Fallout
Son of Wasteland stands tall
by Robert Mayer
Interplay
DEMO: Fallout
FIRST LOOK: Fallout
INTERVIEW: Tim Cain
NEWS: Fallout Lands
NEWS: Fallout Masters
NEWS: New Fallout
NEWS: Sierra Signs Fallout Cre ...
PREVIEW: Fallout
TIPS: Fallout

hey finally did it. Years ago, they fought a nuclear war, and trashed most of the world. In the western United States, or what's left of it, the last remnants of humanity struggle on among the blasted ruins of once-great cities, or deep under the earth in massive Vaults, refuges built before the war in anticipation of the Armageddon to come. That's where you come in. As inhabitants of Vault 13, you and yours are faced with extermination as your water supply is failing. The Overseer, the chief of the Vault, taps you to go into the hostile outside world and search for a waterchip, an electronic part needed to restore the Vault's ability to produce fresh water. Buckling on your trusty pistol, you shoulder your pack and head out into a world you've only known through stories and myth. You're going out there, and who knows if you'll be coming back?

Shot One So begins Interplay's latest RPG, Fallout. Building on the post-apocalyptic world made famous in the old 8-bit classic Wasteland, Fallout blends satire, cynicism, and humor with a healthy dose of grim, gritty conflict into one of the most enjoyable, if rather short, RPGs in recent memory. From the opening video, done in a faux-retro style featuring futuristic television broadcasts extrapolated from 1950s culture, to the ever-present Fallout Boy cartoon character who adorns various parts of the manual and interface screens, the atmosphere in the game treads the line between the serious and the sardonic. Reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, much of the game has a steam-tech Neo-Victorian look to it, coupled with some very modern, high-tech weaponry. The intent, it seems, is to convey the sense of a medium to high-tech world suddenly reduced to low-tech savagery, but with vestiges of the old world hanging on. By and large, Interplay succeeds dramatically in setting this mood, and fans of Mad Max and other end-of-civilization romps should feel right at home.

Shot Two The setting is Southern California, which is portrayed as nothing but a blasted wasteland of ruined cities, mutated monsters, and desolate emptiness. Having a real place as its setting adds verisimilitude to the game, but hinders replayability, as placement of minor locations like, say, Los Angeles, cannot easily be moved about without arousing derision. Most experienced RPG fans will have little trouble grasping the basics of Fallout. Characters sport the usual bundle of statistics and skills, adapted for the mixed-tech environment of the game. While this is definitely a single character RPG, there are a bazillion ways to customize one's game-world surrogate. What is more, the game actually allows characters with very different abilities to do equally well (or nearly so). Building a walking death machine is not the only solution; the entire game can be played pretty successfully with an emphasis on stealth and technology, or on silver-tongued diplomacy. Combat is a key part of the game, however, and fans of turn-based RPG battles will be in near-Nirvana. Weapons range from the mundane (brass knuckles) to the outrageous (flamethrowers), and many feature different types of ammunition for different occasions. Only the absence of true, player-controlled compadres takes the shine off the battles in Fallout, that and the occasional brain-dead behavior of NPCs who are ostensibly helping out. It is even possible to kill the bad guys with, of all things, a BB gun.

Shot Three All in all, it's a very good system. It's very non-linear, in that outside of three major quests, there is nothing really pushing the player towards specific locations or actions. This non-linearity comes at a price, though. As it is impossible for the designers to predict what players will do and where they will go once they've left Vault 13, all sorts of anomalies are possible. It is easily possible for players to kill NPCs or accomplish tasks out of sequence, thus making future conversations with important NPCs rather problematic, or at least frustrating. In Junktown, for example, after helping the "mayor" kill a wicked casino operator, on subsequent visits with that same mayor he betrays no knowledge of what has transpired. Likewise, the quest to "find the water thief" in Vault 13 magically appears, already marked as accomplished, with no direct input from the player; and the final voice-over after winning the game lists events that the player never experienced. It turns out that the game is extrapolating; actions by the player have prevented certain things from coming to pass. Not a flaw, really, just disconcerting to the uninitiated. Each location exists independently of the others, so it is entirely possible to stumble upon a place meant for a later period in the game and "solve" a still unimagined quest (usually by killing the bad guys). This isn't necessarily bad, as it removes those frustrating and unsatisfying "triggers" that bedevil so many RPGs, but it does mean that players have to develop a strong tolerance for, um, temporal anomalies.

Shot Four The biggest complaint about Fallout, really, is its brevity. This problem is intimately related to the game's non-linear structure. There are three main, make-or-break quests in Fallout. The first is the waterchip search; failing this means death for the Vault and the end of the game. After that, the player has 500 days (or 400, based on how the first quest went) to kill the Master, leader of the plan to rule the world with mutant super-humans. Failure to do so in the time allotted leads to, you guessed it, destruction of the vault and the end of the game. The other major quest is to destroy the base where the Mutants spawn; destruction of this base, along with the death of the Master, ends the game favorably. Theoretically, one could simply kill the Master, and then play on indefinitely, until the time was ripe for ending the game. In practice, this isn't too likely. Putting aside the reluctance of gamers to pass up a sure win, by the time a player is strong enough to take on the mutant base or the Master (and it doesn't take more than a few evenings' play to get to that level), most of the other challenges in the game are anticlimactic. Wandering around the wastelands in power armor, armed to the teeth with energy weapons, makes fighting cave rats something of a letdown.

Shot Five That's not really a fatal flaw, though – far from it. It is perfectly possible to ramble around the wasteland, accomplishing good (or bad) deeds at a more leisurely pace. There's just nothing to prevent a lucky, perceptive, or aggressive gamer from ripping through the game in 20-30 hours of gaming. With judicious use of saves, it's quite possible to rocket up levels, gain powerful weapons, and win the game without even touching on most of the mini-quests. Of course, even a short game delivers 25-40 quality gaming hours, with the possibility for replay being high; despite its initial brevity, Fallout certainly does well in the "bang for the buck" category. Other quibbles – lack of effective NPC assistance in combat, some muddled and obtuse quests, the general sameness of interior locations – are not nearly enough to take the bloom off this radioactive rose. Some users have reported a handful of other problems, but none of those showed up in the gaming done for this review. Overall, in fact, Fallout performs very well in the technical department, with the minor exception of some interface slowdown with anything less than a full install.

Fallout might not be the game for everyone. Its theme is dark, though with a certain black humor twist. The emphasis is definitely on combat, and the game provides a good turn-based combat system, oodles of weapons (each with distinct ammo types, making for such rich decisions as armor piercing vs. high explosive rounds), and lots of gory ways to die. Puzzles are really non-existent, in the sense of those in the Wizardry games or other "classic" RPGs for example. Instead, in keeping with the game's fiction, most "puzzles" are really technical mysteries that are fairly logical and intuitive. There's only one character to control directly, and interaction with the world is less than in some action games. For anyone with an interest in complex, combat-heavy, lovingly produced RPGs, though, Fallout is a must buy. In an age where many are predicting the death of traditional RPGs at the hands of multiplayer extravaganzas, Fallout is a glowing example of the genre, one which positively radiates quality. Fallout – it's da bomb.

Requirements:

DOS
  • 90MHz Pentium or higher
  • 32MB of RAM
  • 2X CD-ROM
Windows 95
  • 90MHz Pentium or higher
  • 16MB of RAM
  • 2X CD-ROM
MacOS
  • System 7.12 or higher
  • PowerMacintosh
  • 16MB of RAM
  • 2X CD-ROM
Multiplayer: None
©1997 Strategy Plus, Inc.

Fallout (A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game)WIN 95/DOS IBM CD ROM 10/97 $14.95
Fallout 2 IBM CD ROM 11/98 $18.95