Feral Wheel

Being a raider in Fallout 4: Nuka- World is fun, but there are hours of repetitive chores to complete first.

I’m leading a party of raiders in an attack on a settlement. Not just any settlement: Sanctuary Hills, my very first settlement, where I spent ages building, decorating, defending, recruiting farmers to tend crops and traders to sell goods. Now, I’m happily massacring those same settlers, farmhands, and minutemen, and blasting away at Preston Garvey with his stupid hat and his giant dumb hand-cranked laser cannon. I’m a raider, baby. Finally. Fallout 4’ s final expansion does indeed let you become a raider, great news for those of us who had always wanted to join the filthiest, most blindly violent faction in the wasteland. The not-so-great news: there’s hours of fairly routine business you have to attend to first.

After picking up a radio signal from Nuka-World, a massive and crumbling amusement park to the east of the original map, you arrive to discover it’s been taken over by three different factions of raiders. The raiders have only claimed a small portion of the park, and it’s up to you, the new raider Overboss, to annex the rest.

Most of this is work both dull and dangerous, as you must enter sections of the park and wipe out the scores of enemies living there. There are also tasks given to you by the leader of each raider faction, radiant-style quests that send you repeatedly back to the main map. These tasks are repetitive, roughly the same regardless of which faction you’re working for, and having to repeatedly leave the park to accomplish them is a bit irritating.

Nuka-World itself is big and full of things to do, though I didn’t get much mileage out of them. There are carnival games, exhibits to walk around, and once you restore power to the park you can ride the ferris wheel, spinning teacups, and the indoor rollercoaster. It’s all very cute, but one ride on each was plenty and they will now forever lie dormant. Once you reclaim the entirety of the park, you can finally start claiming settlements on the main map. Let the raiding begin!

Settle down

You can raid any settlement you please, even the ones you’ve already claimed. With three raiders backing me up, I rolled through one of my settlements in a blaze of bullets and blood, chewing up the settlers I’d previously recruited and blasting down the defenses I’d once built, until I’d re-conquered what was already mine. I’m not going to lie: it was damn fun and quite cathartic mowing down those corn-growers and stall-vendors, each of whom I spent hours of my precious time recruiting, dressing, and assigning horrible careers to. Being a raider is fun, even though I was dressed as an astronaut instead of wearing face paint and rusty spikes.

Then I set my sights on Sanctuary Hills. Unfortunately, you can’t kill certain ‘important’ characters, so while I was able to shoot Codsworth, Mama Murphy, and Garvey, none were actually killed. Visiting Sanctuary Hills after the raid, Codsworth and Murphy greeted me as if I hadn’t emptied a shotgun into their bodies a couple of hours earlier.

A raider settlement is still a settlement, and while there are some new decorations and shops to add, you’re mostly just replacing settlers with settlers that wear raider gear. My new raider settlement was even attacked by other raiders just minutes after I’d first raided it. So, even being the bad guy, I still have to contend with bad guys. Who knows, maybe I’ll rejoin the Minutemen at some point and re-convert that raider camp. I’m a fickle Overboss.

Other raiders attacked my settlement just minutes after I raided it