Fallout 4 Six Hours In

So, I got an Xbox One last year. I also got divorced, moved in with our sports writer, and we've dropped to a two man operation from the 4 we had. My personal life has been a rollercoaster over the last year, and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. To that end, I'm hoping to be able to get back to doing this on the regular again. We've been playing a lot of board games as of late and while that's been fun, I've recently picked up my controller and began to play video games again.

Now for the reason you're all here. The title of the article. I've only spent around 6 hours with Fallout 4 so far, and I've got to say... holy crap. This game is wonderful. I've had a couple minor glitches with some enemies, random deaths, and some loot problems, but overall, I'm enjoying my time in the Commonwealth.

Fallout 4 is an improvement in every way over the previous generation's iterations of Fallout. The world is much more dense, which is fantastic. Combat is much more fluid, with the shooting feeling particularly nice. Customization has gone through the roof with both weapons and armor being customizable. Armor customization is a bit more limited in some ways, with several suits and outfits taking up all slots, where as others are very modular and allow swapping between any at any time. Weapons though, are completely customizable. Everything in the wasteland is made of components for customization or building. Weapons break down into several categories and each category has several upgrades for you to work towards. You can also store a limitless amount of crap in workbenches throughout the world, so you could in theory always have a stockpile of junk ready to go. I haven't spent much time with the settlement builder yet, but what I've done has been pretty great and allowed me to build some fun structures. I'll know more on that later I think.

The gameplay is basically the same as the last two games. V.A.T.S. is back and works wonderfully, the shooting and movement are spot on, and the game controls much better than the previous games. Dialogue is much better, with no clunky menus to navigate through, though you are limited (so far) to only 4 dialogue choices at a time. The looting has changed a bit and caused some issues for me as I'm still not used to it. Gone are the game pausing pop-up menus where your inventory and the container or corpse's inventory are side by side. Hover over something and a list pops up with what's there. You tap a button to take it, or another button to bring up your inventory to dump stuff. It's very nice. Visually it doesn't break any records, but the game looks great. I have found myself getting absorbed into the game quite a bit in my short time. Here's to more Fallout, but I probably won't get around to any more play time until Friday.