Fallout 76

So utterly disappointing and flawed in every possible way… The first few hours, most of it can be ignored, and occasionally the flaws can be forgotten, but only briefly before they come storming back to the forefront. An awful, boring, empty, pointless experience. There is, however, a glimmer of hope. It's worth mentioning that there has already been a Bethesda title that was equally as unimpressive: The Elder Scrolls Online - but looking at it now, it has transformed into one of the best MMOs out there. There's always the hope the Fallout 76 develops the same way and becomes something special, but for now, that seems impossible. It's a world away from that.

Maybe they can turn this game around. Maybe they can fix the bugs, add some actual life into the world, and make it to where playing with friends is more than just a co-op buddy. They did a lot for Elder Scrolls Online, maybe they can do it here, but I’ll be the first to tell you to wait until that happens before taking these country roads home.

The issue is these positives are dwarfed remarkably by the huge and underlying pitfalls of this title. Even if the countless glitches get fixed, and updates whip the technical side of the game into shape, there are intrinsic issues in the mechanics of Fallout 76. This hurts for me to say as a fan of the Fallout series, but 76 is a slog to play, a chore to deal with and certainly not worth your time.

Despite what many would say, Fallout 76 could have worked on paper. What could have been a brilliant coop adventure in the Fallout world however, has turned into a wasteland of poorly executed ideas and flat, dated mechanics. Ironically, despite the a multiplayer focus, the wastelands of Fallout has never felt as barren or lonely as this.

At launch, Fallout 76 is a poor experience. There are echoes of the series' admirable qualities, but look past that facade, past the cute Vault Boy animations, past the familiar radio tracks, and you'll find no heart--just an inconsequential wasteland doomed to be nuked over and over again.

Fallout 76 is an ambitious game that’s burned by it. The online features hamper what could have been a great Fallout game.

Previous Fallout games always had something to say about the post-apocalypse and the human factors that led to it; here, it’s reduced to shooting mutants and picking up rubbish. Even if, in the future, it mutates into something more stable, it will still feel eerily soulless.

Fallout 76 has potential. It’s there, past the bugs and glitches that pervade the experience. Past the frequently disappointing quests and the unfulfilling locales. Past the dreary combat and the multiplayer that is as much a focus of the entire game as it is an afterthought in design. Past the sense that war has changed, and that Bethesda will continue to push Fallout further away from the elements that made the franchise so popular in the first place...Past all of that, Fallout 76 can be enjoyable. But to get that enjoyment, you have to put up with far too much.

Fallout 76 is a seriously shoddy attempt at trying to cash in on the multiplayer survival market. Fallout with friends is an intriguing concept on paper, but we can't think of many more ways that Bethesda could have screwed it up. Every online aspect of the release is half-baked and poorly implemented, but even as a single player experience, Fallout 76 would fall flat thanks to its archaic design and astoundingly poor world building. If you really, really enjoyed the gameplay loop of Fallout 4 and want to share it with friends, you might just find nuggets of fun scattered throughout, but even then, you're better off waiting to see whether Bethesda can fix the game's unforgivable technical performance. Fallout 76 is a stain on the developer's record, and one that won't be easily scrubbed clean.

Fallout 76 had a lot to say when it was revealed. It was multiplayer, it had the largest world of any Fallout, it was going to be fun. The trouble is that it just doesn’t work, the world is too big and empty, and the quest design as uninspired as it gets. If the only way for a game to be entertaining is by having your friends make jokes about it as you journey together, then it has failed at one of the things that most games should be. It has failed at being fun, it has failed at being entertaining in its own right.