We all know the Fallout games as the "War, War never changes." games, of course. There was Fallout 1 and 2 made by a different company that generally established the lore of the games we know today: Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and now, Fallout 4. Fallout 3 (I'm not going into FO1 and FO2, because they were top-down RTS/Turn Based games, even if they did establish the lore in general) was created by Bethesda Studios, Fallout: New Vegas was created by Obsidian Entertainment (Or just Obsidian I guess) and Fallout 4 was developed, going back again, to Bethesda Studios.
Todd Howard is the CEO of Bethesda studios and leader of creating these games, generally. A lot of people tend to berate Todd due to FO4's shallowness, along with the fact that they slimmed down the game and kind of actually wrecked the RPG mechanics more or less, and made it into a First-Person Shooter (or TPS, whatever, however people play) with RPG elements. In my experience playing the game, it's been extremely shallow. The focus on the gameplay is gone, and it's now about exploring the Fallout world, the Commonwealth, that they've crafted for us players. Unfortunately, the world is extremely shallow and not deep at all. Sure, you see some scenes and some stories told on terminals, but to be honest, the game is worth more as a 30 dollar game over a 60 dollar full production value game. But I'll get into that in a bit.
So, first off:
Storyline
The storyline of Fallout 4 is generally the same with all Fallout games. It's some time after October 23rd, 2077, when the nukes fell on America, as well as China and Russia. It's unknown what happened to the rest of the world. Was Europe taken over by super mutants? Did it drop into anarchy? What happened to Australia?! These questions may be able to be answered with a simple google search, but all we know is that China and Russia are most likely obliterated, and the United States of America is as well.
It's like some dude said... something about World War III and sticks and stones and nukes or whatever.
Anyway, so you begin the game as a guy in the Pre-War Fallout world. giant, fancy cars running on nuclear fission or cold fusion or whatever, and you live with your wife and newborn baby along with Codsworth, your Mr. Handy robot. However, shortly after you begin the game after some events happen, you are called into the living room to see that a newscaster is getting confirmed reports of bombs, nuclear bombs, having been dropped on New York, Manhattan, and some other places (forgive me if Manhattan is wrong, I know he says some other name) and you and your wife have to race to the Vault made by Vault-Tec to save yourselves. You both get into these pods, and you're sent off to sleepyland in cryo-sleep, including your baby who is in your spouse's arms. A time passes and someone comes and removes your baby from your spouse's arms and kills them. More time passes and the cryo-sleep systems fail, and you get out of the pod. You can choose whether or not to open your spouse's pod or just leave the Vault, but either way, that's when you start the game.
So, that's where the story begins, and then without any other spoilers, you're propelled 200 years into the future into what is Fallout today. The timeline for this game is ten years after Fallout 3, by the way, as I found out on Reddit. (http://reddit.com/r/fo4 and reddit.com/r/Fallout are both very good subreddits to read about Fallout 3/4/NV btw)
You find out your son has been kidnapped and you race off to save him from whatever evil beings have captured him, without really knowing how old he is, or where he is, or what the outside is like, or anything. And you apparently don't care 1 fucking inch about your dead significant other in the cryo pod across from you, because if you open the pod, you just take their wedding ring, and that's that, you leave. There's no tearful goodbye, or the body flopping out of the cryopod and you catching them and laying them on the floor and just crying over them. It's just cold and heartless.
This, this is the beginning of the end of this game, and just how bad it really is.
Gameplay Mechanics
So gameplay in the game is pretty much like playing Call of Dooby: Land of the Free and Home of the Retarded 16. Your basic FPS, minus the fact that there are apparently 50 different guns out there in the wasteland to find, not to mention all the different kinds of Legendary guns you can find off of some tougher enemies as well. You shoot stuff, loot them, stay alive, do quests(extremely limited number of sidequests) and beat the game.
I'm just going to touch on Legendary enemies because I really like the idea of Legendary enemies. They're basically what equates to an "elite" monster in other games, a monster that's not a boss or a miniboss, but a normal monster that's just harder to take down than the others, and you get improved loot for it. Things like getting a Pipe Rifle (extremely primitive rifle or pistol made from some metal and wooden parts) that sets enemies on fire, or fires explosive shots. Or a Combat Shotgun that shoots explosive pellets, or that deals Radiation damage as well as normal damage, etc. Normal weapons you find out in the wasteland will have normal modifications on them (Will be touching on this in a moment as well under Crafting) but only legendary weapons have the legendary modifications on them. This is really the only unique thing FO4 brings to the table in terms of monsters.
You still have your Raiders, your Mirelurks (some new variations), ghouls (SO MANY FERAL GHOULS AHHH), and Super Mutants. That's really it. Oh, and Synths, those are new and from the Institute which I'll be delving into more later.
But I'd like to point out that the developers who made this game seem to have worked in small teams and then just smashed the game together into one jumbled thing, smashing areas together that they individually worked on, and then smashed the whole map together and released the game. There are a lot of places in the game that seem to have gotten a lot of love put into them, and others are just bare and full of bugs and crashes for a lot of people, and as a running example right now, Monsignor Plaza in the game. If you enter it, it crashes your game.
The gunplay is awesome, though. Movement is the same as the previous Fallouts, and more or less the same feeling as well. You also still have the ability to sneak and do massive critical damage, of course. The gunplay is extremely smooth and responsive, provided you're not under 20FPS, and really feels like you do damage... until you get into the higher levels.
The attire you can wear ranges from sweater vests and slacks to a full suit of X-01 Power Armor, i.e. for people that don't know what that armor is, is the Enclave's power armor from FO3. The X-01 Power Armor is the best power armor in the game. There's also things like combat armor, leather armor, raider armor, Raider Power Armor, you can also paint your power armor if you find specific things in the wasteland as well, specifically special magazines.
That's... pretty much it unfortunately in terms of actual gameplay, to be honest.
Gameplay Score: 7/10. It could be a lot better, but unfortunately Bethesda just has to lay the groundwork for a game so modders can improve on it and do a better job than anyone else there ever could, apparently.
