Before the Fallout series became the big, bombastic, and incredibly popular immersive sandbox apocalyptic that it is today it was pretty niche. The universe we know and cherished was limited down to what was an isometric grid made up of pixels and tiny characters capable of running in only four directions. With some of the cruelest encounters you’ll ever face in a CRPG and while not being as vast as today did the most they could to set up the groundwork that is now Fallout. The first two Fallout games for their time were considered two of the best games ever made. Dense, well made, well written, and ahead of their time. Ask anybody who grew up with the first two games and they’ll recount the found memories they had with them. That or give you tips and strategies and how to overcome the toughest problems in the game. It was one of ‘those’ games. A game where people could exchange information and knowledge they picked up. An incredibly experience driven game that rewarded those who dedicated the time to learning how it worked. Not just how to play it, but how the world functions and the circumstances they'd face. The philosophy that carry over to future games.
Two years ago I was given a copy of the original Fallout by a dear friend of mine. He considers the Fallout series his favorite video game franchise and wanted me to see where the series started off. He gave it to me during a sale which normally would sell for ninety-nine cents, but being the determined spirit I was, I planned to beat the game. Played five hours of Fallout 1, gave up, and never came to it again. I thought the game wasn’t for me and guilt ran through my mind. A game my buddy spent hard earned cash on wasn’t finished by his dear friend. It lingered through my mind until recently I built up the courage to finish it. With over eighteen hours now clocked into the game I can safely proclaim that I’ve beaten the original Fallout. Well I did use some cheats, but this was after three restarts with the third one being having to redo ten hours of progress. So why would I write this review when I clearly didn’t play the game the way the dev intended? Is that not a built insult especially since the first two games didn’t sell well enough back during the 1990s which then led to Interplay Productions, the original dev team, to get shut down and the series to eventually be sold off to Bethesda Softworks who a lot consider incompetent. Well yeah, I’m gonna admit right now what I did was pretty wrong and unacceptable in many places.
However, this is my experience and I get to control how I experience the games I bought or were given. If I could achieve the platinum trophy for Bloodborne and Lies of P then playing Fallout on the lowest difficulty shouldn’t be that bad. Besides, Fallout is a game I quite liked. It’s better to take the time to cover it rather than forget and push it to the side. The original Fallout is a hard game to talk about, and I’m not just talking about the difficulty. For a game that looks simplistic on the surface there’s a lot to dissect and discuss. It’s a game that does a lot right and any person who has beaten it will say, “It was good. I liked it.” However, there’s no denying that the original has aged poorly in some areas. Rough edges in a lot of minor areas that build up overtime to then make problems you can’t ignore. This review is going to be one of the more critical I’ve given in a bit, but I do want to remind you that I like this game. It’s good. I think it’s worth experiencing on your own terms as like any Fallout game it’s all dependent on user experience not what the game is telling you to do. Let’s take a trip back to the 1990s and discuss what made the Fallout series the behemoth it is now.
Story
You know how the f*cking world of Fallout works. You know it's a retro futuristic universe that follows an America that experimented with nuclear powered technology. That they become both money and resource hungry, and that their corrupt capitalist minds drive them to go to war with people who potentially hold the resources they want. This then leads to nukes flying all over the world and creating the wasteland we know now. Before there was a Capital Wasteland or Mojave we simply had just a wasteland. A dry desert as far as the eye can see containing fierce creatures and towns trying to recover from what happened hundreds of years before. This was the original Fallout. Dense, fierce, and not afraid to gauge your eyes. It was awesome for its time.
You follow a Vault Dweller who lived in the humble Vault 13. Unlike most vaults this one wasn’t subjected to any weird experiments. Just isolated from the world for two hundred years. All was well until one day the waterchip that provides clean water to your people broke. Without it the vault will surely die of dehydration or radiation poisoning as nuclear waste from the surface will seep into the earth and contaminate the water. The overseer of Vault 13 decides to send you out to locate a new water chip. You have 150 days and if you don’t bring back the chip in time every single person in the vault will die. So off you go into the world. To find the water chip, deal with everything that stands in your way, learn of what the world has become, and survive, Make some new friends, solve conflicts, and learn on lingering over the horizon in the far distance.
Gameplay
The original Fallout is split up into three different categories for me. Traversal, combat, and all the in between stuff you do within townships and cities. Traversal is the simplest thing to discuss as it’s how you get to where you need to be. You see a tiny icon on the map, you click to where you want to go, and that icon travels across the map. You can’t see anything in the distance until you get close enough, and townships are usually large green circles that when you stand on will give you the option to spawn into the township. Problems may occur during your travels and it comes in the form of random encounters. These may vary whether that be caravans to trade with, nothing, or enemy encounters that aren’t afraid to demolish you. So be prepared when this may occur as coming ill equipped will lead to you dying faster. Combat is fairly simplistic too. If you ever played a CRPG before then you should know how it works. You have a stamina bar and it tells you how many action points you have left before your turn is up. You can choose to attack, switch equipment, reposition, heal, or reload a firearm of your choice. Everyone will take turns shooting and stabbing each other until all the enemies die and you can walk away, or you die. That leads to a game over screen and having to reload a save file to where you were last.
Once you get to a township you have numerous options. You can discuss with the locals, barter to obtain items and better gear, learn where you are, and get directions to other townships and where you should probably go. As a reminder you have 150 days to obtain the water chip and if you do not obtain it in time it’s game over. Well that’s what I assume because I always managed to acquire it in time. Trust me, 150 days is a lot of time. Occasionally you’ll learn of a problem that is occurring within the township. This may be a gang that is harassing the town, an infestation of mutants, or something stranger. You can choose to help them with their problems and by doing so you may either resolve the problem or lead it all to a different solution. This is an RPG. Do what you think is best, or what you can handle. Whenever you complete a quest you are given experience points, and when enough are obtained you level up. Your maximum health increases and you are given points to increase numerous stats. These include skills with guns, melee weapons, speech skills, knowledge skills, bartering, sneaking, and much more. Maybe you’ll get a perk every so often that changes something that exists outside these categories. You choose the playstyle you want because again this is an RPG where choice matters. Also don’t be afraid to bring allies to help you. There’s four companions total and they’ll help make combat much easier.
Outside of that there’s nothing much else I have to say. Let’s just hope you can find the chip, go bring it back to the vault, save your people, and hope th- wait there’s more.
Thoughts
Here we are at what is the real section of this review. My thoughts on the original Fallout. What cruel words do I have to offer for this classic RPG? How cruel shall I be as I warned you during the introduction? What shalt thou say on this fine day that was fine minutes ago. Fallout is good. It’s like an 8/10 on my rating scale which means enjoyable. I told you readers earlier that this is a game I think is worth experiencing once. It has a lot of rough edges which we’ll discuss, but as the first entry in what was a debut series it was confident. It set up the groundwork for what are better games. We got Fallout 2 a year later, which many old fans consider the better amongst the two. Then we would get modernizations of the older games. Fallout 3, New Vegas, Fallout 4, and the other one we dare not say the name of. I have a lot of respect for Fallout 1. The developers did the most they could with technology at the time and in some cases Fallout 1 ahead of other games that came out. There’s so many ways for which you can solve a singular problem, and just about every option you could take was accounted for. It and the original Baldur’s Gate are pure examples of how to make roleplaying games by definition. You feel like an active participant in these worlds, and it’s nice knowing your actions affect what are basically tiny digital lives. Trying their best to go on in life.
Fallout 1 is a good game. I would even consider it great when it knows how to handle its greatest revelations and moments! However, I cannot deny certain aspects of this game have aged poorly. I’m not just comparing it to modern Fallout games. I also mean recent CRPGs that have refined a lot of the limitations faced back then. Starting off I do not like the combat for this game. There are people who like it and I respect that, but as someone who is a fan of turn based combat and prefers it over real time combat I think it has a lot of flaws and is downright unfair. I will say that I understand why it was designed this way. Fallout takes place in a harsh world where not one person can trust another at any time. Where the people who dress the finest are actually the worst individuals known to man. Where good luck can turn into a bad day at a moment's notice. I get why Fallout is as hard as it is, but looking back at it now, overcoming its difficulty was not the greatest experience in the world. The world map is completely RNG based as sometimes you’ll get encounters that are a cakewalk, and then get thrown into an encounter that destroys you. At times you’ll get nothing at all and it feels weird when that intensity of walking across the map either escalates too quickly or drops entirely. I do get it though, but for someone like me this is not very fun. Combat is also just a lot of clicking and hoping the enemy dies fast enough.
It’s not like modern CRPGs where the positioning of your characters can actually turn the tides of battle. Look at Divinity: Original Sin 2 as an example. The verticality of its arenas and being able to get the drop on foe by using environmental hazards. You can deal bonus damage if your ranged character is positioned in a higher area, or takes cover. I haven’t played this RPG yet as I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it or not, but another great recent example is Wasteland 3. This is a game where different character builds require different strategies. Where it’s best to place a sniper behind a barrier, but bring you flamethrower guy up close to spray a horde of enemies. These games are more advanced in comparison, and comparing Fallout 1 to them is unfair. Yet, the combat of Fallout 1 is really clunky. Your character moves in a finicky way as there’s only four directions they can move in. Every person is a physical object and trying to move about in tight spaces is hard. In fact, there’s a chance you may accidentally shoot an ally because they are standing in the way of something you want to shoot. Also allies cannot be revived when they are down. This game has permadeath and when an ally dies they are gone for good. It’s like Fallout gets worse the more you screw up, so it’s best to give them as many healing items as you can.
The inventory system also isn’t the most intuitive. You have to scroll through the list of times in your inventory to get what you want, and there’s no way of rearranging items or placing the ones you use the most at the top. It gets annoying, and it sucks when you can only have two equipped items at all times. That and reloading requires you to drag ammo onto the gun in the inventory. If you’re gonna do a party based RPG then I wish you would have more control of your party. This is a game where prioritizing certain foes during busy fights is best. I do not need them to focus on someone else, or start running away when they’re near death or low on ammo. Outside of combat I think clues and guidance on quests is half and half. Sometimes the characters will give you a good idea on what to do, but then you get to a place and you need a specific item to get further. This is not newer Fallout games where items you need have a radar or are highlighted. If you miss something then most likely finding it will be hard. It’s like Baldur’s Gate 3 where you can highlight every surface and see what can or cannot be looted. It becomes harder to tell as the game’s many pixels make it hard to see what is an item you can loot in the environment.
These are aspects that don’t fully define Fallout, but everytime they build up to become really annoying. However, I did say I liked this game and there’s a lot to love underneath all the rough edges. The world is dense, fierce, and learning more about it is thrilling. Seeing how all of the different towns operate, the problems they’re facing, and trying to solve the problems for them. Make the world a better place for them in a world that is already unforgiving. Helping one town with their gang problem and finding that the gang is led by a 1960s mob boss. Finding another town with a gang problem, but it turns out the gangs are actually good and it’s the corrupt law officials who are causing trouble. A town of ghouls who are trying to make peace with the many mutants who came to cause them trouble, and you can help them solve a water crisis they are dealing with themselves. That and running into factions I would encounter in Fallout: New Vegas was really fun. The Khans, the Followers of the Apocalypse, and meeting the original leader of the NCR in her early days. Another thing I love is how characters are written. Voice acting was not as good as today, but people in Fallout talk to you like you’re a real person. They talk to you calmly and act as if they got more experience in the world, because they do. Everything you ask and say is phrased as a question, because this game wants you to learn as much as possible.
I love how quests are designed, because while not always straightforward or giving you the best hints do have multiple ways of solving. You can talk your way out of conflicts. Sneak in to get what you want. Skills like science, repair, and lockpick seem useless at first but become quite useful when it comes to exploring important areas, which is almost every single town or ruin. The towns and cities in Fallout actually feel like towns. Places where people are actively trying to rebuild and make them habitable. I love the modern Fallout games, even Fallout 4, but one thing I disliked is how certain places that have people living in them weren’t always clean. Like they just kind of found the place, settled down, and did jack all to improve them. I quite enjoy the pixel work of this game. It was charming for its time and still is now. Some characters will have animated facial close ups when you talk to them, and they’re pretty cool. They look like clay now, but it helps give them an identity and make them someone you can remember. Even though I don’t like traversing the world, the amount of freedom you have is impressive. You could just go to where you’re told to go, or you can dart to a later area if you know exactly where they are. The game doesn’t care if you just move west towards the super mutant base. You’ll most likely die from random patrols and not be able to go in due to tight security, but it’s still there for anyone who thinks they are skilled enough to tackle the final challenge whenever.
The original Fallout is a great but rough game, and that’s why I talked about what I disliked first before moving onto the positives. Much like all the other Fallout games it’s more than just the sum of its parts. The world, characters, atmosphere, and all is all still here and present. I respect what it did for the franchise. Not everyone is going to get it, but those who do are in for what is one of the most rewarding RPGs for the 1990s. A game that rewards you for mastering its world and overcoming the ferocity of the wasteland. Fallout was ahead of its time and that is why in some way I do recommend it. That is why I give Fallout an 8/10 for being enjoyable.
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