Fallout 4 a fantastic addition despite glitches

“Fallout 4” is a landmark achievement for the action-adventure RPG genre, marred by Bethesda’s patented technical glitches.

From the moment you step foot outside the safety of vault 111, you are placed into a vast beautiful open world with a million creatures just waiting to trying and kill you. The game takes place in Boston after nuclear bombs dropped turning the city into a wasteland.

Compared to previous entries in the series, “Fallout 4’s” world is about as bright and vibrant as a nuclear decimated world can get. There’s nothing quite like standing on top of a tall building and taking in Fallout’s map in all of it’s beauty. The world you’ll be exploring is equally dangerous as it is beautiful.

Starting out you’ll be taking on mutated mole rats, cockroaches, and bugs and the occasional raider. The game does a good job of easing you in to combat, which is great because the shear size of the map and amount of things to do make even little things like fighting feel a little overwhelming.

One tool you have at your disposal while fighting against super-mutants, feral ghouls and synths is a Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting Systems. The VATS slows down time and allows you to pick where you want to attack your enemy. This is a subtle yet welcome change from other games in the franchise where it would completely freeze time. When the time slows down, it still makes you vulnerable to enemy attacks so it’s best to use it tactically rather than completely relying on it at all times.

For the many things that “Fallout 4” gets right, there is a huge glaring problem that anyone who has played a Bethesda game is all too aware of. This game is glitch — far more than any triple A video game should ever be. The occasional frame rate drop is forgivable; I can turn a blind eye to character models acting up here and there, but “Fallout 4” throws all of that, plus hard crashes and major frame rate drops, are not acceptable. Nothing is more infuriating than making a lot of progress on a mission only to have the game crash and lose it all.

At the time of this review I had my game hard crash three times over the course of seven days. That’s three times too many for a game of this caliber. For so long fans of Bethesda games have given them a free pass for the glitches because the rest of the game is so excellent.

Don’t get it twisted, there are a fair amount of technical issues but “Fallout 4” is a great game that I have been and will continue to play for hours.