[media-credit name=”Concept art from Fallout 4″ align=”alignright” width=”300″][/media-credit]

So for those of you who didn’t read my last post, I am taking 3 posts to review Fallout 4. This is because it is such a big game with so many different aspects to cover. This week I will focus on the story telling.

Story is one of the most important parts of a video game. In my own opinion, I would say it’s possibly the most important part. Games with good stories are automatically some of my favorite games. Examples of this are Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake. It is an unfortunate fact that I cannot list Fallout 4 in this list. The story isn’t bad so far. It’s interesting and has some cool moments, but it has a twist that I saw coming since before the game was even out. It has an overarching theme that was handled in a much better way earlier this year with the game Soma.

This is a good setup but by the time you figure out what happened and why, you can guess the twist of where your son is pretty easily. Like normal, the side stories are better written and are by far more interesting than the main story but other than a few cool references to things like Pickman’s Gallery with H.P.Lovecraft, none of them are better than side stories in Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. Nothing in this game really pushes the boundaries of gaming stories at all. The major story begins before the bombs fall (side note, its kinda cool that this is the first game to show pre-war Fallout).

You and your wife live a comfortable life in the Boston area when the bombs start to fall on America. You take your one year old child and your wife and run for the nearest vault. The vaults are massive bomb shelters built by a company called Vault-Tec. Most of the vaults were actually social experiments, and vault 111, your vault, is no different. Your family and you are frozen into a cryogenic freezer. Years later you wake up to see a mysterious man shoot your wife and kidnap your baby, all while you are unable to move to save them. Years after that you awake again and manage to escape the vault.

To be fair, I didn’t expect it to beat Silent Hill 2 or Alan Wake, but the overall generic plot was a let down from the better plot of Fallout: New Vegas. I’m hoping that the DLC can follow the path of the Fallout 3 DLC and have amazingly cool stories like Mothership Zeta and The Pit, but that’s a review for another time.

To read more from the last movie, check out Fallout 4 review part 1.