Quick Note – While this game was initially designed for Android and iOS, it’s only available on PC as of 2018. No console ports were ever released.

Considering the rough-and-tumble reputation that Deus Ex: The Fall received in the brief period of time in which it was relevant, you’d be forgiven for asking why I even bothered paying for it. Of course as my 5 (count em, FIVE) subscribers know I obviously didn’t pay any significant money for the game and it cost me around 150 pennies, but still. I could’ve bought a sausage roll, or a can of Stella Artois or something instead of what is widely considered to be the worst Deus Ex game – much to the relief of Invisible War. As ever my morbid curiosity got the better of me, as I have memories of trying Mass Effect: Infiltrator on my Gen 1 iPad back in the day and I just couldn’t get past the recurring idea that maybe those Android and iOS games from the 7th generation would’ve been fine with a normal control scheme. DE:TF kind of supports my theory, as once you play it on PC (which is now the only option!) it’s not a bad game. In fact if I were the type to dish out scores I’d give it a 6 because I was genuinely disappointed that it abruptly ended after a mere 4 hours of gameplay. Sure 6/10 isn’t a great score, but Deus Ex: The Fall is a valiant attempt at porting a great game to a lousy platform (sorry mobile gamers) and it largely succeeds, with a couple of big fat caveats.

Before diving into the issues though, I think it’s important to consider what’s actually been carried over largely intact. The core gameplay of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided has been ported over, with a decently sized weapon roster, fully functional weapon upgrades, levels that have multiple routes through them, unlockable augmentation upgrades that enable further routes and the lethal/non-lethal split for combat encounters. The game also retains the dialogue system and it’s associated upgrade, alongside e-books, a fully working port of the hacking mini-game and decent stealth gameplay. Of course there are some limitations such as some missing augmentation upgrades, smaller levels, less multi-choice dialogues and the like but the core systems are largely here and immediately identifiable. So if the core systems are fine, what’s wrong with DE:TF? Surely we should all be DTF (Down To Forgive) an ambitious and affordable game that successfully carries across most of the gameplay systems to a weaker platform of systems.

Well the first and most forgivable of the game’s issues would be the graphical limitations that come from it being designed first and foremost for mobile platforms over a condensed development cycle of only a year. While the game generally looks fine, it’s pared back significantly from it’s bigger brethren and the most noticeable cut back has been to the facial animations, with hair and eyes looking particularly janky. A considerably larger issue with the game that’s very quickly made apparent is how small each area is, from the single over-world hub that’s split into 5 areas and multiple buildings each with 0 overlap, to each of those various buildings that often feature multiple floors that are again split up by loading screens. This wouldn’t be an issue, but these areas have distinct AI and as such if you’re alerted in a building you can often just sprint past every enemy and then enter the next area. Alternatively if you take the stealthy route, you’ll often only have to deal with between 4 to 8 enemies between each loading screen. Sure the game remembers if you took down or avoided the enemies, to the point of even saving their alert status but it’s still a significant limitation. On the subject of the AI, it’s really terrible and has myriad issues. The stealth detection system doesn’t quite work right half the time and enemies manage to be both blind and surprisingly aware at the same time. Even if you’ve been detected though, the enemy is incredibly stupid and can often by tricked by simply moving slightly or even just remaining totally still on various occasions.

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the game though is that it’s both incredibly short, with a run-time between 3 and 5 or maybe 6 hours for completionists. Short games have their place of course, but the real spoiler for Deus Ex: The Fall is that it ends on a totally unresolved cliff-hanger with a vague “TO BE CONTINUED” which comes almost as a bit of a shock. There’s even a warning that you won’t be able to finish any side quests in Hub #1 if you proceed which is true because the entire game just ends with a short cut-scene. The promise of a whole new batch of quests, essentially entire narrative and even a subplot featuring a nemesis from our protagonist’s recent past all end up going nowhere. To this day if you boot up the game there’s still an option for “additional content” on the title screen which when opened promises more content coming soon, even though it never will. So while the plot and characters are decent and make use of a rich setting, it never really gets to go anywhere and indeed will never go anywhere. You’re left with the first third of a potential game and everything, from the balancing to the story has been crafted with the intention that there will be considerably more content than what actually got made.

There are some other weird little niggles with the game that belie it’s roots as a mobile game, such as the fact that enemy “corpses” begin to disintegrate around 10 seconds after they “die” whether they’ve been taken down in a lethal or non-lethal fashion. This means that there’s no risk to having enemies be woken up by their colleagues, while non-lethal takedowns still give more XP so you get the reward without much of the risk. There’s also an in-game store, which is accessible from anywhere at any time via the menu and which enables you to buy basically anything. I can only assume the iOS/Android versions let you buy things with REAL MONEY but in the PC version it basically means that at any point you can just some more ammo, or an EMP grenade or whatever. You’re never really short of cash either, unless you’re aiming for the big ticket items so resource management isn’t much of a concern. As previously stated though the game was clearly balanced around having 3 separate acts, so I don’t think it’s possible to gain every unlock or item within the relatively small world of DE:TF. Finally it should probably be mentioned that the game has barely any enemy variety, you’ve got guards, guards with shotguns, guards with assault rifles, some rare robots (I counted 3), two turrets and a type of guard that goes invisible when they spot you. Oh and there’s a big boss robot. So basically 98% of the time you’re up against normal guys who have crap AI and anyone you knock out melts into pixels shortly after “death”. So it’s a pretty easy game, with the only real risk being that you could get caught while reading an in-game book as doing this doesn’t pause the game.

In conclusion then Deus Ex: The Fall is an ambitious game, that ports over all the core systems while botching the execution in various ways. It has a good story that abruptly ends a third of the way in, decent graphics that are let down by some poor posing and details, adequate combat that’s let down by poor enemy AI and variety, and so on. There are some decent story beats and the occasional cool moment, so I can’t be too mean on the game especially as it was made by a small team with a tight schedule for platforms with limited power. In fact the resulting game in the form of DE:TF is actually pretty impressive considering they gave about a dozen people a year to bash this out. Unfortunately though it’s hard to recommend, especially at it’s normal price because it’s just not finished. In spite of my inability to recommend the game however, I still had some fun with it and with the right mindset towards bargain bin gaming I’d say this is one to considering giving a shot. It’s nowhere as good as the main games, but of course it bloody isn’t. Most people will get this in a Deus Ex franchise bundle, and once you’ve played the bigger games this one is a fun little diversion. If you haven’t played the rest of the series, or take a dim view on deeply flawed games then obviously give this one a pass. But I personally have played much worse games, some of which I’ve even “reviewed”!

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Honestly I didn’t pay much for Warhammer: Chaosbane as it cost me 153 pennies thanks to a good deal. I’d bought it as a co-op game so that I’d be able to play it with my big buddy. Tragically his MIGHTY integrated graphics couldn’t handle the sheer indescribably adequate graphics of this beast of a game. As a consequence I played through it (all by myself ;-;) in 2 days. Altogether it took me 10ish hours before finishing up the campaign as the engineer class and reaching level 57. After blitzing through it, I can safely say that Warhammer: Chaosbane is definitely a video-game and is perfectly fine. It’s not great, it’s a bit monotonous, but seasoned Warhammer fans can rest assured that they’ll fight against all 4 of the Chaos Gods (well via their lackeys). You’ll even get to play a game with some mildly fun plot twists and decent enough characterisation of the setting. Unfortunately you don’t get to fight all 4 Gods and their servants simulatenously. To add insult to injury, the cannon-fodder you’re facing are both easy to deal with and pretty similar. You fight Nurgle beast-men, Khorne beast-men, Slannesh beast-men and Tzeentch beast-men and they’re all the same. Each God gets one or two gimmicks, one or two unique enemies (that die very quickly), some very slight roster tweaking and that’s it. You’ll kill the Nurgle baddies who have a damage over time de-buff, then fight the Khorne baddies who… uh… don’t. Then move onto the Slannesh baddies who don’t but uhm… sometimes give you a de-buff that means you take slightly more damage. Finally you’ll fight the Tzeentch bad guys, who do deal damage over time but THIS TIME in an area! Honestly it doesn’t change much. Then because your character gets more powerful faster than the baddies, each God gets easier to deal with. I only died once and that’s because my character got stuck. Like physically stuck in an area getting hammered by a semi-boss monster that is helpful repeated across all 4 Gods. It’s actually easy to defeat once you get access to your good abilities.

You see like any “good” ARPG, Warhammer: Chaosbane initially gives you a character that does feck-all for the few hours. Only as you level up you do you gain all of the stuff you need to play the game. The myriad abilities, upgrade points, more armour stats to compare in the inventory screen and so on. To the game’s credit, by the time you’re nearing the mid-game it’s all falling into place. You’ve got a pretty clear idea of what your build does, what abilities aren’t trash and what to focus on. To the game’s disservice, once you’ve reached that point it’s kinda over. Why? Well because you’re only going to become more and more overpowered to the point that the final boss fight took me 2 minutes. In fact I’d say that the main challenge of the campaign is the level pacing. As there is a lot of waddling through similar dungeons that aren’t particularly open, sometimes with backtracking thrown in (yay). In the first Act there are some timed missions to increase the stakes, but those steaks are then dropped on the restaurant floor and stomped on by the kitchen staff because the rest of the game is monotonous. Go here, clickclickclick on the baddies, move slightly forward, more clickclickclicking on the baddies, rinse and repeat for 10 hours. After you’ve semi-decently assembled your build , the only enemies that are occasionally concerning are the really big ones. They’re not even particularly strong, but they’re surrounded by really small enemies that act as bullet sponges. As stated the game has plenty of different builds across 6 characters. These 6 characters are only allowed 6 abilities at a time, with each ability having 3 tiers. These upgraded tiers are generally but not always better. As they sometimes deal different types of damage or trade a buff for more damage. That kind of thing. Ultimately by the twilight of Act 2 I was in the zone and nothing could hurt me because I had life-steal (well “life-gain on hit”) and could just clickclickclick my way through everything. Except the actual bosses which all have an invulnerability phase like the cowards they are. Fortunately you can easily defeat them by giving them a few seconds to take 5.

And at this point I don’t really have much to add. The game is now just about clicking on the bad guys and wandering through levels that only have 1 route. To be fair, sometimes there’s a side route! Which might lead to a chest, which could contain items, that are probably worse than the ones you have anyway. On that subject, unless I was blinded by the stupor that this game put me in you can’t sell items which is a novel change. Instead you can trade all the things you don’t want to the collectors guild. This levels up your collectors guild rank, which results in you occasionally receiving a passive perk. Much like the active perks you can only equip 6 (I think) passive perks at a time. These range from +10% health to +stackable buff when you make a boomboom and all that kind of stuff. They all sound lame but then they turn out to make your character freaking busted. It turns out +2.5% damage on every shot, stacking 10 times = +25% more damage basically all of the time. Then this boost means that you are essentially one hitting 98% of the bad guys. One other thing to mention about the perk system is that you have a set number of points. You do gain one or two per level up and these are then divvied out depending on your choices. For example you might always want the Tier 2 gun turret because it shoots rockets that make bosses a total joke. This tier 2 skill costs 10 skill points, and early on you might only have 20 skill points. Remember that these points are spent across all skill/perk slots. By the end of the game if you want everything maxed you need (potentially) 15*12 = 180 points. You probably won’t have 180 points by the late game, but fortunately the game has a SICK levelling system. You’ll hit Level 50 then hit level 0, panic, and then the game goes ahahahaahah no you’re on LEGENDARY level 0. You can therefore just keep grinding, if you are so inclined.

And uh other than that there are some side missions for you endure enjoy if you are the type of freak for whom mindlessly grinding is a fulfilling activity. These include a Boss Rush mode, where you fight bosses with some additional penalities applies to you or buffs applied to them, Relic Hunts which are the same thing but with whole levels (wow) and uh a Tower of Chaos mode where you fight your way through a tower where you can open a chest or keep going after every segment. If you open the chest, you get the loot. If you keep going the baddies get buffs but the chest gets better stuff in it. There’s also an “invasions” mode, but I honestly can’t remember what it’s meant to do as I lost interest. I’m assuming you just churn through the same content but with some arbitrary numbers changed so the ARPG addicts can brag about their items that no one else will ever care about. I think that’s about it, as mentioned the game does allow for online co-op with up to 3 of your big buddies so theoretically if you know 3 big fat greasy Warhammer nerds like me or 3 ARPG addicted losers (like you?) then you can have a great party game via either online or local co-op. The game also boasts that it has a great soundtrack but I couldn’t hear it over my character making things explode near endlessly, although the snippets I heard over “I CANT DO THAT YET” and BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG sounded fine enough. Similarly the graphics are good too (and there’s even a free 4K texture pack DLC). As for slowdown, I didn’t have any and only suffered 1 crash throughout my excursions (including one demon realm). In spite of there frequently being 50ish enemies on the screen getting exploded at once. Credit where credit is due, Warhammer: Chaosbane is an inoffensive game made by people who cared in a genre that’s for weirdos. Then again I can’t be too abrasive, as I paid for this game and finished it – obviously only because I care about my 0 readers so very very much.

In conclusion then Warhammer: Chaosbane is a game. More specifically it’s an ARPG that’s faithful enough to the Warhammer setting that provides up to 4 player co-op and can be classified as a OK experience. The graphics are decent, the plot has one or two mildly interesting twists and the slight spin on the “get a bunch of shit then sell it so you can not buy any of the vendor items because you’ll just find something better anyway” is a welcome change. The character builds? Yeah they’re fine too, as is the visual variety in the areas you fight across the game. The skills system? Yeah it’s a decent idea. There’s some stuff I didn’t bother mentioning like the fact that you can “bless items” with gems that drop or that there are legendary skill upgrade points but honestly this game is just clicking things and none of the extraneous faffing around the edges will ever change anyone’s mind about it. Altogether then Warhammer: Chaosbane is the boiled potato of the gaming world, nothing exciting but you would really have to go out of your way to be mad about it. Just a big, slightly under-seasoned but filling piece of content to distract you for a dozen hours. Alternatively you could watch like 6 good movies, but then again maybe you don’t care about Hollywood because they’re almost all tax cheats or child abusers. In which case Chaosbane will keep you mildly stimulated and perhaps even entertained!

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Quick Note: Both Nuka World and the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack automatically activate at level 30 and level 20 respectively, or they can be triggered manually by heading to the Nuka World transit centre and Quincy Quarry respectively.

Apologies to anyone reading this blog who is getting bored of Fallout 4 and/or Bethesda, but after taking a look at both Fallout 4 and half of the DLC’s available I thought it would be a good idea to just wrap up everything before moving on. As a consequence I’m going to take a look at the large Nuka World pack which consists of a whole new zone, multiple new enemy types, a bunch of new items and the interesting (at least in theory) ability to construct raider settlements and to take-over normal settlements. Alongside this hefty quasi-expansion, I’m also going to delve into the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack which gives you a modest quest chain and the ability to construct a bunch of new, shiny pre-war settlement items and even construct your own vault (kinda). Finally there’s the Wasteland Workshop Pack which lets you “recruit” most of the wildlife in the game, tame them (kinda) and even kidnap raiders, gunners and super-mutants so that you can force them to fight against each other, wildlife and possibly even your own settlers in arenas you’ve built. It’s an eclectic assortment to be sure, as while almost every other DLC has been about building up your settlements, the Nuka World expansion is essentially about enslaving them and making a heel turn from Wasteland saviour to Wasteland Wrecker. Before taking a closer look at what is without a doubt the most substantial piece of content left though, I’m going to take a quick peek at the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack which is broadly equivalent to the Automatron pack I took a look at last time.

For some bizarre reason, Bethesda seems to think you won’t be able to handle the sheer excitement of the Vault-Tec pack until you’re level 20 or have accidentally stumbled across Vault 88 by clearing out the Quincy Quarry, a highly radioactive raider camp located just south from Jamaica plain which is itself riddled with ghouls. I can only assume this is due to the Vault’s location, as the fights within it are relatively tame and largely optional for wrapping up most of the quest chain and by extension unlocking all of the lovely little workshop items you get. Another weird choice with this DLC is that you can gain 4 unique workshop items, but you can only build each of them once and after that you’re out of luck – so transporting your bespoke objects to another settlement isn’t possible. I’m not sure why Bethesda went through the effort of making the quest chain revolve around building and testing these unique items, only for the game to then go “ah well, that’s them done with” but I digress. What you do get in this pack is a new Workshop location which is contained within Vault 88 and is exceedingly large. At the start of the quest chain, you’ll need to fight through some raiders and feral ghouls to save the Overseer, before being tasked with two parallel objectives. The first is to activate the other 4 workbenches which are buried away within the labyrinthine complex, a task which requires you to find multiple MacGuffins control decks so that you can bring them all online – then clearing away the rubble so that each workbench is interconnected and therefore the settlement can be one continuous area. At the same time you also need to construct various test items within the vault, which includes fighting your way through a bunch of drugged up gunners at one point. Once you’ve built the four pre-requisite testing items and conducted some experiments on the exceptionally eager and slow of thought Clem (one of the new settlers), the DLC wraps up.

And I’m not trying to sell the Vault-Tec DLC short, as the new settlement options are genuinely pretty impressive and let you construct almost every aspect of a vault in any location with some nice use of the snap-fitting settlement system. Unfortunately outside of this and some new decorative items, alongside one or two useful settlement items (such as a barber chair and cosmetic surgery chair that let you adjust your character’s appearance without using the in-game console commands) there isn’t much here. The main quest is a breeze for those who actually took their time on the run-up to the recommended level, as you’ll have a settlement by then with a bunch of resources in it (I assume) and as such having one of the settlers create a supply route makes the whole thing a very short affair. As for the experiments, well they always follow the same basic pattern. You build something new, you connect it to a terminal, you choose 1 of 3 research parameters from the terminal, Clem gives some funny dialogue and you move on to building the next thing. The R&D notes describing each bit of research are mildly amusing thanks to Ted the inadvertent test control who basically isn’t doing any weird research at all, but the choices don’t seem to actually matter that much. Basically when you are testing a new item, these 3 different R&D parameters determine how that item will impact any settlers when they’re built, but generally the items aren’t hugely useful. You get a slot machine for some extra happiness, a power generating exercise bike and a soda stand. The slot machine is kinda useful for bumping up settlement happiness, but this mechanic generally isn’t an issue so long as settlements have food/water/turrets which you’re going to do anyway. Then the exercise bike is basically useless as it either generates less than a single generator or has a chance to explode. Finally the soda stand can be configured to make settlers less hungry, but once you’ve got one settlement producing food this resource takes care of itself and so any benefit is fairly marginal. With that all being said, there is a chance to cause the Overseer to get pissy and rage-quit if you always choose the “nice” option, and there’s a chance that the settlers will get sniffy if you choose the less ethical ones, but basically it doesn’t matter as both the Overseer and the settlers are inherently disposable. You do get a unique vault suit if you manage to not alienate the Overseer, but honestly who cares? It’s not a great piece of armour anyway. As for the other parts of the quest chain, well you shoot up some gunners and have to fight some radioactive fauna to clear out the entirety of the Vault including a Mirelurk Queen. Otherwise it’s a pretty short if modestly entertaining piece of DLC that is the definition of nice to have, but not essential.

Moving on from the Vault-Tec Workshop pack, I decided to grab the bull by the horns and actually play the main DLC that anyone cares about – namely Nuka World(!) Unlike the other two packs this one is an actual, honest-to-God entirely new area which features multiple quest chains and a generous amount of content. The crux of this DLC is that the official theme park of the ever so popular Nuka Cola beverage has been taken over by three competing raider gangs, and it’s up to you to either whip them into shape and become a new sort of Raider boss or just genocide all of those filthy drugged up scum. Obviously if you choose the latter option, you get a pretty exciting and longggg gun fight against myriad enemies before being able to explore the theme park and unlock some new Nuka Cola recipes. If everyone else who actually wants to get their money’s worth though, the DLC starts with you bumbling through a gauntlet of turrets and traps, before defeating the former Overboss of the theme park in a duel which results in you becoming the new overboss. Once you’ve been designated the king (or queen) of the raiders, you start a series of quests to clear out the rest of the park which has been left to rot and determine which raider faction (if any) you prefer. You see while the gangs are all “loyal” to you, they were also all “loyal” to the last Overboss and as a consequence this DLC is mainly about having a jolly good time shooting a bunch of stuff in the theme park and managing these three gangs so that they don’t betray you. The two goals are largely in-sync with each other, as once you’ve cleared up a section of the park from it’s hideously mutated wildlife and/or maliciously poor programmed robots you can assign it to one of the three factions. These factions being comprised of your standard “in it for the cash” raiders (the Operators) who are morally bankrupt and trying to make up for it with cold hard caps, the Darwinian survival of the fittest group called The Pack and finally the psychotic “murder and torture are fun” group called the Disciples. Each faction basically says “favour my guys or we’re gonna hate u” and so if you don’t divide the 5 areas semi-equally then they’re going to cause trouble for you. At least in theory…

You see no matter how you divvy up the zones one group is always going to rebel against you, because there are 5 parks and 3 groups so one group always gets the short end of the stick and will then retreat to the power plant to start shooting at you. You then go there and gun them all down, before getting some mediocre perks from the 2 gangs you didn’t alienate. The other main part of the DLC is that you’re able to setup raider camps, which are like normal settlements except edgier and require you to either shoot all of the existing monsters/inhabitants or pass charisma checks to “persuade” the human settlers to leave. Once this has been done your new totally different raider settlement will begin giving you some cash every now and then, but the amount you earn is pretty minimal and these camps require more setup time as you both need to liberate the settlement and bully nearby non-raider settlements into giving you food. You might be thinking that at least these guys would be good at defending themselves, but nope the raider camps only spawn basic raiders while the enemies are level scaled so they get rinsed half the time anyway. The only “benefit” is that they automatically recruit new members without requiring a radio beacon, but this also means that they tend to grow constantly unless there is a critical shortage of food/water/defence. To give Bethesda some credit, these new camps provide a lot of settlement customisation options and the passive income stream is nice, plus you will encounter various raiders, slavers and the like wandering around the map to a much larger extent than you normally see Minutemen patrols. Speaking of the Minutemen, if you setup one wafer thin camp then Preston Garvey will permanently hate you forever while still being immortal so he will wander around his designated settlement being pissy at you. You’ll also occasionally have to gun down the Minutemen who show up to defend a settlement, which is particularly funny when they decide to show up to defend a settlement held by another group of raiders. If for whatever reason you get bored of role-playing as the Overboss, then you’re free to make every raider hate you forever by shooting some of them at which point you basically get locked out of the rest of the raider content. Preston will still hate you even if you do this though, so if for whatever reason you’re a hardcore Garvey simp then you need to either reset his faction allegiance or use a mod. Or you can just leave him stranded in Concord forever, then recruit him once you’re done with all your raider business.

Nuka World is therefore a fun little diversion, albeit one that’s relatively short on new content. You’ve got a spin on the classic settlement formula but it really doesn’t change very much at all, and while the prospect of being the big bad raider boss is fun for roleplayers I suspect everyone else will find it pretty shallow. You don’t get much in the way of benefits from doing it, and while the 3 raider factions are a cool concept, all of them basically treat you as an errand boy and none of them really do anything – even once you’ve given them multiple areas of the park and raider camps in the commonwealth. The DLC does have a bunch of new enemy types, but once you’ve cleared through the various parks you’ve basically genocided almost all of them for good with the exception of some of the irradiated fauna such as the blood worms and tiny mutant ants. You can craft some new varieties of Nuka Cola, but these require old types of Nuka Cola and are fairly heavy for healing items. There are also some smaller side quests like collecting the rare caps to meet the founder of Nuka Cola, exploring a haunted house riddled with traps and helping a bunch of cultists liberate a UFO theme park ride, but most of these are fairly short and the rest of the extra content is largely a scavenger hunt (like collecting the medallions). While I still think Nuka World as a part of Fallout 4 hits the same standard as the base game, it isn’t as exciting or as interesting to explore as Far Harbour and the RPG mechanics are near non-existent. It’s only really worthwhile for those who are bored of exploring the repetitive quests from the main game or who want to roleplay as a dickhead. Alternatively you can also skip most of the raider quests by just genociding all of the raiders, which is the “good” ending and leads to a pretty intense couple of gun fights as you liberate the park. Beware that this will permanently lock you out of setting up raider camps and doing any other raider missions however.

Last and certainly least, there’s the Wasteland Workshop DLC which is filled with some cool ideas but utterly falls short at being of any interest to anyone. This pack is a smorgasbord of content that people probably wanted, but which couldn’t justifiably be included elsewhere. The big attractions are the cages which are used for catching wildlife & raiders, alongside the ability to create arenas and assign your captured animals and settlers to teams which will fight each other to the death. Alongside these additions there is a bunch of random stuff like a better power generator, a better water pump, some new traps, some new concrete construction materials, some decorations and a bunch of light-boxes which are mainly used as screenshot bait for constructing garish displays. Most of these are nice to have, such as powered doors, more lights, the ability to mount a death-claws head on a wall but none of it is really essential. Perhaps the biggest criticism that can be made of this DLC is the fact that it blends so easily into the base game that you can hardly notice what it added, as a new and slightly better water pump isn’t really enough to get your pulse racing. As a consequence I’ll just say that all the little things are good and move on to the two BIG features, namely the arena teams and the captured creatures.

First things first, the various creature cages are kind of a pain as most of them need specific types of animal meat that you probably don’t have. Mainly because storing meat in the workshop will cause your settlers to eat it, the lazy greedy bastards, and secondly because any meat you gathered you probably cooked for the easy XP and because it made it much more useful. As such you’ll need to stock up on various critter chunks such as Softshell Mirelurk meat, Mutant Hound meat, Yao Guai meat and so on. Then to prevent the wildlife from attacking you and/or your settlers, you need to construct a “Beta Wave Emitter” which requires you to have taken the Wasteland Whisperer perk (which itself requires a Charisma of 9). Then even once you’ve done all this the animals will still attack each other if for example you have a Death-claw and a Yao Guai in the same settlement. These ferocious animals do provide a defence boost, but they will also cause other animals from that species to attack your camp which is a pain in the ass to deal with. So if you want a pet death-claw, you now have to deal with frequent death-claw attacks on your settlers. The raiders, gunners and super mutants you can trap are also always permanently hostile so… yay? Fortunately you can assign all of them to the ARENA by building the two ARENA contestant structures and assigning them in the Workshop, while they try to attack you. Then as soon as they see anyone from the other ARENA team, they will start fighting them, which is a problem if you want to do a team battle. You can construct a bunch of stuff in the way to block the line of sight, but honestly it’s a lot of trouble to watch a bunch of NPCs attack each other, especially as cages take multiple days to catch anything and you must be away from the settlement for them to work. As such both the arena and the cages are cool ideas that don’t really work very well, because the captive creatures aren’t worth the trouble – it’s not like you get a companion animal out of it – and the arena requires a bunch of construction and planning for a brief and expensive diversion. So I’d give the Wasteland Workshop pack a big fat “they tried” out of 10.

In summary then, this batch of DLC features a bunch of content I can only recommend for people who really care about settlements. The Wasteland Workshop pack is solely dedicated to new things to build, while the Vault-Tec pack has a handful of bland quests and only really comes alive when you’re building stuff at settlements. Finally there’s the Nuka World pack which does add a bunch of content, but outside of exploring the new zone and killing a ton of new enemies, the quests are pretty basic and again a lot of the new mechanics revolve around… settlements! Perhaps unsurprisingly I consider Nuka World to be the best one here as it does provide plenty of new areas to explore and a handful of interesting combat encounters, but otherwise this batch is slim pickings. Obviously if you want to roleplay as a bad character then Nuka World is nearly essential, but for good characters you get one massive gun-fight against all of the raider gangs are a bunch of smaller gun-fights against all of the new Nuka World creatures. Which essentially means that if you spent a lot of time fiddling with settlements before doing the Nuka World questline you’ve got the awkward choice of either missing out on most of the Nuka World content or invalidating all of your previous hard work. Overall I’d say that Nuka World is worth a playthrough as the new areas are kinda cool, whilst the other two packs are largely inconsequential and can be safely ignored even if they are somewhat useful for those who are interested in the settlement building part of the game. Do with this knowledge, what you will

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Quick Note – Automation’s quest chain automatically activates once your character reaches level 15.

Following on from my earlier review of Fallout 4, I thought I’d get my full money’s worth and take a look at the DLC for the game as well. This time we’ll be taking a look at Automatron, Far Harbour and the Contraptions Workshop Pack with the remainder (Nuka World, the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack and the Wasteland Workshop Pack) coming next week. Starting things off in alphabetical order, the Automatron pack gets a dizzyingly high rating of “it’s alright” out of 10 from me, your humble truth-seeker and scribe. The reason I’ve chosen to bequeath the Automatron pack with such a rating is simple, it adds an alright quest chain with the occasional challenging fight and makes some tweaks to the larger game world which give the player some new enemies to fight and the ability to create and upgrade robots. This latter part is really the star of the show, with the quest chain basically serving as a way to justify how you’ve discovered the ability to make a robotic workbench and then make a variety of different robot types. Fans of Fo3 and F:NV who experimented with modding might think this sounds familiar and honestly it is, as the RobCo certified mods basically let you do this in both of those games. The main difference this time however is that Bethesda have expanded the concept, so you can not only make robot companions but you can also assign them to settlements and decide which parts they have (which gives you the ability to make some abominations). Basically once you’ve finished the relatively short quest line, you’re given the ability to create new robots for crafting materials and are then able to decide what head/arms/body/legs they have, with the system being broadly analogous to how Power Armour works. This is due to the fact that each arm and each leg are treated separately (unless you’ve chosen the hovering jet that Mr Handy’s have for legs) and each part not only has a variety of types, such as Robobrain treads or Protectron Legs, but also various suboptions which essentially act as armour and weapon upgrades. There are also some other effects such as the ability for your robot to give you a bonus to stealth or regeneration outside of combat, alongside some upgrades that are slightly overpowered but give that part a small chance (generally 2%) of breaking after use. You can build basically as many of these robots as you want, and they’re treated by the game as settlers for the purposes of your settlements (so yes, your Protectron can “choose” the humble farming life). Unfortunately they don’t work as shopkeepers because Fallout 4 is an inconsistent game at best, but everything else works.

And while that’s all admittedly pretty cool, the other additions from the pack aren’t particularly huge. As mentioned you get a modest quest chain which serves as your introduction and it brings everyone’s favourite Fallout 3 character, the Mechanist into Fallout 4. Unfortunately(?) the Antagoniser isn’t here to summon giant ants to aid you, so instead you’re tasked with saving a caravan of traders, which gives you an Assaultron companion and then begin hunting down the Mechanist. To do this you need to gun down some robots at the General Atomics factory, hunt down 3 robo-brains (not as easy as it sounds) across 3 separate locations, before finally assaulting the Mechanists layer. These locations and encounters are generally enjoyable, with most parts of the quest being pretty short but there are two large dungeons here which provide some unique items and can be challenging especially for those hovering near the level 15 mark. You also get to see a variety of new robot modifications, generally themed around unfinished robots that are missing their armour and are instead packing a variety of new melee weapons. Once you’ve finished up the main quest chain you’re able to keep your new companion and are rewarded with the Mechanist’s outfit & lair, alongside receiving all of the potential robot modifications that are available. You’ll probably have also looted the full suit of T60 power armour that a certain troublemaker drops, alongside their unique tesla gun that’s useful for clearing out mobs of enemies. Aside from this main quest the DLC also adds a new raider gang called the Rust Devils, who are basically a geekier version of the raiders who employ more robots, alongside an endless amount of radiant quests that involve tracking down the Mechanists remaining robots. That’s about it for the Automatron DLC, which I consider to be enjoyable thanks to it’s robot building abilities and decent main quest line. Sure there’s not a ton of content on offer, but it’s far from the worst of Bethesda’s offerings and the ability to turn Codsworth into a sentry bot is honestly worth the extra 500ish megabytes that the game demands from your Fallout 4 installation.

After finishing up Automatron I dove into Far Harbour, which actually took a surprising amount of time. This is because to unlock the initial quest for Far Harbour, you either need to hang around Nick Valentine’s detective agency after getting to a certain point in the main quest of Fallout 4, or just stumble across the quest organically. I thought I’d mix things up by trying to get it to trigger organically, but I can safely say that finding the Nakomi residence can be a real pain in the ass if you only have a foggy memory of where it is. To cut a long story short, it’s hidden away at the absolute uppermost North-Eastern corner of the map and isn’t marked on your local map until you’ve basically stumbled across it. As a consequence I ended up “wasting” an hour or two exploring every point of interest on the eastern coast before finally finding it. Once there you bumble around the house, picking up a few audiotapes before finally getting permission to take the family boat to Far Harbour. After your arrival to this entirely new island you get a quick bit of exposition basically confirming that there are three settlements, a normal-ish town, a synth sanctuary called Arcadia and then a Children of Atom cult base. The town and the cultists hate each other, while the synth’s are cut in the middle trying to be reasonable-ish. Unfortunately one of the faction’s is unintentional sitting on Thermonuclear missiles and as a consequence even if Far Harbour and the Cultists don’t just genocide each other the old fashioned way, there’s a pretty significant chance that once both realise there are nukes lying around it’s all going to end in tears. Much like in the base game’s main quest, in Far Harbour you get to determine which (if any) factions are going to emerge victorious from the inevitable final confrontation, which gives this DLC some replayability. As a bonus, the quests themselves are also pretty decent as far as the game goes, with Far Harbour allowing a good level of choice and some actual consequences for failing or succeeding speech checks outside of not getting more caps from quest givers. Alongside an unexpectedly strong narrative thread, this DLC also contains a decent amount of content because as previously mentioned it takes place on an entirely new island which features entirely new factions, quite a few new enemies, a bunch of new locations to explore and some new weapons/crafting recipes/random buildable objects for your settlements. It also gave my character a surprising amount of XP per quest and a significant amount of cash once I started working my way through the side quests. One of these is a particular stand-out as you end up playing detective for a bunch of rich people who’ve locked themselves away in a vault, and one of them has just been murdered. It’s not a particularly massive brain-teaser to figure out, as the game’s quest markers are embarrassingly adamant that you can’t make a mess of things, but it’s still an enjoyable diversion and I ended up with over 1100 bundles of pre-war money as compensation (worth about 3300+ caps depending on the vendor and your perk choices).

Far Harbour can then be considered an equivalent to Point Lookout in terms of DLC content, as while many enemies are re-used (including some random Super Mutants who are on the island because… reasons) there’s plenty of new content to play around with in a brand new setting. It’s not going to turn the world on fire, but I did find the new wildlife to be challenging to deal with on occasion and I also have to confess that the new fog effects looked great and helped lend the island a sense of foreboding and menace. When combined with the island’s rather liberal approach to dosing you in rads, it’s fair to say that Far Harbour is not for the player who is faint of heart (I almost shit on multiple occasions due to massive beasts dropping from trees and bursting out of lakes) or playing on the lower levels. As for how our hero’s saga ends, well it is entirely up to you. What I can say is that there are multiple options to decide how things will end, each of which will have significant ramifications and none of which offer an entirely clean ending. At best you’ll have to get your hands dirty to enforce a level of peace and at worst you’ll be genociding at least one of the three factions. One of the better aspects of this ultimate choice is the fact that doing the side quests (and even progressing along in the main quest chain for the base game) will influence which options are available and whether or not you’re able to pull them off. It also offers some a modicum of roleplaying opportunity, as your character can become a devoted member of the Church of Atom, a mercenary or a peacemaker with each run being fairly different. It’s therefore a strong entry and while not much of an RPG compared to normal games in the genre, it’s still a leap forward for Fallout 4. Last but not least I’ll just mention that you can find a unique-ish suit of power armour and can gain access to a handful of new workbenches, for creating some new settlements. With all that being said, let’s move onto the final piece of DLC I’ll be looking at this week…

…The contraptions workshop of course! As one of the Workshop packs it’s fairly light in content, due to the lack of quests, new areas or new enemy types. Instead it solely focuses on adding new content to settlements that you can fanny around with, in this case a couple pieces of decorative junk and the ability to create production lines inside a settlement which let you turn junk into (almost) anything. The way it works is simple on paper but can be tricky in practice. Basically there are multiple types of conveyor belts, production devices and storage containers which all can be connected to each other and once they’re powered up, you just need to connect a terminal and then the system will largely begin to operate as intended. To give an example, you can build an ammo forge which will create most ammo types from raw materials, such as x10 .45 bullets from x1 fertilizer and x2 steel. You can just drop these in manually, but the intention here is that you’ll produce a hopper (for dropping items), a sorting conveyor belt (to push out those not containing the required materials) and then connect these three things together with conveyor belts. Once setup there is a certain degree of catharsis from watching everything flow by and begin the process of getting turned into the ammo type you’ve selected, but of course things can get more complicated from there. Why just have the bullets flow off the production line and onto the ground when they could go into a storage device that connects to the end of the conveyor belt, for example? Or maybe you’d rather have a tripwire that automatically starts and ends production once you trigger it. Then of course you’ve got the prospect of building machines that can produce anything, but each type of good has it’s own machine. You’ve got a food processor, gun forge, ammo (and energy ammo) forges, an armour forge and so on. Now you could have each one operate independently, but you can also string a bunch together into a fully conjoined production line for maximum factory shenanigans. To be entirely honest aside from ammo, explosives and maybe food this whole DLC is more giving you an excuse to faff around like this more than it is actually providing anything of particular use. Sure you can configure a production line to produce junk items that have a vendor value higher than the cost of their components, but this seems like an extremely convoluted way of earning a bit of extra money in a game with procedurally generated quests.

But before you begin trying to recreate Factorio in Fallout 4, there are a few caveats to bear in mind. Firstly and perhaps most annoyingly, as production objects are controlled by a single terminal you can’t have a singular production line produce multiple types of ammo at once. Instead you’ll need to assemble multiple production lines, as otherwise all connected production forges will produce the same thing. This also applies to the other types such as the food processor and weapon forge. Secondly you’ll be restricted by perk choices from choosing certain outputs, which won’t even show as being potentially available but locked off. For example if you don’t have Gun Nut rank 4, you won’t see .50 calibre rounds as an option from an ammo forge (as you can see from my screenshot above). Thirdly you’ll need to basically dump each material into either a hopper or a container connected to a vacuum belt for the production process to start, so it’s not entirely automatic. Fourthly when setting up the conveyor belt sorters, they only accept the raw material for determining which items to sort – so if you don’t have Steel but instead have an object that’s solely compromised of Steel, then that won’t work. Fifthly and finally, all of these machines require power and a decent amount of space. Plus they only go in a preset direction, so there will be some fiddling to do before everything works right. Now none of these problems are insurmountable, but it essentially means that this DLC is either a brief but amusing gimmick or will require a significant time investment. As for the rest of this DLC, well it’s pretty light on things you might find useful. It does add elevators, a fireworks launcher, logic gates which utilise power flow in different ways and some new ways of displaying items (cases, gun racks and mannequins that can wear any armour) alongside the ability to send settlers to the Pillory stocks and two new traps and some signage. That’s about it though, so this DLC isn’t particularly big and if you don’t care about the new forges and conveyor belts then you’ll probably not care about it at all!

So after diving through three of the Fallout 4 DLC packs at dizzying, breakneck speed I can safely say that they’re all good to have but I’d recommend them to various degrees. Frankly the contraptions DLC is entirely optional and is basically a waste of time unless you’re really into the prospect of watching a production line whizz by. On the other side of the spectrum is Far Harbour, which I consider to be basically essential for anyone who enjoyed Fallout 4 as it’s both a well balanced quest chain with plenty of player agency and an enjoyable additional dollop of content with multiple unique enemy types and new areas to explore. Then sitting pretty in the middle is Automatron, which is great if you want to have an Assaultron or upgraded Codsworth as a companion, but is otherwise just kind of OK otherwise. Sure the additional quests in Automatron are enjoyable enough, but it’s a fairly short (if occasionally challenging) piece of content that I would otherwise only consider essential for The Mechanist fans or those who are easily excited by the prospect of building your own Protectron settlers. For everyone else Far Harbour is the clear winner and the best DLC of the bunch (Spoilers: including next week’s lot), while contraptions is basically a cute little time sink that’s barely worth paying for. Therefore Far Harbour > Automatron > Contraptions Workshop.

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Quick Note – These days you can still buy the Fallout 4 base game, but honestly the GOTY edition is the version you should get the base game is a noob trap. Sure the base game goes on sale for slightly cheaper, but if you decide to grab the DLC (which I’ve reviewed here) then you’re going to need to re-buy the GOTY edition anyway.

Fallout 4 (Fo4) is a game that’s garnered a mixed reception in the years following it’s launch, and honestly it deserves it. While the game is a massive leap forward compared to Fallout 3 and even Fallout: New Vegas in many ways, it’s barely an RPG in any meaningful sense of the word. Sure it has some of the trappings of it’s predecessors, with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system returning, the option of fighting through or talking through many quests and the return of the “choose your favourite faction” ending but these all come with significant caveats. Firstly while the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system (which forces players to build a character via putting points into Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) is back as ever, it isn’t accompanied by skill points at all. For those who haven’t played a previous Fallout game, this might not sound like a big deal but believe me, it is. You see the S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats were designed to form the skeleton of your character and as such influenced how you would play by giving you an early bonus to certain skills, while making you weaker at others. For example if you put a bunch of points into Strength you would be a powerful melee character, or if you put a lot of points into Charisma you could be a silver tongued deliver that would be able to persuade your enemies to give peace a chance or just extort those damsels in distress for extra quest rewards. This would then give you a natural gameplay focus, with various perks and occasionally quest outcomes being dependent on having the “right” kind of character. While it is true that towards the late game you could still put a bunch of points into say, gun-fighting while playing as a character with the grace and dexterity of a blundering imbecile, you would be constrained by the level cap from being an expert at everything and thus would be putting yourself at a disadvantage. In Fallout 4 however these skills are all gone, so everything is determined by your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats, which means that instead of managing 13 skills + 7 stats you’re now managing… 7 stats. To somewhat mitigate this simplification of your ability to influence your character throughout the course of the game, you now get a perk after every level and these perks only require you to have a perquisite amount of the corresponding stat. In less pretentious terms, if you want to shoot the bad men betterer you don’t need to worry about distributing points between the various weapon skills (Guns, Energy Weapons, Big Guns), only having enough agility/perception to unlock the +20% more shoot gun perk. Similarly lock-picking and hacking are now just perks under the Agility and Science skills respectively, instead of being their own skills. Speech? Entirely handled by the Charisma stat. Bartering? Just a perk. Unarmed and Melee weapons? Both just +% damage perks. You get the idea. Now to be somewhat charitable to the perk system, it does give each perk multiple levels (e.g. +20% bang gun shoot, then +40%, then +60%, then +80% & ignore 15 bad man armour points etc) and many of the perks from the previous games are nestled within it as well. So there’s still a smidgin of depth to the system but… once combined with the other tweaks you’ll see why Fallout 4 didn’t win RPG of the year.

You see Todd’s brutal snub by Geoff “Dorito Pope” Keighley wasn’t just over this modest change, nor indeed because Fallout 4 is a bad game. It’s actually kind of fun in a mindless sort of way, much like Skyrim which I also reviewed and thought was a bad RPG but a fun little game. In fact I even mentioned that I spent the first 30 hours of the game immediately after buying it on release (supposedly with a friend but he bitched out at the ABSOLUTE last minute) having a great time. Then the trance wore off and I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell I’d been playing it for two days straight, or why I’d bought the PS4 version like the gigantic philistine I am. The thing with Fallout 4 is that despite it’s slow start, it goes start to sink it’s claws into you and won’t let go until you start to realise that every single quest is basically the same and none of your choices matter and you don’t need any more loot because your build is already great and blah blah blah. Even writing this review I found myself weirdly engrossed by the game, 7 years later and while on my 4th playthrough because it nails the “just one more thing” feeling in a way I haven’t experienced since Civilization 4. So why did I start this mutually assured waste of time review by putting the boot in? Well for the simple reason that Fallout 4 is a fun game until you start thinking about it or trying to treat it as an actual RPG. Which is a deal breaker for some, but considering how many people earnestly tell me that [INSERT POPULAR GAME YOU LIKE HERE] is good I can’t help but imagine the sentient gamer is a rare and oft-bullied minority.

So the removal of the skills system aside, what makes Fallout 4 such a lousy RPG? Well the first significant issue is the fact that the guys at Bethesda thought it would be super cool to have a voiced protagonist for the first time in the history of the series. This of course means that you get to be IMMERSED, but unfortunately your character never really says that much and I don’t think it was really worth it. Of greater concern is the fact that by having your character be voiced, each line of dialogue cost money and as such Bethesda dumbed down the dialogue system by having you only be able to respond in 4 ways to each situation. To be fair other RPG’s such as the excellent of slightly janky Alpha Protocol – Coincidently also by Obsidian FYI – handled this limitation without any difficulty, BUT Bethesda totally made a hash of it by having each option always fit the same pattern. By which I mean, someone says something to you and every single time your options are as follows: Pwecious widdle carebear, Dickhead, Question, Neutral-ish response. Then to compound the cock-up even further the question option often doesn’t advance the dialogue at all, so you only really get three options which are Yes <3, Yes and Go Fuck Yourself. To give you an idea of how this works in gameplay, some loser will cry about something and offer you a quest to rescue their waifu body-pillow from a raider camp – to which you can agree nicely, agree normally, ask who their waifu is and tell them to get a life (declining the quest). That’s the extent of the role-playing across the ENTIRE game. Even the speech options fit into this pattern, with certain options occasionally being coloured from yellow to red (corresponding to difficulty) and offering you a bonus if you succeed or a less optimal outcome if you fail. Asking for more money (hitherto controlled by the barter skill)? Well that’s the neutral yes option but now it’s a different colour. Intimidating someone (hitherto dependent on either your Strength, Faction Rank, Weapon Skill, Perks etc)? That’s now the dickhead option but a different colour. So you’ve got less character differentiation thanks to the loss of the skills system and a considerably reduced pool of options in every single conversation within the game. Then to really give those bespecactled RPG loving nerds one last slap in the face, most of the quests are basically the same. You know how in Skyrim it felt like every quest basically boiled down to kill these bandits/viking zombies/dragons? Well in Fallout 4 every quest is basically “go to this ruined building and shoot all the bad men/radiation zombies/angry shreks within it”. Sometimes you also need to pick something up, which will basically always be held by the boss bandit raider/zombie ghoul/shrek super mutant.

Alright so Fallout 4 is a shit RPG and even if it has the same “choose a faction” approach to the main quest as F:NV did (whether it’s a homage or the equivalent of copying the smart kid’s test answers I’ll leave up to you dear reader) it manages to make a mess of it too. You see in F:NV the factions offered a real choice between Deus Ex Machina Howard Hughes, less cool America, the blatantly unfinished faction and the cop-out “oopsie woopsie you failed all the other quests” faction which all had various competing quest lines that gradually drew you into a big final showdown involving basically every faction (including the little subfactions) in the game. It did this by having each major player offer you competing quests throughout the main story, while also offering you the ability to swap the various sub-factions towards one big power or another. Towards the end of the game you’d inevitably have picked a side as a consequence of all your other choices and all that would remain was to make one last throw of the dice and determine the ultimate fate of New Vegas and the Mojave once and for all (Chris Avellone’s “well fuck you none of it ACTUALLY mattered ahahaha tunneller (snakes) rule” notwithstanding). Fallout 4 on the other hand tries to emulate this but uh… none of the factions are ever in competition with each other? Like sure in F:NV you could do a NCR quest and then a Legion quest, but you’d be earning and losing reputation with both factions and once you started hitting the point where each faction had competing objectives things got messy. In Fo4 though all the RPG elements have been stripped back though so there’s no reputation system or morality system (the latter of which was Fo3’s attempt at having quest outcomes matter, mainly by having one of two random groups of infinitely respawning retards keep trying to kill you for no real reason) to worry about. The quests don’t even interfere with each other either, so you can help faction A rescue synths then return to faction B to enslave some synths then hit up faction C to genocide some nerds from faction B and none of it really matters. That is until you’re 90% of the way through the plot at which point the game goes “Yo what’s up? It’s time to pick a faction for the ultimate victory” and then you wipe out at least two of the other factions. Even if you’re really high-up in the ranks of them and probably could have overseen a more diplomatic solution if the game wasn’t for mouthbreathers if your character had been so inclined.

At this point you’re probably wondering how after all this I can still say that I enjoyed Fo4, and for good reason. The answer is simple though, and it’s that Bethesda half-assed the RPG elements of the game specifically because they were confident in the rest of the game. Well OK not really, but still the rest of the game is actually enjoyable in it’s own way – hence why I described it as mindless fun earlier. For all of the effort that Bethesda didn’t put into making a good RPG, I’d say an equal portion went into making a good “wander around while looting and shooting” game. One of the first things anyone playing Fo4 will notice, assuming they’ve played either Fo3 or F:NV of course, is that the combat has been significantly improved. Not only is the gun-play more enjoyable, but we’ve now got baked in weapon mods (in a more extensive fashion than in F:NV by the way), alongside the ability to bash enemies at close range with your gun. Enemies have less of the bullet-sponge effect, especially in contrast with Fo3 while there are also some enhancements to their behaviour including the ability for them to take cover and for certain enemies types to burst out of the ground/terrain or charge you while leaping over cover. In addition many enemy bases populated by human enemies have traps littered around to keep you on your toes, including tripwires and mines. While this latter feature was also in F:NV and Fo3, I’d argue that Fo4 makes particularly good use of it. Then there’s a subtle but significant tweak to VATS, in that no longer pauses the game and in most cases won’t be enough to save you from getting rushed by a melee enemy making the whole thing feel more tense. There’s also a little tweak to the radiation system too, which previously gave you an ever increasing debuff as you got more irradiated but now radiation covers up an ever increasing portion of your health bar in red – effectively reducing your max health more and more until you chug a radaway or go pay a doctor. Finally the game has added a survival mode (just like Skyrim’s but without that CUNTING warmth system) and significantly reworked how Power Armour… works. In both Fo3 and F:NV you had to get specialised training, after completing some specific quests, which then gave your character the ability to equip power armour which was just an improved version of regular armour. In Fo4 by contrast, power armour is an additional layer that enables you to stomp around in your armoured treads and feels like a significant upgrade. Not only can you wear your existing armour underneath it, but each piece also has it’s own independent health bar and can be upgraded just like the other weapons and armour in the game. It also makes you immune to fall damage! Alas there are two draw backs to using it, namely the fact that your power armour has a fuel bar (represented by fusion cores which are relatively uncommon items scattered across the world) and you can’t use certain terminals or crafting stations while in it. The latter is a seemingly minor drawback, but needing to exit your armour, then probably get told you’re now over-encumbered (because power armour increases your carrying capacity a fair amount), then do whatever you needed to do and get back in the power armour happens just enough that it’s a noticeable drawback. There’s even a mod solely designed to bypass this limitation.

Alongside revisions to combat and making the game much more visually impressive (that laughably bad combat armour notwithstanding), Bethesda also nailed the settlement building aspect of the game. Now fans of the previous games who enjoyed the settlement building mods will know roughly what to expect, but Fo4 takes it to a new level by making it part of the base game and by giving it an actual reason for players to engage with it outside of it being enjoyable. Before I get ahead of myself I’ll just be clear, yes you can build multiple settlements and yes the whole process is both intuitive and comprehensive with a snap-fit mechanism for designing structures alongside myriad little props and dohickeys to scatter around your base. These include everything from stores, crafting stations, entire structures, bespoke structures made out of various parts, fences, gates, terminals, lights, defensive turrets and so on and so forth. Basically everything you would really want is included in the base game, and then if you bought the GOTY edition then the game also lets you build and customise robots, tame various animals, setup arena fights to the death and build a bunch of shiny pre-war stuff that isn’t all wrecked. Of course your base wouldn’t be a base without useless NPC spongers citizens/lackeys and as such you’ll need to setup a recruitment broadcasting tower, then make sure your settlement can fulfill all the needs of it’s inhabitants. Oh yes, you heard me right. These settlements aren’t entirely trouble-free and as such you need to make sure you’ve got enough beds, water, food, defence (a combination of turrets, traps and guard posts) and power to keep all the cool stuff working. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do as you can always see how much of every resource your settlement is producing and if there’s a shortage of any specific resource it’s indicated by that resource being highlighted in red when you’re in building mode. Of course you’ll inevitably start building a bunch of stuff you don’t need, like decorations, doors (that the little shits ALWAYS leave open), containers that dynamically show their contents (like display cases, mannequins and magazine racks) and so on. Don’t get too comfortable though, as once your settlement starts growing it’ll inevitably start attracting the attention of raiders/ghouls/mutants who will occasionally attack it and then you’ll need to come back and defend it. This can get a touch overwhelming in the latter stages of the game as you can build dozens of settlements (albeit only in designated spots) and so you might defend from an attack at Boaby Stencher’s Farm only to need to rush to Spunk Garglers Ranch as it’s now under attack too. On the plus side you can share resources between these settlements (once you’ve unlocked the pre-requisite perk), so generally once you’ve stockpiled enough building materials and food/water in one place you’re settle to tinker away to your hearts content in the rest.

Which neatly ties into the other big change in the gameplay that this settlement system has brought about, namely the fact that every random item in the game which was hitherto junk now has a purpose. Previously you’d ignore all of the tin cans, empty bottles, plates, coffee cups and so on because they just didn’t have enough monetary value to justify grabbing them all and taking them back to a vendor. Now however each item is made up of between 1 and 3 components, which are available for use once they’ve been scrapped at your settlement workbench. What this means in practical terms is that if you want to get that weapon/armour mod, or build that thing you’ll now need the corresponding resources. So you’ll be grabbing a bunch of random junk constantly throughout your travels because there are decent odds that when you inevitably return to your base (because it has a machine that cures your radiation poisoning for example) you’ll be short 3 gears of building that missile turret that you need to increase your defence because you got 2 more settlers to join while you were away who both needed beds and food which mean that you’re now a more tempting target for raiders. In this way the gameplay systems all eventually orbit around the settlement mechanic, as once you start building it’s hard to stop and then you’re constantly sallying forth to get just more X or do one more quest to level up so you can get Rank 3 of the make gun gooder perk and… You’re trapped! Todd and his gang have you ensnared in a fiendish gameplay loop where you’re constantly creating and setting little goals for yourself which keep you coming back for more even though it’s 3am and you could’ve sworn you had a life outside of playing videogames. Oh and also the act of looting things from containers and corpses no longer requires you to jump into that little barter menu, instead a miniaturised version of the contents appears and you can grab or ignore everything quickly and easily. It’s a small change but considering how often you’re grabbing random junk (or weapons/armour to feed your buying random junk habit) it’s a really appreciated one.

To summarise then Fallout 4 is simultaneously a big step forward and a giant leap backwards, ultimately culminating in a game that I can recommend but only to those of you who can safely switch off your brains. If you start asking questions about various elements of the plot (such as why one of the factions keeps making super mutants for no good reason) then you’re going to find yourself frustrated by a RPG that totally fails at being an RPG. Instead you need to approach Fo4 as a serviceable FPS game that revolves around building up your own little town(s) and lets you customise them extensively, making up your own little story as you go. While there are some decent quests sprinkled throughout the game, most of them just boil down to “go to X, shoot Y, go back to quest giver Z” and so it’s not a game about quests or narrative but instead blundering through a large hand-crafted world, grabbing better equipment, daydreaming about your next perk choice and then going back to base to build some crap no one but you will ever care about. As such Fallout 4 gets a recommendation from me, as someone who spent plenty of their childhood dicking around with model kits (shout-out Airfix) and city builder games the ability to build settlements in a FPS game is something I found weirdly entertaining. For those who don’t care about this aspect of the game however, Fo4 provides either an alright time exploring and shooting baddies in a Retro Futuristic slice of 50’s Americana, or a total train-wreck of an RPG experience. My earnest advice would therefore be to only care about the game if you are the type of weirdo who wants a FPS/City builder hybrid. Fortunately I am so I’m having a good time and those chumps at Interplay can SUCK IT.

The post Fallout 4 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Diablo 2 is one of the most popular and influential PC games of all time, and over the years has garnered a massive fanbase across the globe. As not only one of Blizzard’s most popular games during it’s golden age, but also as a frequent addition to the myriad “greatest PC games of all time” lists I’d also felt like I was really missing out by not playing it. Now for a quick bit of context, I only really started caring about the PC during the 6th console generation and while I did plenty of older games I tended to stick with RTS games and some shooters. As such while I did buy Diablo 2 around 2005ish, I never really got into it and dropped it at the end of Act 1 in favour of playing more Red Alert 2 / World of Warcraft / Simcity 3000. Now that close to two decades have passed, I’ve finally gone back and played through the entirety of Diablo 2 after having played a couple of other ARPGs such as Torchlight 1 & 2, Titan Quest, W40K Inquisitor and even Diablo 3.

And boy oh boy do I not get it at all! That’s not to say it’s a bad game, but honestly the whole experience could be described as a graphically impressive treadmill. Maybe it’s due to the fact that I picked the Necromancer class and focused on my summon abilities, due to the fact that I thought it was pretty cool having a bunch of disposable goons in front of me. Maybe it’s the fact that I played a bunch of other successor games first, and so the novelty of Diablo 2 wasn’t there. Or maybe it’s just a case that I don’t see who this genre is for or why people bother with them. To give some context, once I hit around level 10 or so every fight played out exactly the same. My skeletons and golem would rush in, my mercenary rogue and skeleton mages would hang back, and I wander around occasionally resurrecting my minions or engaging in combat myself to expedite everything. This was every encounter for around 15 hours once I’d got my cool spells (prior to this I didn’t have a golem sadly). Now I can only assume people will point out “Hey LOSER, you can just play another class or build!!!” but that seems to be a solution that sounds great on paper but doesn’t actually achieve anything. I can say this with confidence because I initially played this game all those years ago as a… Paladin and it was really boring. Then while playing my Necromancer I switched between melee and ranged builds, then dabbled with the other spells and really the whole felt identical. I was wandering around like a big spooky simpleton, getting rushed by the same mobs and clicking on them ASAP before they made my health bar go down. Sure I could emulate President Trump and build a BIG BEAUTIFUL (bone) WALL to keep them at bay, or I could use an Iron Golem instead of a Flesh Golem but it really didn’t change the overall dynamics of the game at all. You’re just some feckless murder-hobo being pushed from big open plain to small dungeon to big open plain for about 20ish hours.

Fortunately the developers at Blizzard came up with an ingenious system by which losers gamers would be kept endlessly amused by this entertainment juggernaut. That solution? You can pick up items, that give you some bonuses to some stats that make you better at clicking on things! I guess the name for their MMO originated from players yelling “WOW!!!” at the prospect of fighting the same enemies in the same places over and over and over and over so they could have another Crossbow but this time with BIGGER NUMBERS. You probably think I’m probably being facetious (and I am) but honestly the max level is 100 and you can beat the game before you’re level 30. So why the hell would you spend the incredibly large amount of time grinding up that main number so that you can then grind for the other items that contribute to the little numbers? This is what I mean when I start my review with “I don’t get it”. It’s not that the combat is bad, as it’s fine and honestly the enemy variety is pretty decent for an RPG. There are cases where enemies are reskins, but it’s not a big issue and most enemies fit into a clear archetype that when combined results in some fun target prioritisation. But unlike say… Serious Sam which does the same thing in a frantic FPS environment where you are dealing with dozens and sometimes hundreds at a time, Diablo 2 is only giving you at most a room full of guys to deal with (around 20). Otherwise you’d just get melted by everyone punching you at the same time. Instead of having progressively higher stakes and needing to learn movement mechanics like in a good FPS game, you instead get a big ass unnecessary grind for you to brag about on the online servers (and/or forums). It’s baffling to me that this is not only one of the exemplars of Blizzard’s existence, but that this grinding simulator is held up as the pinnacle that inspired an entire genre of successors. Who the hell wants to do the Act 2 boss fight 50 times in a row so that they can maybe get the Ultimate Halberd of King Knut (+30 life +30 energy +1cm penis size +2 Dexterity +15% chance to cast bear mace (Level 3) on hit) so that they can then have a powerful build for when they replay the same game but at a higher difficulty level? Why do these people exist???

Of course I’m not being entirely fair, as there are a few points in the game where the gameplay changes. Don’t worry, there’s not a mandatory stealth section or anything. Instead when you have to face Bosses, you’ll quickly realise that they have a shitload generously large amount of health and deal a fucking retarded significant amount of damage. This changes the game a lot, because you lose a lot of gold (It’s your current level as a percentage of the gold you had) when you die and indeed when you die you need to find your corpse (to loot so that you can regain your EPIC gear), which in this case will be right next to the boss that just kicked your ass. Act 1 doesn’t really have a boss, but the final quests in Acts 2, 3 and 4 involve dealing with a very large demon that makes every other enemy in the game look like a pussy. In fact most of these bosses could shred through my big health golem very, very quickly and my other summons (and mercenary) even quicker! This obviously presented an issue, as even with my more powerful spells and abilities I was in trouble. Fortunately I devised an expert strategy that almost never failed, which was to bring a lot of potions… and use the shared section of my stash so I didn’t lose any gold when I died… and just teleport away when near death to regain health for free. So in a sense, they were kinda broken in terms of balancing and I was super broken. I did feel kinda bad, because it seemed like the heroic thing to do would be to rush in like a crusader of yore and batter them into submission, but even my fancy golden crossbow did bugger all damage to them and missed like a third of it’s shots. So each boss fight became a battle of attrition between my character and how many mana potions I could fit on my belt to keep spawning golems so that I could shoot more crossbow bolts that basically just tickled the bosses. I also tried melee and died really quickly. Plus I did try using spells, which did more damage (yay!) but meant that I burned through way more mana and so it was much harder to keep golem meat-shields around. I’m sure there’s some build that makes the bosses a cakewalk, but after double checking how to deal with the Act 2 boss without being a little cheating bitch I found out that my build was actually considered one of the best ones. Go figure.

On the subject of mercenaries, these are NPCs you can recruit that function as companions and followers. Unlike in many fully fledged RPG’s they have no dialogue (well, they say thanks you give them items) and don’t impact the plot at all, but they’re still useful to have. In my case I kept my starting rogue, as these mercenaries level up and have a variety of abilities they use automatically. They can also equip a weapon, a helmet and armour that you give them but not the other item slots such as rings, boots, gloves. On the flip side they don’t need ammo which is great, but when they die you need to pay to resurrect them. Which would be fine, if they weren’t suicidal when dealing with bosses. You see the companion AI is about the same as the minion AI which is the same as the enemy’s AI which is on the level of charging the nearest hostile and being dumbfounded by chasms. Due to this, I’d say keeping my emo rogue alive constituted almost the entirety of my gold expenditure throughout the game as death was free, shop items sucked and so many potions and teleport scrolls were dropped by the baddies that I never had to buy them. Even this source of expenditure was fairly low, except for the final boss when my occasional death to Diablo’s basically one-hit kill death-beam would cause them to kill themselves in solidarity. So even after abusing the stash gold loophole, I still had to pay some money to bring them back. Which would’ve been fine, if they had been able to avoid Diablo’s attacks, which they couldn’t, so they often died really, really quickly.

But all my negativity aside there are some aspects of Diablo 2 which are actually pretty impressive. First of all having the entire game be playable with friends (or randoms) is cool. No doubt about it, if you couldn’t afford an MMO then this was an interesting way to interact with people and I can say that even when I last played the game close to a decade after release it was still popular. Plus as mentioned there is plenty of enemy variety, you’ve got multiple classes with different builds and the challenge of grinding out the harder difficulties. Why you’d bother is a question I can’t answer, but if you enjoyed the game for whatever reason then hey you can play it with other weirdos online and there’s a ton of (repetitive) content to explore! Perhaps more noteworthy for me as someone who wasted around 20 hours of their fleeting, worthless existence on this game due to the peer pressure of strangers, I will admit that the art style is pretty good. There’s plenty of variety between the zones of each Act, with the general look and feel of each area being handled well. It’s a good looking game and the remaster does a solid job of bringing it up to modern standards, without losing any of the appeal. Even the font and UI have been chosen with care and the whole game successfully captures the feel of a Gothic low-fantasy world. The music is also a good accompaniment to the game, although I have to confess that it loops like a motherfucker because there aren’t really many tracks here. The ones that are there are good, but I’d personally say they kinda peak in Act 1. Last but certainly not least, the cinematics show that Blizzard really know what they’re doing in this department and as ever they’re great. Not only they are visually impressive, but they’re a good way of providing context to the events in the game’s world and are a good way of breaking up each Act. In fact I’d say they provide a better reward than the loot on offer, but I’m probably just biased because my class couldn’t use half the late(r) game equipment due to not having enough Strength.

In conclusion then Diablo 2 is a game I really don’t understand. It’s a perfectly serviceable ARPG for those who are desperately seeking more carpal tunnel syndrome in their lives, but for the typical player I don’t see the appeal. It’s a game that looks great and has a striking art-style, with well made accompanying music and plenty of content for you to grind through if that’s your bag. For those seeking a good story, that’s not here. For those seeking a varied and engaging combat experience, I don’t think that’s here either. Instead it’s an RPG for that subjection of RPG gamers who only wants to make the numbers go up. The plot is minimal, there are no choices, there isn’t even much of an ending, but there are numbers. By the light, are there numbers. So for those who love grinding, or are seeking a co-op game at short notice then by all means give Diablo 2 a go. But for me, it’s just the cause of one big inescapable question – Who are these games for???

The post Diablo 2: Resurrected appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Before delving into what makes Fire Emblem 7 such an enjoyable game, I’m just going to mention two things that may be deal-breakers for the uninitiated or even those who are looking to play this game after experiencing some of the newer games in the series. Firstly much like the newer games, Fire Emblem 7 has a decent amount of RNG or Random Number Generation involved, as every attack will have a chance of missing and a chance of inflicting a critical hit. Even if a lot of enemies won’t have a chance to inflict one of these crits (which are worth x3 the normal amount of damage inflicted), the bosses and certain enemies definitely will. Plus there’s always a chance that your guy will whiff their blow, leading to you either taking more damage than expected or possibly dying. So far so XCOM, but then much like XCOM Fire Emblem 7 throws another spanner into the works by making it so that the death of any character aside from your trio of plot-critical lords is a permanent death. As such your options are either to play through the game with the spectre of perma death always looming over (almost) every single character, or you can take the slightly more cowardly route by resetting the game every single time a character dies – which of course means that you’ll need to play through the level from the very beginning. No matter how you slice it Fire Emblem 7 can be a brutal game, and while I don’t condone it I can understand why both Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to make the permadeath optional in later games.

With that out of the way, Fire Emblem 7 is one of my favourite games for the MIGHTY Gameboy Advance (GBA) and a fantastic game that I think anyone with some patience will be able to enjoy. It’s a Turn Based Strategy (TBS) game that borrows heavily from RolePlaying Games’s and as such can also be considered as a Strategy RPG (SRPG), with both the player and the enemy in the form of bandits, cultists and other ne’er-do-wells moving all of their units one at a time during their respective turn. For the player each character is a unique unit with some custom art, a backstory, their own inventory which can hold up to 5 items and their own skills split into 8 categories which each increase as they gain levels. For the enemy they have hordes of disposable grunts to be used at will, with many levels causing more enemies to spawn in during certain turns and often from an irritating angle which will force you to take considerable care when using your more fragile units. All units in the game are split into various classes, each of which can use a handful of the game’s weapon and spell types and due to the game’s balance each class is therefore good against certain other classes but in turn weak against others. The first piece of the puzzle is the fact that weapons and magic both fit into a triangle system, with axes beating lances, lances beating swords and swords beating axes – while arcane magic beats light magic, light magic beats dark magic and dark magic beats arcane magic. Then you’ve got the fact that different classes (and by extension characters) not only have different amounts of movement points, but these classes also tend to empathise certain skills at the expense of others. Heavily armoured knights and generals have high defence and attack for example, but have low resistance making them weak against magic and low speed which means enemies can often get two blows in. Mages on the other hand have relatively high resistance and can attack at a slight distance, but are weak against physical attacks and generally have modest amounts of health. The intersecting nature of these classes ensures that no one unit is strong against everything, so you need to use your entire squad as a team lest your favourite unit get dog-piled and ground down by the enemy.

Then just when you think you’ve got everything in hand, the game’s inventory system pops up to nag you. The trouble is, while there are myriad weapons within the game each weapon can only be used a certain number of times before it breaks. Remember how you can only hold 5 items on each character? Well that means that you’ll need to factor in your weapon and how many hits it can dish out before it breaks, lest your unit be weapon less and thus unable to hurt a fly during the middle of a large skirmish. Before you ask, no you can’t repair items for most of the game (and when you can it’s only via a rare staff that in turn can only repair 3 weapons before it breaks) meaning that you’ll probably want to carry spares around. Then as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got classes that can carry up to 3 weapon types and you’ve got to consider how the quality of certain weapons/spells. You see not only do you have multiple weapon types, but you have multiple weapons within each type alongside some rare weapons which are effective against certain types of enemies. Generally speaking weapons go from Iron to Steel to Silver, with each type of weapon only being usable by characters with a high enough level in that weapon type. Oh and the better weapons not only cost more but can be used less before they break. So it’s entirely possible that you’ll have a character with a Steel Sword, a Steel Lance, backups for each and then a unique weapon such as the Axereaver which inverts the weapons triangle (i.e. it’s a lance that’s good against axes but weak against swords). It all gets somewhat complicated very quickly, but that’s part of the fun and it’s a good way to ensure that you’re invested in finding new loot before it’s pilfered by enemy thieves and to go out of your way to rescue villages before they’re pillaged by enemy bandits. If it’s all sounding a bit much then don’t panic, as you can store (temporarily) un-needed items with your supply convoy after a certain point in the story.

Due to all of this Fire Emblem 7 can be a complex game of cat and mouse as you manoeuvre your troops around, dodging enemy reinforcements (or funnelling them towards the right units) while you consider which weapons to use. This gives the game a nice feeling of depth and outside of the occasional piece of absolutely terrible luck, the game is well balanced and most deaths really are your fault – you MONSTER. As alluded to above there are also ways to gain new items outside of buying them from shops which appear in some levels, such as by killing enemies (who automatically drop any items they have in their inventory that are coloured green), stealing items from enemies with your thief, by visiting friendly villages before they are ransacked by enemy brigands/pirates and even by recruiting units to your side. Yes that’s right, some levels contain enemies which will “give you” a hint at the start of most missions via their dialogue with other units that reveals that they know one of the characters on your team. If you can get this unit into melee range with that named enemy, then you’ll be able to convince them to join your team and to stop aiding the bad guys. Of course this inherently involves some risk as now your unit is in melee range of that unit, which might place them in a sticky spot. And as if all that wasn’t enough, you might also be in a mission with a named friendly NPC (who appear as Green units) who has to be chatted to before they end up suiciding themselves by charging the enemy. These interactions are themselves often quite sweet and involve an abrupt change of heart on the part of the enemy, with many of these recruitable characters being powerful indeed. Or you can just kill them because you are a MONSTER.

As for the characters themselves they can all be described as charming archetypes, most of whom are suitably simple to understand for a game with modest pretensions to being a full RPG but who are still entertaining enough to justify their screen time. You’ve got nervous and naïve knights, gambling obsessed swordsmen, men of duty, men who are just in it for the sheer THRILL of adventure and much more besides. Ultimately you’ll be able to find a few characters that you enjoy, as while most of them are relatively shallow each of them feels like a D&D character and you’ll inevitably have your favourites. These characters are then able to propel a story that is likewise fairly simple, but which definitely has it’s moments and which manages to create an Arthurian feel of a world which has it’s noble lords and wicked villains, it’s power hungry despots and it’s wise sages. The whole game is brimming with charm and character, even if almost all of it is told through plain unspoken text (with a little bit of fantasy tweaking and dated verbiage) and static imagery. Of course there are a few exceedingly short cutscenes, but due to the limitations of the MIGHTY GBA the game is limited in how it presents itself. Fortunately it more than makes up for these limitations via some great artwork which is occasionally used to great effect in showcasing how the world appears through the eyes of it’s characters.

Further complimenting the occasional piece of high definition artwork (Relatively speaking, it is the GBA after all) is a great art style for units and gameplay which is simultaneously easy to read but still looks great in spite of the system’s limitations. Units may only be made out of a handful of pixels, but both the animations and art design is excellent and makes the game visually pleasing to the eye. Critical hit animations are stylish without feeling overlong, each class feels unique and I’m always surprised by how much a simple colour pallet change or slight tweak can make a character or enemy feel unique. As for the music, it’s also great in spite of the system’s limitations even if the number of tracks and their length is fairly limited. You will be hearing the same battle theme again, and again and again but fortunately each theme is handled well as is instantly recognisable. Fire Emblem 7 is therefore a great example of how much can be done with a limited amount of headroom and is an exceedingly efficient game in the way that it’s able to contain close to 40 unique levels, a full OST with around 30 tracks, almost the same amount of units and myriad weapons/spells all in one exceptionally small package.

Then when you reach the end and face off against the final boss, which is a total pain in the butt btw, the game gives you a charming ending screen which explains what each character does after the world has been saved. By that point you might think the game is over, as you’ll have encountered many characters, plenty of dialogue and wrapped up close to 30 levels. But then the game reveals that actually you’ve got an extra route revolving around Lord Hector that you can playthrough (who is otherwise portrayed as Eliwood’s stalwart pal but doesn’t have much autonomy). Oh and if that wasn’t enough then you can also replay Lyn’s route (the first 12 levels) and Eliwoods route (the other 18ish levels) in a newly unlocked Hard mode which is even more challenging. As such the game that has pretty much everything including great art direction, a solid difficulty curve, plenty of strategic head-scratching and a surprisingly good plot with charming characters reveals that it has plenty of replayability too. Oh and did I mention that there are multiple levels that only appear if you meet specific requirements, such as completing a level under a certain amount of turns, killing a fleeing enemy or by “rescuing” a hostile unit that would otherwise try and kill you? To see everything you’ll need to play through both the normal Lyn & Eliwood route, then the Lyn & Hector route and you’ll need to do both while meeting these hidden objectives. Fortunately you can always check a guide to see what’s needed, but I’ll warn you now that knowing how to unlock a hidden stage and actually unlocking it are not the same thing and some of them can be quite challenging to unlock.

In summary then Fire Emblem 7 is a game that can be challenging, complicated and occasionally unforgiving but which is nevertheless a fantastic game brimming with charm and content. There’s always a twist awaiting the player, whether it’s a new enemy type, a new plot development or a new hidden stage and while the game can occasionally be frustrating it’s almost never unfair. Every mechanic compliments each other nicely and the game excels with it’s solid gameplay, great visuals and charming cast of characters. Ultimately Fire Emblem 7 is a game that anyone can enjoy and one that I would highly recommend to anyone, although these days copies can be expensive as this was always a relatively niche series (at least until Awakening encouraged you to have babies with your waifu which caused every weeaboo in the world to become a gushing fanboy). If you see this game in the wild be sure to pick it up, and if you can’t afford it then just know that you can’t really afford to let Fire Emblem 7 pass you by either, so do what you have to (*cough* emulation *cough*) to experience it for yourself.

The post Fire Emblem 7: The Blazing Blade appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: If you own the Special Edition or Anniversary edition (I.E. the only versions of Skyrim still available for sale) then this content is included for free.

Following on from last week’s review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or just Skyrim for short, I’m taking a quick look at the two and a half DLC packs that came out following the game’s release. Of the three, the shortest by far is Hearthfire which allows you to build a couple of houses and generally faff around with children and marriage but is otherwise short on content. Then you’ve got Dragonborn and Dawnguard, which are each much more substantial and are about equal to Oblivion’s Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine respectively. In Dragonborn you are attacked by some cultists who have been sent from an isle that is located conveniently just off the main world map of Skyrim, and so you have to track them down to a Dunmer port “city” (more of a village really). From there you’re able to explore an entirely new island with a myriad variety of new enemies, alchemy ingredients and NPCs while on a quest to stop a different dragonborn who is trying to enslave the world. In Dawnguard meanwhile you’re dealing with enemies who are (mostly) located in the realm of Skyrim, even if some of them are new. These new enemies take the form of vampires and their thralls, although you can choose to join them if you so wish in which case you’ll be responsible for tracking down various vampire hunters and turning the hunter into the hunted. Of the two major Skyrim DLC expansions Dawnguard is unique in that it offers two separate quest chains, albeit with considerably overlap, due to the fact that you have two factions to choose from. Your choice will determine whether or not you gain the ability to transform into a Vampire Lord, alongside the fate of every mortal in the land.

Upon hearing of the ability to turn into a Vampire Lord, you might suspect that joining the Dawnguard (for whom the DLC is named) would be largely pointless and you’d be entirely correct. I still choose them anyway as it felt bizarre for my character who had quite literally just saved the entire world from dragons to then decide to pull a heel and condemn that same world, but the Dawnguard route is definitely the weaker option. Fortunately enough the new companion Selena doesn’t have much of a preference one way or another and is happy to side with you as you genocide her entire kind, but outside of that defection you don’t really get anything. The Dawnguard themselves are largely po-faced and while a few of them can provide skill training, they’re just mortal folk and as such there isn’t much they can offer you. You won’t gain many new abilities or valuable new spells from their route and there isn’t too much in the way of new gear or equipment (aside from some Dragonbone armour and the long awaited return of the Crossbow). That’s not to say that the DLC as a whole lacks new weapons and spells, as you can get some anti-vampire or pro-vampire items alongside a few new Dragon Shouts and spells/buffs, but most of these are available whether you side with the Dawnguard or not. As a consequence there isn’t much of a pay-off for being the hero and so the option comes down to player preference, as the main reward is choosing whether to become a Vampire Lord or not. That’s not to say that it’s bad or not worth playing, but I would generally recommend that players go with the Vampire route if only because that’s clearly where most of the effort went. One thing that might tip you towards the Dawnguard is the fact that you can hire new Armoured Trolls as companions. They are much as you’d expect, normal trolls but with more health and armour. While it’s a small comfort to be sure, at least it’s something and honestly having them obliterate the myriad wolves and bandits that keep nipping at the players heels is quite amusing.

Regardless of which faction you pick however the game does have two segments which take place outside of the normal lands of Skyrim and which are the highlights of this DLC. The first is the realm of the Soul Cairn, a sinister afterlife populated by those who’s souls have been stolen. Here you’ll not only fight a variety of new enemies, but you’ll also be able to receive a handful of quests from the deceased (one of which rewards you with a spooky ethereal horse). It’s an appropriately bleak place and the lack of both vendors and most loot gives it a barren feel, which is enhanced by the flat terrain and dark colour palate. The zone feels like the background of a Daedric quest and while the main quest contained within it is fairly bland, the area definitely gives the DLC a boost and is one of the more memorable parts. It also contains some opportunities to fill your soul gems, as is fitting. Then once you’ve finished your business in the cursed afterlife, you’re quickly sent off to the Forgotten Vale which is the land of the (almost entirely) exterminated Snow Elves. Here the main quest has some cool moments such as fighting your way through Falmer camps and wandering through halls filled with frozen solid enemies, while you search for an enchanted bow which has the power to save the world or bring it to your character’s heel. Much like the Soul Cairn it also contains a swathe of unique enemies and it’s a visually appealing area which is filled with some references to TES lore. While you don’t spend too much time in this area, you can return and there are some cool moments including a fight against two dragons at the same time and some hidden loot (including a mineable creature). These two zones feel like they were a focus for the DLC and are both interesting in their own right, while encouraging exploration and allowing you to return to either at your leisure.

Once you’ve done these zones, the quest chains are basically over and you’ll be attacking the base of the other faction. If you’ve gone with the Dawnguard then you’ll be rushing the evil vampire’s castle, and if you’ve gone with the Vampires then you’ll be destroying the Dawnguard’s castle. In either case you’ll charge in with the friendly faction’s NPCs (some of whom will probably die) before fighting your way through the castle and ultimately facing off against the faction leader in a fight. At this point you’ll use the enchanted bow for good or ill and decide the fate of Skyrim, again. Once everything’s been wrapped up you’re free to loot the place and then things largely return to normal, with your faction’s NPCs heading back to their base camp so you can continue to utilise their skill training abilities (and/or recruiting armoured troll abilities). Outside of this quest chain and the two new areas, there isn’t much in the way of new content outside of the aforementioned handful of new pieces of armour, weapons and some faction related side quests. Two things I haven’t touched on yet are the Werewolf skill tree, which functions much like the Vampire Lord one in that you gain points by making use of the transformation as opposed to just chucking points into them once you’ve levelled up. Both of these transformations come with some caveats, such as the fact that “normal” friendly NPCs will start attacking you on sight as you’re a monster and that some abilities can’t be used due to the fact that you are now BIG and so you’ll need to craft items when you’re not a werewolf or large vampire lord. Finally this DLC does also unlock the ability to change your appearance via a new NPCs located in the Thieves Guild base.

Next up in chronological order is Hearthfire, which is the smallest of the Skyrim DLC’s that were released as paid content. There were two smaller DLC’s including a small quest revolving around a Portal 2 reference and the HD texture pack, but both of those were free leaving Hearthfire as the most modest Skyrim DLC we’ll be taking a look at. In Hearthfire you get the ability to build houses at three new locations, alongside the ability to adopt children and get married to your spouse. Alongside these new features you also get a handful of NPCs that can be hired as carriage drivers and personal bards, alongside some busy work (in the form of fending off groups who of bandits/skeevers/giants who attack your home) and uh… some new food items alongside updated models/visuals for some existing soups and stews. That’s about it as far as the new content goes, aside from the handful of new materials which are used for house and furniture building. Fortunately enough building houses is integrated fairly well with the base game and the requirements aren’t too onerous, although the whole process is paced so that you’re unlikely to be able to build the house of your dreams in one sitting. Instead you’ll need to build up your new home(s) one stage at a time, and of course the first stage is buying the land which involves doing some quests for the local Thane. Once these are done you can purchase the plot of land for 5000 gold, which comes with enough materials to build a basic cottage and then if you wish to upgrade it you’ll need to accumulate various metals and crafting materials. The whole thing is surprisingly engaging and the ability to build up your house means that it will be larger than any of the pre-existing homes you can get in the game, although the requirements involved mean that you’re unlikely to be able to build a great house until you’ve spent a decent amount of time playing as your character. This is due to the fact that while a basic cottage is easy enough to build, the sheer amount of materials required for building a two storey main-hall alongside the three wings (from which you have multiple options such as a Spellcrafters tower, trophy room, extra storage space, etc) is significant. Then you have to factor in all of the furniture and the fact that you’ll need to visit multiple mines/merchants to gain all of the necessary materials, even if you can afford them. On the plus side there are no limits to the amount of homes you can own, so you’ll be able to have a house or build a house in every hold except for Winterhold. Just be aware that one of the Dark Brotherhood radiant quests involves killing Helvard in Falkreath which will make purchasing the Lakeview Manor plot impossible, unless the Jarl is replaced by siding with the Stormcloaks in the civil war questline.

Last but certainly not least is the Dragonborn DLC which is in my opinion the most interesting, due to the fact that it contains an entirely new island which is filled with content, quests and enemies to deal with. As mentioned at the start of this review, the Dragonborn DLC involves facing off against another Dragonborn (Miraak) from the era when Dragons ruled the world and who is a servant of the Daedra prince Hermaeus Mora. Perhaps unsurprisingly Miraak is exceptionally powerful indeed and due to his close affiliation with Hermaeus Mora you’ll be tasked with braving the horrors of yet another Daedric realm whilst gathering the forbidden knowledge you need to save the world (again, again). Fortunately Miraak gives you a heads-up as to his evil schemes by sending a handful of weak cultists to try and murder you, a task doomed to failure thanks to the player’s ability to reload saves. Once you’ve tracked him down you’ll be free to explore the island of Solstheim which is riddled with content to explore, even outside of the main questline that is itself quite fun to playthrough. This main questline involves liberating various groups from the malign influence of Miraak, as you gather books and scrolls which let you venture into the Daedric realm of Apocrypha.

Apocrypha itself is a cool new zone with some striking visuals that can be best thought of as a collection of small dungeons, as you’ll be wandering through miniature levels of this realm before teleporting to the next one by reading various books that are dotted around. Entering this realm is itself dependent on reading forbidden lore, which transports your Dragonborn (in mind if not always in body) into these levels which have a handful of unique hazards and enemies to contend with. It’s worth noting that these enemies are tough and that healing items are relatively limited whilst your in Apocrypha, which caused my Argonian mage some real issues. Fortunately you can just run past most of the enemies, and in some ways this is encouraged as you’re only here to gather forbidden lore before escaping back into the real world. Just be aware that Miraak is no pushover either, so if you’re struggling with the generic enemies then he is going to be a tough boss fight. On the plus side if you take the time to explore each area of Apocrypha fully, you can gain plenty of otherwise rare books which are perfect for finishing the new library in your charming Hearthfire home. As it’s the realm of knowledge there are also some spell tomes, books and mage specific potions scattered around although there are also some debuffs that enemies can inflict which make playing a mage in this realm tricky.

Of course as this is the final DLC for Skyrim, the “real world” as shown by Solstheim is no pushover either. The new enemies can hit hard and they come in many forms, from the broadly humanoid Ash Spawn through to Lich Priests, Werebears, Goblins Rieklings and Ash Guardians (a type of Atronach). Plus there are some new dragons, draugr and even spiders to contend with. Fortunately Solstheim also offers a variety of new armour, weaponry and spells which can be used to vanquish these horrors alongside some new friendly NPCs that can teach you these skills and which offer a myriad assortment of new quests. Oh and I nearly forgot that one of the main selling points of this DLC is (was?) the fact that you can learn some new shouts including the ability to fly around the map on dragons. While this last ability is learned fairly late in the main questline, gaining it is obviously a pretty good way of getting across the island and dealing with enemies dumb enough to fit you outside. Luckily enough most of the approximately 28 side quests involve fights in the wilderness of Solstheim, so this ability can easily come in handy. Plus it’s always nice to make friends with the new dragon who was trying to snuff you out, although it should be noted that having your dragon blast your enemies to death will deprive you of XP.

There’s a lot to be said about the various side quests and even the miscellaneous quests, such as hunting down the East Empire Company pendants for loadsemoney but as there are so many of them it would take too long to go over them with the depth they deserve. So all I’ll say is that working your way through all of the content in Dragonborn will take a considerable amount of time and while doing this you’ll be involved with multiple interesting and unique quests which offer good rewards. The two new settlements are also appealing, with the Dunmer enclave being riddled with cool side content (including tracking down a rare copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid) and possessing a great visual style while the smaller Nord settlement has a smaller amount of quests but does provide you with the ability to mine an entirely new and somewhat overpowered type of Ore. It definitely feels that Solstheim was an attempt by the developers at Bethesda to give Skyrim one last Hurrah and they definitely succeeded.

To conclude while the DLC’s in Skyrim aren’t quite as good as the ones from Oblivion, they’re definitely still a great series of additions to the game and are undoubtedly worth playing through. Dawnguard might be slightly underwhelming if you take the Dawnguard route (ironically enough) but outside of some initially tedious quests to hunt down NPCs that spawn at random locations, the main quest chain is still enjoyable and gives you two new areas to explore alongside some new weapons, enemies, spells and the like. Then you’ve got Hearthfire which is modestly sized but excels at enabling you to build up your own home and roleplay as a family man/woman/lizardwizard. Finally you’ve got Dragonborn which is the best of the bunch as it offers at much larger assortment of equipment/spells/enemies/quests than Dawnguard and does it all across an entirely new island which is riddled with content. And if all of that wasn’t enough, Dawnguard vastly expands on the experience of being a Vampire and/or Werewolf while Dragonborn lets you ride dragons and engage in strafing runs against those seemingly suicidal wolves and bandits. As a consequence I’d have no problem recommending these DLCs to Skyrim fans or even more casual WRPG fans in general, especially as they come included with every version of the game that’s been released since the base versions came out back in 2011. There’s a wealth of content to be found here and while some of it can be bland, most of the quests are great and many of the new locations look brilliant for such an old game.

PS: If you can’t find the Dawnguard hunter and own Dragonborn, then there’s a chance he’ll be in Solstheim for some reason – which is probably why you can’t find him. God knows I had that exact issue and assumed my game had just bugged itself

The post The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – DLC Double-ish Bill appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: Skyrim has had not one, but two significant re-releases on PC alone. As a consequence it can be a little tricky to review, but anyone playing it these days will be playing the Anniversary Edition (AE) which was a slight tweaking of the Special Edition (SE). The main difference between AE and the SE is the inclusion of some “creation club” content, while the differences between the SE and the base game were the inclusion of the DLC content and some visual upgrades. For console gamers, the PS3 and 360 are vanilla, PS4 and Xbone will be SE and Switch/PS5/SeX (or SeS) will be AE.

Despite buying Skyrim near it’s release date (in all honesty I pirated it initially as I was a fat kid who’d rather spend his money on chocolate at the time) I never had the best initial impressions of the game. Maybe I was blinded by nostalgia goggles for Oblivion, which after years of playing games on the N64 and Gamecube felt like a vast leap forward from anything that I’d ever played before. Or maybe it was the fact that I never really cared much for the setting, as I’ve never understood why Vikings are so popular with game developers due to them feeling fairly one note (it’s snowy and you have an axe and uhhhh dude look how JACKED i am). Regardless of my own dumb biases, I went into Skyrim with modest expectations and walked away fairly disappointed as it felt like a really dumb RPG game which while possessing some nice touches such as NPCs asking if they could keep the items you dropped, was ultimately as wide as an ocean as deep as a puddle. I can’t remember how many hours I put into it around the launch period, but I do know that within a couple of days the opinions in my friend group had gone from “GAME OF THE YEAR” to “It’s pretty good” to “It’s OK”. Now don’t get me wrong, I had the exact same trajectory for the next big Bethesda game in the form of Fallout 4 as I thought it RULED for the first 30 hours and then realised it was kind of a hot mess, which is both an accurate term and one I use with endearment. Only Bethesda (and maybe Lionshead) seems to have the power to make it’s sloppy RPG worlds so engrossing, in spite of or perhaps because of their lack of depth. Yet even if I was kinda disappointed with my initial Skyrim playthrough, I did eventually buy the game and then buy it again for the SE edition so I won’t pretend there was nothing there. It’s just not a game that ever succeeded in really keeping me within it’s world for more than 15ish hours per install.

But after around a dozen years of not finishing the game, I figured I would use the terrible lovely weather of the Scottish Summer(TM) to finally play through the entire main quest without getting distracted. In most games this wouldn’t be an issue, but Skyrim is even worse than Oblivion with regards to encouraging you to get distracted as it has both a main questline and then an almost main questline in the form of the civil war between the Stormcloaks (Braveheart x Vikings – the collab we didn’t know we needed) and the Empire. Then there’s the fact that the main questline actively requires you to interact with both the mages guild College of Winterhold and the Thieves Guild to proceed through it. Those of you who can put aside these niggling distractions however will be rewarded with an admittedly hit-or-miss series of quests that were blatantly not designed with Survival mode in mind. But before diving into the main quest and at the risk of getting distracted (as is par for the course for this game) I’ll quickly go over what survival mode is and why it sounded kewl.

Survival mode is an optional added in the Special Edition of the game which forces you to eat, sleep and stay warm within the snowy wasteland that is Skyrim. If you fail to maintain any of these responsibilities, you’ll gradually suffer a penalty to the maximum amount of Stamina, Magicka or Health that you have as parts of the applicable bars will turn black and be considered as empty – even if you heal or use a potion. Alongside this, you’ve also got a penalty to the amount you can carry which is halved to 150lb and arrows are now given a weight so you can’t just carry thousands of them around without any thought. Last but not least, you can only level up by sleeping in a bed like in Oblivion and fast travel is disabled almost everywhere with one or two exceptions. Now considering that in the normal version of Skyrim, you never sleep, never eat, never care about swimming in frozen fjords and generally don’t interact with the cooking, carriage or inn systems as a result, this seemed like an interesting little bit of extra challenge that would add some zest to the game. Unfortunately if in F:NV the survival mode was barely a factor, in Skyrim it’s frankly too much of a factor and it breaks a couple of quests to the point of them being almost impossible unless you have been frantically stocking up on Fire Salts (so you can craft the hot soups that no one else sells because apparently not a single soul in Skyrim wants their soup hot) like a maniac for the whole game. The issue is simple, you get cold really fast and this can not only kill you but also reduces your maximum health pool fairly quickly. In addition you need to have a little sleepy weepy, but unfortunately you can only sleep at inns (or your house) which means that extended quests or ill-advised trips through the world can make it so that you have basically no magic at your disposal. Of course there are ways around this, but generally after every lengthy mission you need to return to an inn, without being able to fast travel. Otherwise you will not have any health/stamina/magicka, because most of the tougher missions in this game involve being somewhere really cold and fighting tougher enemies. There was one segment where I had to keep running outside, summoning a flame atronach, then running back inside so I would warm up, but if I left it too long the enemy dragon would regenerate health so I was in-and-out and in-and-out like an absolute psycho. Then again picking an Argonian Mage is just asking for trouble as you get cold quicker and need to worry about magicka. My advice would be to not bother with this mode, or at the very least play as a Nord or Khajit with light armour for the maximum resistances to cold. Otherwise there will be some quests where you just straight up die trying to get to the objective unless you stocked up on those specific types of soup that require Fire Salts (a rare alchemical ingredient).

Anyway my own self-inflicted suffering aside the Skyrim main quest is perfectly fine if a little monotonous, which I imagine is a big part of why less than 20% of Steam players actually finished it. It starts with you almost getting executed, then almost getting executed by a dragon, before you scurry away and soon end up in the town of Windhelm. Here you get roped into helping fight against those rascally dragons, which involves doing some dungoneering and fighting one of them before absorbing it’s soul. Then you walk up a mountain so you can freeze to death repeatedly for not having the specific kind of soup talk to some old guys who tell you that you are the protagonist and then make you faff around for a little bit. Then you find the McGuffin, but not really, so you can go to a lame party with 4 guests total and then kill around 20 guards with no consequence. After doing your part to liven things up you go rescue a different type of old guy, before doing a bit more dungoneering and then fight the antagonist dragon. Once you’re done not killing the main antagonist you faff around some more, which includes a diplomatic conference in which the main parties of the civil war whine at you about things no one cares about, before you finish honing your ability to yell in an ancient language. Then you’re able to go to Valhalla Solsteim and kill the antagonist dragon for real this time. Now it would be really easy to criticism my whistle-stop tour of Skyrim’s main questline which is spread into 17 missions, but basically they’re all listening to NPCs you can’t kill blabber on about stuff and then going to an area and killing a bunch of dudes (and maybe a dragon if you’ve been an especially good Dovahkiin this quest). You don’t get to make any choices that matter and there are almost no opportunities for roleplaying, and outside of a few specific instances it plays exactly the same as the rest of the game. Sure the party at the embassy and the peace conference are a bit different, but they involve walking around for a bit then responding to the only dialogue choices that advance the quest before falling into the same old routine. There really isn’t much to captivate the player outside of the prospect of saving the world but even after you’ve saved the world the game does a little bit of hand-waving and says “yeah, well, there are still gonna be dragons attacking you because uh…… some dragons don’t accept your hegemony videogames”.

With all that being said no one really plays Skyrim for the main questline and I’m fairly confident Bethesda assumed that from the get-go as it has a ton of content outside of the main quest. Even excluding the other quasi-main quest in the form of the civil war, you’ve got multiple faction related quests including the Thieves Guild, College of Winterhold, Dark Brotherhood and the Companions alongside myriad side quests and then mini-quests which aren’t counted as side quests but instead as miscellaneous objectives. Some of these are very straight forward, such as talking to NPC A, then talking to NPC B, then going back to talk to NPC A but others have a bit more depth to them. One smart trick the game does to keep you interested in what are ostensibly tiny little non-quests is that some of these miscellaneous objectives are the stepping stone into larger side quests, and as they’re generally pretty easy I did find myself doing them as a way of taking a break from the meatier quest chains. They also tend to give some sort of reward, whether it be a couple of hundred gold or just assistance/discounts from vendors. Plus the game also has radiant quests, which went on to cause Fallout 4 no end of trouble but which are essentially bounties that various NPCs place on bandit camps / dungeons / dragons (or actual named NPCs if you’re taking one from the Dark Brotherhood). You then go there and kill the dudes for your mediocre cash reward and the satisfaction of a job done (until you get the next one a handful of in-game days later). With that being said, I don’t think people really play Skyrim for these quests either even if all of the factions combine for a total of around 40ish additional quests which have had about as much time and effort put into them as the main quests. Instead I think people mainly play Skyrim for the feeling of their character getting ever more powerful, which I suppose is the only way that Skyrim can really be considered as an RPG.

I suppose in this regard Skyrim does a decent job, as it retains the classic TES system wherein you gain levels in a skill by using it with your total level increasing as you gain levels in those skills. The main difference here is that not only are there no penalties to using skills at a novice level, but you also gain a perk point each time you level up. These can then be used to unlock perks in the associated skill-tree, which are generally fairly minor but are still useful. Some examples include making novice destruction spells cost half of the magicka to cast, gaining a boost to pickpocketing when the target is asleep and being able to craft higher level items out of certain ores and materials. The caveat to this levelling system is that while you also gain a little bit of health or magicka or stamina (your choice), the enemies in the world are scaled to your level meaning that you end up at around the same level. Now to prevent you from totally abusing this system by staying at level 1 forever and grinding through the various skills, many spells need more than 100 magicka, while 100 stamina won’t get you particularly far without any perks. But I still can’t help but feel that this system leads to the game having a treadmill feeling, much like Oblivion albeit with an ever bigger issue as spells don’t scale. They have a flat amount of damage and while you can learn new spells, there is a point at which you’ve reached the maximum potential. But you can still level up via increasing your other skills, so no matter what build you play you’re basically going to end up as a hybrid class anyway. If you go melee only flying enemies (by which I mean dragons) are going to be a pain, and if you go magic only you’ll bottleneck yourself once you’ve maxed out the destruction skill. Fortunately as you level up you do also get access to better equipment in the form of weapons, armour and potions as vendors update their offerings, randomly generated chests upgrade their contents and enemies carry newer and better gear. Yet even if this does create a sense of your character being unable to totally eclipse most enemies, there are still occasions where the world spawns lower level foes and which prevents the world from suffering the aggressive level scaling problem that Oblivion ended up dealing with.

Overall then Skyrim has learned a few tricks from Oblivion and has avoided the worst excesses of it’s level-scaling system while still managing to retain the variation in cities and quests that made it so popular. Yet even with the new dragon enemies and radiant quest system, I’d be lying if I said it was as enjoyable as an experience especially as the RPG elements feel even more basic. There really doesn’t feel like there is much to distinguish various character builds and the lack of roleplaying opportunities within the majority of quests is a sticking point for me personally. Even if the world has so much to do, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is a game that has spread itself a little bit too thin as the majority of the content basically plays the same. In large part due to the fact that every character you create essentially plays the same across all playthroughs. Regardless I do still think Skyrim has it’s charms and is worth a playthrough, if only for the way in which the game has a large amount of scripted but amusing interactions and mini-quests which appear as if by random while you play. Yet it’s this same reliance on scripted encounters that makes everything feel a bit artificial and almost like a theme-park. Every time you enter a city for the first time a sequence of events plays out, and it will never change no matter how many characters you create or how you choose to level them. Skyrim is therefore a game which has plenty to see and do, but offers no real reason to stay especially if you don’t much care about the feeling of your character gradually progressing in power and ability. As a consequence I would give Skyrim a modest recommendation (excluding those who are RPG novices and will find it a great starting point) and I would honestly skip Survival mode if I were you.

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Quick Note: Much like with my playthroughs of Fallout: New Vegas and the previous 2 DLCs, I played through both of these in Hardcore mode. Unlike Dead Money this didn’t really change anything, aside from making the mountains of ammunition littering both locations a pain to transport back to the occasional vendor.

Wrapping up the Big Boaby Gaming account of F:NV, this week we’re taking a look at the final two DLCs for the game – Old World Blues and Lonesome Road. The former is directly inspired by cheesy science fiction movies and novels of the early half of the 20th century and has the player exploring the pre-war research centre of “Big Mountain”. The main quest chain in Old World Blues focuses on what to do with the various semi-sane researchers that are still in control of the facility and which have thus far failed to do anything other than bicker with each other. LR on the other hand is directly related to the story that has been building across the rest of F:NV and deals with the character of Ulysses, a courier who has been involved with your character’s story since they first held onto the Platinum Chip in the first place. Unlike Old World Blues it is much more po-faced about the pre-war world, with the main plot thread revolving around your conflict with Ulysses who keeps trying to get under your character’s skin and ultimately threatens the Mojave as part of his quest to rattle you. Just like the other DLCs for F:NV, both of these DLCs are accessed via a quest which is given to your character upon starting the game and which directs them to a new area from which they’ll be teleported to the new zone. Both of these new areas can be re-accessed once their respective main quests have been completed, which works out well as they both have multiple challenges (as opposed to side quests) which provide rare equipment and upgrades.

Starting with Old World Blues, this DLC has you teleport to Big Mountain (or the Big Empty as most wastelanders call it) after interacting with a crashed satellite. You then wake up in a pleasant balcony with a view of the new area, which still has active industry dotted across it’s myriad craters and ruined masonry. You quickly encounter the “Think Tank” running the facility of Big Mountain who have, erm, removed your spine, heart and brain. Ordinarily after dealing with this sort of assault you’d be entirely justified to respond with violence, but the Think Tank have been smart enough to active a pacification shield around their facility which means that you can’t deliver swift wasteland justice. Instead you’ll need to figure out where your brain and other organs went and so you’ll be acting as their errand boy until you can piece yourself back together. Fortunately these delusional scientists are still able to provide clear objectives, even as the centuries of mental decay have rendered them little more than talking imbeciles. Their first task for you is to find multiple items with which to enter The Forbidden Zone, an area they think houses your brain but is unfortunately under the control(?) of Dr Mobius. Mobius is a dissident madman who is as insane as the think-tank, but who has fallen out with them and has spent the past two centuries creating fearsome robo-scorpions with which to bring Big Mountain to heel. Once you begin gathering the various items which are needed to enter the Forbidden Zone, you start on a fairly short quest-chain where you potter around the Big Mountain facilities, gather some required items, gun down various Robo-Scorpions and other failed experiments before you’re able to confront Mobius, your own brain and finally the Think Tank to decide the fate of the facility.

While this quest chain is definitely tongue-in-cheek and has some amusing dialogue, the main meat if this expansion is actually contained in side-content which resolves around upgrading your player home and a couple of the major new items found in this DLC. The player home component is seemingly straight-forward but actually has a fair amount of depth to it, as your home away from home at Big Mountain contains 10 different appliances which can each offer various services to your character. Unfortunately, when you initially move into your sweet new digs, you’re informed that all of these devices are inoperable and as such you’ll need to find the 10 corresponding holotapes which are necessary for them to begin operating. Fortunately these are marked as quest items and as such finding them isn’t too hard, but trekking to the locations they’re in and dealing with the various threats that are occasionally guarding them is more of a challenge. Once you’ve activated all of these appliances (each of which has their own neurotic personality by the way, from a miniature Securitron who is obsessed with mugs to a saucy, seductive seedbank) you’re then informed that they can all be further upgraded by gathering… even more holotapes! If you take the time to do all of this, then you’ll be glad to hear that you can benefit from an assortment of buffs – some of which are temporary such as increases to SPECIAL stats, while others are permanent including 3 new perks from the auto-doc and the ability to craft new skill books from the overly patriotic book-chute. Some of these upgrades are again sign-posted via a pertinent quest, but the skill books are not and will require some careful hunting to find.

Alongside upgrading your player home and the appliances within, you can also upgrade a few of the more noteworthy items that you can find within Big Mountain including a stealth suit and two new weapons – an energy weapon that fires sonic blasts and a powerful rifle that is improved with the addition of a canine brain. Upgrading the first two items requires running a gauntlet of “simulations” which require you to either sneak through an area without getting detected by patrolling robobrains, trip-wires and proximity mines or fight your way through a high-school while dealing with turrets, attack dogs and protectrons respectively. The K9-gun is a bit more straight forward and instead only asks for you to gather some schematics to upgrade the weapon, which might sound disappointing but honestly the combat gauntlet for the ray-gun was a pain in the butt to deal with. Fortunately whether you choose to upgrade your home and new gear or not, you’ll be readily compensated as the Big Mountain complex is positively brimming with lootable equipment including mentats, pre-war money, cigarettes galore (seriously, almost every container has a pack or a carton) and other valuable but low-weight loot. Plus there is ammo seemingly everywhere and most enemies you face off against are equipped with valuable items, including saturnite power fists, shishkebabs and hunting revolvers.

Aside from the new equipment and potential to get rich, the main reason to bother with Old World Blues is the writing which is generally pretty funny. Whether you’re running an upgrade gauntlet for improving the ray-gun, exploring the zone in the hopes of finding new gear or interacting with NPCs there is a consistent level of mad-cap insanity that permeates every molecule of this expansion. I do personally wish that it had been integrated better with the combat sections in this DLC, as generally I found that you’d either be talking-talking-talking to the Think Tank (or whoever) and then you’d be fighting-fighting-fighting your way through a zone so that you can complete whatever mission it is that you’d set for yourself. It does feel like an expansion of two halves, with the writing and combat both being largely separate with each other and most quests involving you going to location A, fighting the baddies, gathering item Z, going back to location B and handing it in before you get hit with another couple minutes of exposition. Fortunately the irreverent yet amusing dialogue should keep you coming back for more, and if it doesn’t then perhaps the multiple ties with the other DLCs (via the previous interjections of Elijah and Ulysses into the zone) and occasional glimpses of the unglamorous nature of the fallout world (via the Little Yahtzee concentration camp and some experiments that went awry) will provide some motivation. With all that being said, the main quest is fairly short and will only take you a few hours if you rush through it. You can also get the best possible outcome for everyone, but you’ll need a relatively high speech level and a high science level too. Or you can just beat all those nerds to death, it’s your call.

Lonesome Road on the other hand is much less of a tongue-in-cheek affair, although it can also be resolved by punching some nerds to death. In LR you’re trying to track down Ulysses, a courier who has it out for you and who seems to know a great deal about your past. For whatever reason, it’s this past that has lead Ulysses to become obsessed with you to the detriment of both himself and, if you can’t stop him, the entire Mojave wasteland. As mentioned, LR starts with you receiving a quest to enter a region called “The Divide” which forces your companion to head back home. Upon entering this new area, you quickly find yourself inside a military bunker which was used by the pre-war US military to store nuclear weapons and which also contains another ED-E eyebot. This new ED-E gives you the ability to open up new automatic commissary vending machines, that give you a way to sell the endless amounts of high end equipment you come across. He(?) also gives you the ability to trigger various switches and terminals which are required for you to progress in the main quest. The quest itself is fairly simple, as you’re tasked with making your way from one end of this Lonesome Road to the other, where Ulysses has established his base and makes his multiple foreboding messages and warnings to you. Unlike Old World Blues there aren’t really any side objectives to complete here, although there are 5 upgrades for ED-E which can be transferred back to the old ED-E in the Mojave, alongside a challenge (and CHEEVO) to explode 30 warheads which litter the area and that can be detonated to provide you with alternative routes around areas or to reveal rare items.

Generally speaking though these mini side-objectives don’t provide much extra content and as a consequence the main reason to engage with LR is to find out more about the overall story of F:NV, especially as your character has a nasty cause of amnesia following the time when Benny shot them in the head. That’s not to say that there isn’t some good equipment to pilfer here, as one of the two new enemy types are positively brimming with valuable weapons, but generally speaking the handful of new weapons aren’t that impressive and the main point of interest is the storyline. Fortunately this narrative is pretty engaging, as not only do you learn a great deal about your courier’s past via Ulysses multiple diatribes, but you also gain an insight into a new threat that will wreck havoc in the Mojave and get to learn some more about the lands between the Capitol Wasteland in the East and the Mojave in the West. Ulysses is probably one of the most interesting characters contained within F:NV and as he was intended to be a companion during development, he has a lot of dialogue about the state of the setting and a lot to tell the player. Plus ED-E has his own story to tell too, which comes up at random points during your journey to track down Ulysses and which is also engaging. ED-E is a little sweetheart of a companion and oddly enough for F:NV he is “immortal” in Hardcore mode, probably as he is crucial to various points in the story that wouldn’t make sense where he not there. In addition, he’s also one of very few characters in the game that you can sass after basically every line of dialogue, should you so be inclined.

As for the gameplay side of LR, it’s pretty standard and while (almost) all the enemies are new they basically fit into two camps – excluding a handful of deathclaws and security bots who get caught in the fray. You’ve got the “Marked Men” who are monstrously overcooked ghouls that are lacking in skin and as such are a vibrant shade of red due to the combination of relentless winds and radiation which make The Divide hostile to all life. These guys basically function as the armed NPCs of the run and aren’t particularly worth noting, aside from the fact that they are composed of a mix of turned NCR and Legion troops and as such have access to a large amount of otherwise rare and unusual weapons. They can’t be reasoned with or bartered with, and aside from a handful of named individuals don’t seem to possess any sentience at all. The other main enemies of The Divide are the “Tunnelers”, a new type of swarming reptilian enemy that is dangerous in close combat and which can be a headache for lesser levelled players – but who didn’t pose much of a threat for my melee build with ample reserves of Action Points, stimpacks and a heated saturnite power-fist. These tunnelers are meant to pose an existential threat to the world as they breed quickly and hunt in packs, but there are multiple areas where the courier has to fight around 10 of them and so I can’t help but imagine that the Mojave is going to be fine no matter what happens. But I digress, as the main takeaway here is that LR has the same combat as the rest of the game and without any real side-quests or NPCs to interact with you’re basically just fighting your way through various areas, grabbing whatever isn’t nailed to the ground and occasionally setting off a warhead to gain access to a new route or loot.

While I don’t want to spend too much time discussing the narrative of LR as doing so will inevitably involve a range of spoilers, one thing that makes it interesting is the fact that it’s tailored to your existing playthrough to an extent as Ulysses refers to multiple events that have occurred and is hostile to both the NCR and the legion (to a lesser extent). As such there are various points in the DLC where having a high-rating with either the NCR or Legion can be used to gain further insight into the setting, and even help with some speech checks like the one at the end of the DLC. Due to this you really should leave LR until you’ve gone through a decent amount of the base game, although you can take advantage of the reputation reset that occurs at a certain point in the main quest chain to have high ratings with the NCR and/or Legion despite having the option to cause a lot of trouble for them in this DLC. It’s also worth noting that if you choose to avoid fighting Ulysses, you can interact with him later on and he will provide commentary on your actions and some events that have occurred in the Mojave. With that being said, LR is intended as late-game content for a reason and I’m fairly confident that regardless of your factional inclinations this DLC is best experienced at a high level.

In summary, both LR and Old World Blues are enjoyable pieces of DLC that add their own flair to the game even if both take radically different tonal directions. Old World Blues is a silly little story with hints of darkness at it’s heart, but ultimately it’s a fun and campy adventure as you explore the exaggerated caricature of the old world that Big Mountain has become. LR on the other hand is all about the backstory of the courier and the Mojave, with some sprinklings of humour occasionally found within. Both have decent rewards for the player that takes the time to finish them, including player housing, permanent buffs and a range of powerful items. But the main benefit to both is the narrative experience they provide, one in which you get to save the world multiple times over.

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