Fallout Tactics Review

Quick review: Decent, but goddamn it was long; could’ve been better though.

Longer review

For this review I’m going to do something a little bit different, I’ll review the game by dissecting the title into its two parts: Fallout and Tactics, so let’s get this post apocalyptic puppy going.

The Fallout part

Now I’m a huge Fallout fan, I’ve played through the first two games several times, with several types of characters, read the Fallout Bible, played the long defunct Van Buren tech-demo, only played through Fallout 3 once and I had some problems with it which I hear got fixed in its later DLCs so I’ll obviously give it another look in the near future; anyway I love the Fallout games and a lot of it has to do with the atmosphere and particular style that the creators of the first games managed to bring to my computer screen.

The Fallout universe exists in a particular kind of retro-future landscape, where (or when) human history takes a different road and everything futuristic that was envisioned in the ‘50s actually happened in later decades, and since the ‘50s were big on nuclear power we get treated to nuclear-powered cars and all sorts of nuclear-powered weapons and robots, mutated critters and generally crazy cool stuff.

The other thing that makes the first two Fallout games incredibly awesome is the turn-based nature of the game, which is arguably the only true way you can do justice to it and of course the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat and skill system around which your character revolves – which I won’t go into detail right now, suffice to say that I have not seen a more elegant and common sense system yet.

The first games offer you an incredible amount of freedom as to customizing your character and more crucially offering you a different experience every time you play it with a different type of character or with different types of choices that you have to make throughout the games giving the games an insanely high replay value. This is where Fallout Tactics fails, because while you can customize your character in a satisfactory manner, there is absolutely no chance of getting a different experience from a second play-through since you don’t have that much of a choice as to how the storyline goes.

As far as the atmosphere of the series goes the game delivers somewhat, however you only get to experience a very small part of what the first two games managed to do; you only get to do a lot of fighting not a lot of talking except when you receive briefings.

The Tactics part

This is where the crux of the problem lies with the game; this is the part of the game that mostly fails.

Let’s get the good parts out first. The game offers you a couple of turn-based options which you can try out and see which one suits you best. Another good feature of the tactics part of the game is the sentry mode which you can customize to different levels. This means that you can set up your party to automatically engage in combat at certain to-hit chances, thus allowing you to get the first shot in when in an encounter. This sounds great in theory but if you want to actually hit your enemy you’ll probably have to advance a bit while under enemy fire. You could set up the feature to start up combat when one member of your party just sees an enemy but this means that the game switches from real time to turn-based and you’re stuck with advancing only a couple of steps per turn, take it from me this is going to take a long goddamn amount of time and it’s better to just be very attentive and sometimes let the enemy have the first shot.

When it comes to your party the game does offer you a lot of choices between different members, whether you want snipers, trappers, medics or big gun aficionados. The problem is that in none of your briefings there are no tip-offs or clues – except for when you’ll need a pilot - as to what sort of party you should take with you, so unless you want to spoil the game a bit and check out a walkthrough make sure you have someone from each category.

Now considering combat takes place in turn-based mode, one would think that the game would come with the option of letting you see the grid pattern that the game actually works on. The older games had the option of showing you the grid pattern or even better the cursor in the old games was hexagonal shaped so even if you couldn’t see the grid you could still make it out because the cursor would slightly snap to the grid. This won’t happen in Tactics because you can’t see the grid and the cursor is just a simple oval and this will lead to any number of fuck-ups because you won’t see if a certain place on the map is actually accessible and you’ll click there and watch in amazement how your character starts going back or around some obstacle you didn’t think was an obstacle thus wasting the turn.

One obstacle that you can see and yet cannot avoid is the stairs and ladders which most maps will contain. These are some of the most annoying, god-awful, fucking action-point sucking traps in the game. If you’re in combat mode and have to go up or down stairs/ladders, then you better make goddamn sure that you’re controlling each of the characters individually because trying to move them all at the same time will be met with disaster. Thanks to the shitty lack of a visible grid pattern you’ll be amazed to watch your fuckers either walk around the stairs or go in a whole different direction because there are already two characters on the stairs and they just can’t go up. Stairs and ladders are annoying to deal with even when you’re not in combat, but wasting valuable action-points to get past them, coupled with the crap control you get whilst doing so makes them by far the worst part of the game.

Anyway the length of this review is getting out of hand so I’d better stop it here since I mentioned most of the crap I though important.

Conclusion: It could’ve been a whole of a lot better and although I don’t regret the hours I spent playing and finishing it I will never play this motherfucker ever again, as opposed to its prequels which get into rotation every couple of years.