Intelligent Game Reviews

Intelligamer
Intelligent Choice

Late last year Interplay released a little game called Fallout. Billed as a post apocalyptic role playing game it was without doubt the RPG of the year, and in many books, mine included, was the best game of 1997. A year later and the inevitable sequel debuts. Can it possibly live up to the reputation of the original? In a word, no, but you’re going to love it nonetheless.

The Story

It is eighty years after the end of Fallout. Your character in that game, the Vault Dweller, after being cast out from the home that he saved, wandered the wastelands and eventually settled down in southern Oregon and founded a small village known as Arroyo. It is here that you, a descendant of that great hero, were born.

But not all is well in Arroyo. The simple villagers are struggling to survive, crops are failing, and the village is on the brink of destruction. You play the part of “The Chosen,” the one picked to venture forth into the harsh wastes to recover a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K., that will allow the village to prosper once again. All that is known of the G.E.C.K.s are that the great Vaults each had one. And so, with few skills, a spear and a few coins you start on the journey that will change your life and those of many others…

Basics of Play

Fallout 2 is a role playing game. You can take on the persona of an adventurer in the wastelands. This persona is 100% created by you prior to the start of the game. You can set the exact attributes of your character by spending points in seven primary attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. These then determine secondary attributes as well as starting skill levels. You can then pick three skills you are best in (and that will improve faster than the others) as well as two special attributes as well as your name, sex and age. You might think the latter two are of no importance, but sex at least does have an impact on the game. Certain quests are available only to one sex or the other, and characters will treat you differently.

In addition to your primary attributes you have skill ratings in a variety of areas that are unchanged from Fallout. These include combat skills in small weapons, large weapons and in unarmed combat as well as bartering, first aid, outdoor survival, and several others. All of these have an impact on the game, and which skills you choose to excel in will make a huge difference on how you play the game. With the combination of skills and attributes you can create a thief character, a wise cracking wit, a heavy handed brute or a sharp shooter. The choice is yours to make, but it is done without the use of classes as is the case with more traditional RPGs.

As you adventure and undertake quests you gain experience points. As you surpass certain point totals you will go up in level which gives you extra hit points and skill points to use to improve your abilities. Every third level you’ll also get a new Perk, a special new ability that can improve your skills in profound ways. Perks are a neat touch because they really let you customize your character. You can also gain skills by training with NPCs and by finding and using books (for a small set of skills that is). New this time is the ability to raise skills to higher levels than before and the cost of raising skills past 100 gets higher as you continue to raise them. Gone are the days of 150 in small weapons and energy weapons skills unless you are prepared to use all of your skill points there.

The plot and story line in Fallout 2 is non-linear. It is up to you where to go when and what to do next. You can dive right into the main quest line or try something completely different, like Gecko hunting. Regardless of your choice there are a lot of places to go, people to talk to and things to do. The game is much bigger than the original, with more quests, more locations, and special things in abundance. It is also replete with a dark humor which is at times greatly amusing. At one point I managed to mutate and grow a sixth toe. You’ll also find a religious sect known as the Hubologists which is amusing because it pokes serious fun at a real world group.

But because of the dark nature of the subject matter, the wide spread use of drugs and the ability to have sex among other things, Fallout 2 earns its mature rating. This is not a game for kids under 17 in my opinion. Take the rating on the box to heart parents out there!

Since every character will be different and because of the non-linearity of the game, each experience in the wasteland will be unique. This allows great replay value for a game of this type. I had great fun completing the game the first time through, though perhaps not as much as in the original, and am looking forward to finishing my second and third attempts with widely different characters just to see how things happen. That’s the sign of a solid game design, an engaging game, and an Intelligamer Intelligent Choice award winner.

Like Fallout, Fallout 2 is plagued with slow load times. Oddly, it is slower on the largest install than on the second largest. Go figure. Unlike Fallout the game is plagued with a host of small bugs that can make playing the game a bit difficult. The original was rock solid, with nary a bug to be found. This time there are game crashes from time to time, your car will disappear on you (most annoying that!), save games can get corrupted, and dialog trees can be messed up when talking to NPCs. It’s clear that the game was pushed out just a bit too fast, most likely due to the financial troubles at Interplay, but in the end the game is playable even with the bugs. A final version of a patch to address these issues should be available by the time you read this, and the beta version corrected all of the serious problems for me except for the occasional crash.

The Combat System

The combat system comes over unchanged from Fallout, which in my mind is a good thing. I like the phased combat style of the game very much. It leaves time for thinking instead of requiring purely fast twitch reflexes or manual dexterity with the keyboard controls.

For those unfamiliar with the original, Fallout 2 has a lot of combat, but it is phased. Each participant has a sequence rating derived from his primary statistics, faster “monsters” move earlier in a turn. They then can spend action points (based on Agility) to move, fire weapons, reload or do anything else in their turn they like. This gives the combat system a small scale tactical feel. Running away or hiding behind objects can be smart and using the right weapon for the job important. But you aren’t harried, you can consider what to do and then go about it. Don’t be fooled though, combat can be deadly very quickly, with critical hits and serious firepower often arrayed against you. This is especially true early in the game, where even when you face the easier monsters they will outnumber you and your skills, armor and weapons will be nearly non-existent.

Fortunately, this time around your NPC followers are a bit more useful in combat. To start with they can be used as mules to haul stuff around for you. This is especially useful if you have a low strength. You can also upgrade their weapons and armor unlike in Fallout and tell them, more or less, how you want them to act when the excrement hits the fan, so to speak. Match the right weapons with certain NPCs and bam! you can see a whole lot of dead bad guys pretty darned fast. Just be sure not to get in the line of fire if you give them fully automatic weaponry!

The Quests

Quests are the basis of the game. These are typically acquired by talking to the various non-player characters as you wander ab
out the world. The main quest is of course to find a G.E.C.K. and save Arroyo, but there are a host of subquests and side quests you can undertake to gain experience, skills, and cash.

Most quests fall into a few simple categories: fetch and carry, repair, hit man. Indeed, most quests are of the fetch and carry variety. You need to find an item and give it to the NPC to complete the quest. That is often simpler said than done, as many of these can be intertwined to make life pretty complex. For example, you can undertake a quest to find a part for a car, so that it can be repaired and you can drive the wastes in style. The only problem is that this will (in some paths through the game) spawn several other quests so you can get the original item you wanted. Repair quests are as you might expect, you need to make something work properly. Hit man quests require that you kill a certain person or defeat someone or some group in combat.

The nice thing about all of this is that you can take or not take any quests you want. And there are hundreds of them to try. This makes the game approachable from various perspectives. You can choose to be a smooth talking, back stabbing, S.O.B. that sneaks around and steals what he needs or an in your face, bare knuckled brawler who knocks the lights out of everyone and asks questions later. And the game will generally unfold differently when you take these different approaches do to the large number of quests as well as they way they depend on one another, who you have talked to and so on.

This is true at least until the very end of the main quest. There you are pretty much forced to be a one man (or woman) killing machine. I didn’t like this to be honest. In Fallout it was possible to finish the entire game without combat. Not so here, or at least I could not find a way. And that lack of flexibility in the end detracted, at least for me.

The one huge difference in the stories between Fallout 2 and Fallout is that you aren’t operating under time pressure. In Fallout you had to complete the main line quest within a fixed amount of time or lose the game (and the game was really over when you lost). In Fallout 2 you can do whatever you want for as long as you want, the main quest will always be there to return to. This is both good and bad, as it lets you do things in any order without feeling rushed into finishing the game, but it also loses the sense of immediacy that the time limit engendered. You can also keep playing after the main quest is done, something you could not do in the original.

Equipment and Inventory

There is a vast array of equipment and items you can find in the game. Everything from food and libations, tools, and medicinals to a bewildering array of weapons. You’ll find things lying about for you to pick up, you can loot the bodies of slain enemies, or barter for goods with nearly anyone in the game. One nice change from Fallout is that shopkeepers regenerate money and equipment over time, so you can keep selling off the loot you find and purchase what you need. In the original they’d run out of money and goods and you’d basically be left with a decision of what to abandon after every fight.

I liked the wide array of weapons. There is something for everyone… deadly ninja style unarmed combat, melee weapons like sledgehammers and spears, pistols, energy weapons, grenades, rifles and even rocket launchers and automatic fire shotguns! Everyone will find gear to make them happy, and there is an array of powerful combat armor to stop all these deadly weapons as well. But while there is a lot of powerful weaponry laying about in Fallout 2, finding armor is a lot more problematic. In the original nearly every well equipped foe had armor you could loot. Not this time, you’ll have to find it fair and square, ahem, or buy it. I initially found this an annoying change because it forced me to play a certain style in the early game. But, in the long run it wasn’t a serious problem.

Graphics, Sounds, etc.

Graphically Fallout 2 is essentially unchanged from Fallout. The 3D isometric view still looks good and does the job of helping with the action, although small items are not easily found on the ground, especially behind walls or other obstructions. The look is less universally gloomy than the first installment, with a wider range of color and location, but the world is still a pretty crummy place for the most part with devastated terrain predominating.

Voice acting from the “talking heads” or key NPCs is well done with some big name actors lending a hand (Michael Dorn does a top notch job as a Super Mutant). Video segments were excellent… the opening movie as well as the cinematic cut scenes looked and sounded spectacular. Some of the cut scenes are done using the game engine and these I was less fond of. For one thing you can’t skip by them if you had seen them already, and they can be lengthy. The meeting between Vic and his daughter comes to mind… it seemed like ten minutes of watching nothing.

In the sound effects department everything is pretty much as in Fallout. Weapon effects and death throw animations are cool. Ambient sounds from creatures are also nicely done, I like the sounds the Geckos make. Music was excellent as well, if a bit recycled from the original. Some locations had new music, and this was well done, but many used music from Fallout that I had heard enough of. It isn’t that the original music was bad mind, it’s just that I’ve heard it all before. The reuse of the music, graphics and even to an extent the main line plot gives the game a bit of a recycled “been there done that” feel which is the main reason it isn’t as good as its predecessor.

The manual is wonderful, with complete instructions on game mechanics and encyclopedic descriptions of skills, perks, and traits. All game manuals should be so well put together. It not only provides the information you want, but does so in an entertaining way that fits with the game perfectly.

The Verdict

Although it is bigger, and more adult, than the original, Fallout 2 doesn’t quite measure up. But that’s like saying that your kid sister doesn’t quite measure up to Cindy Crawford. Fans of Fallout will find the second trip into the wasteland nearly as intriguing as the first and I recommend Fallout 2 to any RPG fan. Just be sure to get the patch to correct the various “premature shipment” bugs.

Fallout 2 Screenshots

Combat is more essential than in the original, which could be completed without striking a blow in anger.	Non player character followers are more useful this time around. You can give them far more detailed orders.
The various cut scenes, although not altogether common, are nicely done and help move the main story line along.	I’ve always wanted to meet the President of the United States. Here’s my chance!

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