When you first install this game, if you like games of this type, you will find it very addictive probably. The first few days I couldn't stop playing it! After maybe a week or two, it does start to get a bit repetitive and lose it's luster, but all games usually have this problem. One good thing about this game is that it runs good on a very old system like mine (amd 64 3200, 2gig ram, nvidia 7800gt). I did run it in medium graphics setting, but to be honest that is what the auto-detect set it at, I didn't really try running it at highest settings. The game looked fine in medium level detail though, and ran smooth (graphically) throughout the 75+ hours I played the game. What's good: 1. Huge post-apocalyptic wasteland map you can explore and get lost in. When you enter many buildings, caves, etc...an entire new and sometimes very large map area loads up. So even though you can walk from one end of the main map to the other in a reasonable amount of time, if you count in the different areas and maps through doors that you zone into, there is a HUGE amount of space to explore. 2. Very creepy atmosphere. You really feel like you are in a post-nuclear wasteland. There are lots of tiny details on the maps that add to it like garbage and old tires and the shells of old cars. There are plenty of buildings and houses / neighborhoods that look like they got blown to pieces and burned crispy. Old roads and bridges and overpasses litter the landscape, often having been adopted by "wastelanders" as a new home. 3. Lots of cool weapons to kill your enemies with from sawed off shotguns to laser and plasma rifles. Cool armors as well. Some very cool explosives as well like grenades, mines, plasma grenades, rocket launchers, and even a grenade launcher type weapon that launches mini-nukes. 4. If you buy the game of the year addition you automatically get all the down-loadable content which adds easily another 20 hours of game play and new weapons and armor to play with. For me actually one of the best moments of the game is when I encountered the "mothership zeta" content, which I kind of discovered by accident, and it was quite fun. 5. The V.A.T.S. system is a unique combat system, that has both some good things about it, as well as bad. The good is that it adds a unique, groundbreaking element to the game (at least, I have never seen a game with this type of system before). And when in the VATS mode, you get some very cool cinematic effects (sometimes). And it makes some fights that would be impossible, possible (due to you being heavily outnumbered). 6. There are a lot of other cool details to the game that add to the experience like leveling up your character and raising skills and learning "perks" which give you special abilities and bonuses. 7. And basically just the hours and hours of game play is a plus, since many games these days you pay $50 and then get disappointed when it has only 6 hours of SP game play. If you do all of the side quests and explore the map thoroughly, you can easily play this game for 100+ hours (not including reloads). Some negatives: 1. Incredibly stupid enemy AI. I suggest you play this game in the hardest difficulty setting, or it will be too easy most of the time. Unfortunately the harder difficulty only makes the enemies hit you harder and probably gives them some more hit points, but doesn't make them act any more intelligent. The AI is just your basic "spot you and then charge at you with guns ablaze". If you use the sniper gun....you'll find that at a certain far range, you can just take your time shooting at the enemy AI, while they do basically nothing, other than perhaps walk back and forth in confusion. So it's not recommended you do this, otherwise the game will be silly. One thing they could have done that would have drastically improved the AI is perhaps give the AI the ability to take cover...many games in the years before this game were made, have already done this with success, for example half-life 2. 2. While it's great that they made a game with 100+ hours of content, the fact that much of the content is somewhat generic and repetitive kind of kills the benefit of this. I'd rather have 50 hours of game content, but higher quality with more variation. Bethesda's other well known predecessor to this game, Oblivion, suffered from the exact same thing ---hundreds of hours of possible game play, but so much of the same thing over and over and over again, that you probably had your fill by hour 25. 3. The game employs a system, nothing new, that causes weapons and armor to degrade until they break and are un-usable. A weapon or armor at 100% health gives it's full benefits, damage resistance or damage done etc...You can only repair a weapon (beyond 50%) by using up / destroying a weapon of the same type. Some weapons are extremely rare and degrade much faster than other weapons, like for example the sniper rifle. My guy was like level 10 when he found his first sniper rifle, and maybe level 20 when he found his second....Basically this means that, at least for my game, it was impossible to have a sniper rifle in 100% condition, for most of the game, due to their rarity, and thus the inability to repair it beyond 50% (all the shopkeepers can repair it to around 50%, sometimes at great expense though). Anyways, I found this repair system to be very annoying, to be honest. It didn't seem to add any fun to the game, just the opposite, because it means for the most of the game you are always using inferior / damaged gear that does 50% of it's potential. 4. The V.A.T.S. system....has so many bugs it's not even funny. It doesn't even work at all for ranged weapons, like the sniper rifle (at a far range that is). I don't want to go into detail and describe the exact way all the bugs happen, but basically, VATS is extremely unreliable. When it does work, it can work great, but when it bugs it is very annoying. 5. The game doesn't work very well as a FPS. While in theory you can never use the VATS system at all, and just try to shoot manually all the time, this game doesn't really work smoothly as a pure FPS. For some odd reason creatures / enemies always seem to zigzag in weird ways that makes it near impossible to hit them. You can sort of get around this by running backwards while they chase you, and then they tend to move in a straight line. But sometimes trying to shoot down 1 enemy will be a frustrating thing to do. You'll see once you play it. If you have played FPS games extensively, this game will just not feel as smooth and natural as any good FPS. Now combined with the fact that VATS is terribly buggy at times, this can cause problems. No worries though you will still have a relatively easy time killing enemies and not dying yourself. It just is a bit of an annoyance at times. 6. While the RPG element is kind of cool at first, later on you may realize that every character you make will basically end up the same. Meaning, there doesn't seem to be any real significant variation you can do with character building, which is a huge part of the fun for an RPG. Stats, skills and perks don't seem to make that huge a difference, in the long run. It'd be nice if they had made a more well defined set of classes like a stealth class, soldier class, sniper class or whatever and had given each class special advantages and disadvantages, but the way the game is designed you can basically max almost all the skills on one guy, if you build him right. And some skills seem to be fairly weak or useless like unarmed fighting, or speech. 7. For some reason, as I got closer and closer to the end of my game, the game started getting hanged up more and more, especially when quicksaving or entering / zoning into a new area (which triggers an autosave). It got so bad that I was afraid to hit the quicksave button because that would usually end up locking the game up for several minutes. I discovered if you just wait patiently for....perhaps 2-3 minutes, it would ALWAYS unlock and start playing as normal. I'll admit the first few times I was not patient and I hit the reset button on my pc, but later I discovered just waiting for a few minutes would eventually work....2-3 minutes can seem like a LONG time. I think it had something to do with my save game files / folder getting larger and larger, i.e. it was probably something to do with all the huge amount of information loading / saving like your character stats, perks, quest flags, thousands of individual items you had in your inventory or storage containers! Once I started another game with a new character and an empty save folder, saving and zoning were back to normal... Anyways, I still have to give this game 4 stars because it is really one of the better single player games to come out in a while, and at least for the first 25-50 hours it can be pretty fun. It has many flaws, but no game is perfect, and the sign of a good game is when the good far outshines the bad, and I think for the most part this game does just that. Do not let my list of negatives throw you off -- 90% of the time you will really enjoy this game, the flaws will likely only start to be noticeable after you have been already playing for several hours, having a blast, and even then, they won't ruin the game. I would definitely add this game to my list of "must-play" games.
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