Fallout 4 is here: review, starter guide, and more

Just south of what was once called the Charles River, a few minutes away from the bustling (by post-apocalyptic standards) metropolis of Diamond City, there’s a unique piece of Fallout 4 real estate known as Hangman’s Alley. It’s one of the first places you’re asked to build a settlement using the game’s new crafting tools, but it breaks Fallout’s standard mold of wide-open farms and ruined commercial spaces. As its name suggests, it’s a short stretch of road sandwiched between two blocks of pre-war buildings, a shantytown that still feels almost urban. In Fallout’s sparsely populated, largely suburban Boston, it’s more Jacob Riis than Mad Max.

If you’re interested in giant, ambitious construction projects, Hangman’s Alley is a bad place to start. Its vertical space is limited by awnings and fire escapes, and the ground can support roughly three one-room houses before becoming difficult to walk through. But these same features make it oddly compelling. Its size pushes settlers to cluster together in an unusually human way, and it incentivizes thoughtfully working around its existing architecture. In a construction system where gravity is optional and entire structures can be uprooted instantly, it calls for something that feels almost like real (if small-scale) urban planning.

In a stunning lapse of judgment, I decided to spend 70 hours playing Fallout: New Vegas just a few weeks before I started Fallout 4. In a way, it’s made me truly appreciate the upgraded graphics and new mechanics. But it’s also made me realize that so far, Fallout 4 is missing one of my favorite video game elements: the social power fantasy.

One of the unique things about computer role-playing games like Fallout is that they give “soft” social skills the same hyper-quantified treatment as a gun’s fire rate or a piece of armor’s damage resistance. In New Vegas, not only do you have a precise numerical value assigned to your speaking abilities, you’ve got a sliding scale of your ethical standing — from “messiah” to “devil” — plus a scale of how much you are liked or disliked by every important faction in the game world.

I have a very specific way of playing Fallout games, and I don’t think I’m alone. I need to hack every computer, pick every lock, and persuade everyone I come across. If I’m going to devote dozens, if not hundreds of hours to a game, I want to keep as many options open for as long as I can.

For Fallout 4, I thought I’d try something different: a no-nonsense character with no charisma or intelligence — someone who can barely aim a gun but is lethal with a baseball bat. I thought it would be fun to see a different side of the game, but I was very, very wrong: not only was Fallout 4 more tedious, but parts of the game felt too challenging to even move past. Yes, you can play the game however you want, but some preplanning is downright essential.

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy a Fallout game: the story, the character creation, the sense of exploration. But the element that holds everything together is the fantastic music. The more recent games let you listen to the radio on your character’s wrist-worn Pip-Boy computer, where you can not only hear news from around the wasteland, but also classic tunes from the likes of Billie Holiday or Billy Ward and his Dominoes. Roaming the post-apocalyptic world can be depressing, but the right music not only makes it bearable, but actually enjoyable.

Fallout 4 continues this tradition, offering a mix of new songs and ones featured in previous games. Just hearing “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” makes me want to explore a derelict building in search of supplies — it was my absolute favorite song from Fallout 3, and hearing it again in the sequel brings back plenty of fond memories. You can check out the game for yourself when it launches tomorrow, but in the mean time, here are a few tracks to get you in the mood for the end of the world.

One of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make as a parent is figuring out time to enjoy non-family-friendly entertainment. It’s hard to watch Game of Thrones or play Assassin’s Creed with two kids under the age of three running around. I really don’t want my daughters seeing me (virtually) stab people in the neck. So I was pretty stressed out about reviewing Fallout 4: here’s a game that lasts dozens of hours and frequently includes slow motion close-ups of exploding heads. If it wasn’t for the PS Vita’s remote play feature, I may not have been able to finish the game.

Remote play is a little-used feature that lets you stream a game from your PlayStation 4 to a Vita using your home’s Wi-Fi connection. The games that do support it often don’t work right; the Vita is lacking a number of buttons featured on the PS4’s controller, and the touchscreen isn’t always the best substitution. One of the few games to do a really great job of configuring the controls for the Vita is sci-fi shooter Destiny, with a scheme built by developer Josh Hamrick. Fallout studio Bethesda enlisted Hamrick’s help for Fallout 4, and, for the most part, it works well.

Best Buy is currently offering a promotion that packages a free copy of Bethesda’s Fallout 4 with Sony’s PlayStation 4 console. If you want to spend the least amount of money for the free game, your best option is buying the stand-alone console or the Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection PS4 bundle that costs $349 — the console’s regular price. Aside from the Uncharted games, Fallout 4 and a free controller charging stand, going this route also gets you the newest hardware revision of Sony’s gaming machine, featuring an all-matte design and physical buttons in place of the touch-sensitive power / eject controls on earlier PS4 models. GameStop is offering the same deal.

Best Buy’s Fallout 4 toss-in offers a bit more flexibility, since the game also comes with the Call of Duty: Black Ops III 1TB PS4 bundle ($429), or even the custom white Destiny: The Taken King console if you’re still able to find it at a store. The deal applies both online and in-store, giving you the option to pick up everything immediately on launch day if you just can’t wait to enter post-war Boston and sink hours into all that Fallout 4 offers. The game will be released on November 10th, and our review makes for good reading in the meantime.

Nine hours into Fallout 4 I found myself stuck inside an elevator.

By this point, I had built a bond with my character along with a respectable inventory of items, most notably an automatic pistol with a bottomless magazine. I eat the crust first in open-world games, grinding my stats and finding overpowered weapons before taking on the main missions. The crust of Fallout 4 is enjoyable, but I was ready for something more challenging, so I hiked east toward a side quest, something involving a man imprisoned atop a tower full of super mutants.

The real star of a new Fallout game is the city it takes place in. Each location has its own look and feel, and the developers behind the series do a great job of reimagining some of America’s most iconic cities as post-apocalyptic wastelands. For Fallout 4, that star is Boston and its surrounding area. Known as The Commonwealth to those who live there, the city has the elements you’d expect — lots of baseball references and coffee shops — but rendered in the brown-and-grey, burned out aesthetic the Fallout series known for. Over the past week I’ve spent more than 60 hours in the newest Fallout wasteland, and I couldn’t help but snap some screenshots as I explored (these were all taken in the PS4 version of the game). Naturally, if you want to go in completely fresh, these images contain a few light spoilers, but nothing that will ruin any of the story for you. Fallout 4 launches tomorrow on Xbox One, PS4, and PC — and you can check out our review of the game right here.

There’s nothing quite like listening to “Crazy He Calls Me” as the sun rises over an abandoned highway. A radioactive scorpion could attack at any moment, sure, but when Billie Holiday is in your ears, the end of the world doesn’t seem so bad.

The Fallout games are collision points of two disparate forces. On one hand, you have a role-playing game set during a horrific future in which nuclear war has decimated the population, forcing humans to become scavengers, fighting to survive alongside mutants and monsters. On the other hand, there’s hope. Hope comes from trying to not just live in this awful place, but thrive. Hope resides in Fallout’s 1950’s retro-futurism, an alternate timeline where humankind was on the precipice of a technological revolution that would improve life across the planet — only to be squashed by warheads. War never changes, and hope never really disappears.

Special edition video games aren’t so special anymore. When every blockbuster release, even the not-so-great ones, comes with some kind of commemorative statue or lunchbox, it makes the entire concept a lot less interesting. But Fallout 4 is one of the few collector’s editions that actually made people excited, and for one reason: it comes with a wearable Pip-Boy.

The wrist-worn computer is a staple of the post-apocalyptic RPG series, and the life-size version not only fits on your wrist, but can also house your smartphone and run a special Pip-Boy app so that you can check in-game information without hitting pause. (Its availability is also incredibly limited, as the $119.99 bundle sold out soon after it went on sale. Developer Bethesda has since said that demand is so great it’s incapable of making any more.)