. With no supporting characters there’s very little interaction, as most of the other gamers are racing around enjoying their own adventure.
But non-playable characters don’t just provide cutaways and chatter, they provide an anchor, context, an inhuman voice that fleshes out the world you’re inhabiting and helps immerse you in it.
You can group up as a team of four – although there’s absolutely no incentive to do so, no special bonuses or way to form a faction to establish your own town.
Fallout fans who hate multiplayers will be pleased to know that this is still very much playable as a solo game – although you’ll need to keep the internet connection active.
Visually, Fallout 76 is nothing special either. Running on an updated version of the Creation Engine – which is why it’s reminiscent of Skyrim – the environments look detailed, especially the decay to all the buildings.
I will say that the colours look richer – there’s an added vibrancy to the wasteland, an improvement on the muted tones of previous instalments.
Gameplay-wise it’s a bit of a horrorshow. There are noticeable framerate freezes and dips which last from a few seconds, to unrecoverable crashes. These would be annoying if they were occasional, but you can almost set your watch by them.
I was unable to complete certain quests, and there were times when I arrived at my target to find them already dead – and good luck immediately jumping to a different server where they are alive, it became a little like Russian Roulette.
Now in fairness, Bethesda has addressed some of these glitches with an incredibly large post-launch patch – but it hasn’t fixed everything.
The game’s new survival mechanics are nothing short of tedious, almost tying you to your base camp while you repair your armour or guzzle water and food.
To make things even worse, power boosts for your weapons and armour are only achievable after dozens of hours of grinding through level-ups – to the point that when they become accessible, you simply don’t care anymore.
Fallout 76 was ambitious, and for that Bethesda has to be given credit – but this just feels like an experiment gone very wrong.
To give you an idea of how badly it’s been received, some shops were selling the game for half price on Black Friday – just two weeks after its release. That should be ringing alarm bells.
★★★★★ BARGAIN BUY: £19.99 (for PC) from cdkeys.com
£32.49 (XBOX, PS4) from currys.co.uk.