GB Feature: Fallout 4 Review

As I’m sure many of you can attest to, we’ve been spending an absurd amount of time with Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout 4 over the past several weeks, and that has led to this weekend’s publishing of our full review. There’s quite a bit to take in here, but I’ll you with a couple of paragraphs to ponder:

Outside of combat, you spend a lot of time exploring. The world map isn’t all of Massachusetts. It’s just the area around Boston, and it includes places like Fenway Park, Bunker Hill, and MIT (although it’s called CIT in the game). During my first game, I discovered about 250 locations on the map, and I know that I missed some. I also know that there are numerous locations not marked on the map, including apartment buildings, banks, and even a downed UFO where you can pick up the ever popular alien blaster. So there is plenty of content to work your way through. I spent over 100 hours playing my first game, and I didn’t see everything.

Unfortunately, the locations in Fallout 4 aren’t as recognizable as the locations from Fallout 3, and they’re not as fun as the locations from Fallout: New Vegas. The only Boston site that I really know anything about is Fenway Park, and luckily it makes a major appearance in the game, since it’s the home of Diamond City, one of the region’s major hubs. For the rest of the locations, Bethesda could have created everything out of whole cloth (and maybe they did), and I wouldn’t have known the difference. And so while technically the game takes place around Boston, for me it could have been located at any major city anywhere. If Bethesda continues with the franchise, I hope they think a little more globally in the future and try out something like London next.