ElPolloLoco82

This game starts off too slow and currently has too many technical issues. On the XBox One X, it's practically unplayable and desperately needs a big a patch to get it into a playable state. I was getting dashboarded in both co-op and single player about once every hour, and regardless if I was the host or not, there is no way to rejoin the game and everyone must quit and regroup in the host's lobby. It also doesn't seem to have matchmaking, so you have to preassemble your squad before playing. Pros: -The Environment and the Script It's impressive that a 12 man team could create a world as they such did, it does look good and has layers upon layers built on top of each other. People also seem to like the writing and find it quite funny and a lot like Borderlands in that regard. However, for whatever reason I can't explain why, I just didn't care and wanted every cutscene and dialog to just end, and I think subconsciously my mind just didn't want to absorb anything story or plot wise from this game. To me, it's just another futuristic "corporations and capitalism bad" plotline, like they are trying to indoctrinate us into some sort of communist revolution that will set us back 100 years. The bad: -Combat You have to rely on running around the enemy in circles and an auto aim feature that stops working the second melee enemies get nuts-to-butts with you. Enemy spawns and their group configuration make using cover pointless, because they tend to always ambush you with spawns coming from the area you just passed through and flush you out with melee mobs. This extremely problematic before get augments and modifications. -Map and Navigation The map is 3-D rendered and hard to get used to. Quest navigation stops working and will lead you to literally no where and then it will change and send you 600 meters to another new nowhere. Quest navigation issues can be patched, the map needs an overhaul. -Traveling the world Before you unlock taxis and the ability to fast travel, the game feels like a walking simulator where you get attacked every 50m to get to your objective 1500m away. Along the way, you can be fighting enemies at or below your level, and then you get a mob that's 10 levels higher than you, highlighted with skulls, that will kill you with a sneeze. -The game isn't deep Each area seems to have one of each type of weapon, so while you are on that level you will see the same guns and armor drop over-and over until you go to the next area. Weapon skins you acquire disappear from your inventory completely when you quit the game or get dashboarded and restart the game, so acquiring them is pointless until that's patched. Upgrades are basic with no customization given to upgrade the gun; armor can't be upgraded, and the only build control you is in where you allocate your attribute points and the gear you equip. It's simple and in no way deep. Use items that coincide with your attribute point distribution, that's the basic idea. Any depth this game has can only be attributed to the lore and world building and not to the gameplay aspect in it's current state. Verdict This game is currently in a broken state and gets a 4/10, for now. If properly patched, it's a solid 6/10 or 7/10; and I'm not going to boost the score because it was made by a 12 man team or costs $30 to purchase, if you don't have Ultimate or Gamepass. It's impressive what they did, but it doesn't make it any less broken. At this point it has no end game and I see no real point in why anyone would choose to play it again or invest more than 2 weekends on.

When I started playing this game, I was deeply enthralled. Yet the longer I played, the more that feeling dulled. The game isn't very long when you compare it to similar titles and the number of things you can do outside the quests is sorely lacking. I found the companions pretty dull and felt that any interaction I had with them was utterly pointless. You have nothing to help you gauge just how well your relationship with them is and I'm unsure if you can even romance anyone. On a positive note, they do seem to carry their weight in fights; as well as you equip them well. Gear is too straight forward. Quality of gear is based on the corporations selling them and pickings are slim and they have one low-level variant and one higher-level variant. There are some unique variants, but you can't mod them and the cost to "tweak" them doubles for each level you raise the weapon. Weapons always drop or are purchasable at the same level no matter what. This **** with the unique items, because you can only tweak them so much before you make it so expensive that it'll make it impossible to level any further. Then the mods, there are only a hand ful of options, may be 3 to 4 options on each modable slot. I found myself running the same weapon in all four of my slots, the only difference being the element damage I modded onto it. They also have some science weapons which you can earn in a side mission, but there are like only 5 or 6 of them and they are all low to mid level with gimmicky effects and low damage and seem to serve more of a utility role than that of providing offense. Example, one pistol shrinks enemies making them weaker and another mind controls an enemy to attack other enemies as long as you are constantly hitting them with the beam of the gun. At least with those weapons, if you get a skill high enough you can cap the amount they charge you tweaking them to 200 bits per level. Combat is clunky. Without the time dilation mechanic, shooting would be insufferable and you'd have to go pure melee. Time dilation works almost like how VATS worked in Fallout 4, except you have full control over aiming. The game isn't open world. The set up is similar to the KOTOR games. You travel to place to place and each world will have a small area that you can operate in. Some world may have multiple maps, but you'd have to be able to dock your ship there to explore there. I feel like this game is getting a buff to its review scores because of how Bethesda and Fallout (Specifically Fallout 76) left a sour taste in its fans mouth and this game was announced after the poor release of Fallout 76 and released after Bethesda broke its promise on additional charges for gameplay improvements and released a broken subscription service. On a functional level, this game is way better than Fallout, on a content level it's sorely lacking. After you beat the game, there's really nothing else to do. You could play its version of hardcore survival mode, but there is really nothing outside of the quests; which you can complete with 48 hours. There aren't many different outcomes to the quests, the difference is how you get there and how it affects your reputation with the other factions. Which, from at least my playthrough, only effected NPC disposition and market prices. I do recommend playing the game, but I don't think I could recommend this game at full retail price to someone sitting on the fence on whether they should buy it. It's worth it on game pass or as a week-long rental, but that's it.

So far, I'm really enjoying this game. If you ever played the Technomancer and/or Mars Logs, it has a similar progression and companion systems as those two games, as well as similar fight mechanics. The combat system is a bit better and doesn't feel as slow and clunky, but they really need to find a way to make it faster and more fluid. So far, the strength of the game has been its quests. Some may seem to drag on a bit, but it's not a bunch of repetitive side **** instance you can have a quest that starts out where you're helping them get a permit so they can peddle their goods, then once you do that you have to find out what happened to their supplier and that leads you into an arena to fight for their freedom. Many quests seem to have similar length and method to them. Graphically, the environment looks good, but the characters appearances are not up to snuff. They just look so out dated, and this would have looked great back in 2010 on the XBox 360. You also have bad synchronization with the visuals and the dialog, It's like a bad dub. Also, the subtitles are filled with typos galore, and you even sometimes see the characters voice the same typo that is all out of place. I also wish the loot system was better. Until some easy way to make gold in this game is found, you get paid way too little for jobs and selling items; and this is a problem because you rarely ever get loot to drop and are forced to have to buy gear at the merchants. I hope they buff the quest rewards because right now they are terrible. If this was a AAA, it'd be disappointing but still a worthy play. I haven't came across anything game breaking or outrageous. All in all, I'm having fun despite the flaws. 8/10 is a good score.

First off, anyone giving this game a "10" are being completely dishonest and/or are trying to offset much of the low scores other users are giving this game. Is this the Fallout that people loved? it is. However, it's like the kid voted "Most Likely to Succeed" and goes on to become an utterly hopeless junkie. They're still the same person, but just the worst version of themselves. Let's discuss the graphics first. The game is slightly better looking than Fallout 4, but isn't as polished. You'll see tons of clipping issues, and you'll also see tons of things floating instead of resting on the ground. The gameplay for the most part is the same as Fallout 4, except they made VATS real time. VATS occasionally works, and when it doesn't it's frustrating. Like, when you have 95% chance to smash a Stingwing with your super sledge, just to hear the thump of the hit and see your AP go down and the Stingwing take 0 damage. Then you see the same result the next 4 times you try it. VATS is only really useful to close distance in Melee or to land a shot on an extremely agile enemy. Then there's the stash issue, and the fact that they lowered the base carry limit from the prior games. So having strength of 10 only gives you 200 units of weight you can carry before you become encumbered, and they give you 400 units for stash. Not to mention, this game is set in the "survival mode" of the previous Fallout 4 and New Vegas. So everything has weight. Oh, and good luck trying to sell anything. Vending machines have 200 caps to buy, and yet you can't sell to them. Vendor bots and various traveling merchants have 200 caps available to buy and it takes forever for them to restock; and when you buy from them, only a small percentage of the caps are returned to the vendors available caps. Also, you can't sell most items. When you can, you get pennies on the dollar; even with max haggling perks, everything always is sold to you at a significant mark up. This inventory issue was the biggest complaint throughout the BETA, and it's unacceptable that it wasn't fixed prior to launch. I've spent 99% of my time in game over-encumbered and unable to fast travel. I've been super encumbered, and forced to crawl , for way too long. That's with weight reducing perks and other tricks. Then there are the broken quests. How do I love having my quest giver reside on the SW corner of the map and my objective being on the NE corner and get to the objective just to realise you can't interact with the object in order to complete the quest. Then another you need to search an area and install a tracking signal; only to have the tracking signal stop working; and when you quit, you have no way to install it again, so you it makes finding the item like looking for a needle in a haystack. I've come across at least 3 quests with quest breaking bugs. Death in Fallout 76 is like Dark Souls, just instead of dropping all your souls on death you drop all your junk in a, at times hard to see, brown paper bag with all the junk you've accumulated. Usually, when you try to retrieve it while you have a marker to guide you, you either get ambushed by some radically OP mob of enemies like Death Claws, Glowing Ones, Wendigo, Scorchbeast and Yao Gui. They also have a real problem with enemy and weapon balancing, which can be compounded by getting swarmed by the mob of top of the food chain. I hit a KIng Mirelark with 2 mini-nukes, and it may have only took 1/4 of their health; and it was equivalent to the level of the Fatman I was using. Yet, back to my point on retrieving your loot after death, if you die before retrieving it, good luck trying to find it then afterwards. You'll still 400 units over encumbrance. Also, people can take your stuff if they get to it before you do. Bounty system is broken, and because of it there is no way to escape PvP. You can open a nonplayer owned box, that clearly doesn't have a player owned item in it, only to get a message that you have a bounty for stealing another player's stuff. Yet when you actually take another player's loot from a world loot box, you get nothing. If you have "pacifist" mode on, it's literally like stealing candy from a baby for anyone hunting you. You do significantly less damage and they can do full. So never, ever, ever, put on "pacifist" mode. Player's can still kill you, and they usually wait to wail on you while you're in someway indisposed so they can whittle you to death, if you never intend to engage them back; and then they get a bounty for murder. You get like 10 caps for a bounty, and basic ammo is like 5 caps each at a vendor. Final verdict, is the game fun or have some redeeming qualities? Yes, it can be fun. Even with the "emptiness" and lack of civilized life, it has potential. The fact that they knew about these issues by no later than day 2 of the BETA and failed to fix it by launch, is why the scores, and mine, are so low.

I've played through most of the campaign and multi-player, and I think the game is really good. However, it has some balancing issues with the campaign and the partner AI needs a lot of work. I'm also not crazy about some of the Arena maps, and they have some spawning issues. I'm going to go in more detail in a bit. The game, itself, looks amazing and has some of the best gameplay mechanics that you'll experience in any 1st person shooter. When in the campaign, everything looks so real. Some of the levels look absolutely gorgeous. The cutscenes will absolutely blow you away. I'm not finished with the campaign, so I can't comment on the total quality of the story; but half way through I find myself pushing through to find out what happens next. About the issues I had with partner AI and why the campaign needs some rebalancing. You'll feel the re-balancing issue more so on Legendary difficulties. Partner AI rarely ever follow the orders given to them, and they take their merry time getting into position. They also don't have a way to give a command to a specific AI partner. This gets you killed quite often in Legendary mode. You can spend 5 minutes trying to get them to man turrets, or attempt to split the group in half so you can operate 2 warthogs. Sometimes all 3 will go to the same warthog, and sometimes one comes with you and only one will go to the directed warthog. You will feel this on the "Glass" mission, especially when trying to push through to get the skull on the map (it's the only skull that requires the mission be played on "Legendary" difficulty). The lack of coordination makes it even more difficult than it needs to be to try and beat harder difficulties. Moving on to balancing, Legendary difficulty is "stupid" hard. You could unload a couple clips into a regular enemy before they finally fall; not to mention that all enemies seem to aggro to the user character and tend to lay off AI controlled players. They also are ridiculously accurate, and deal a ton of damage. It's so bad, that in areas that require the use of a vehicle you're better off having AI work a turret. If you man the turret, you'll be dead within a few seconds of running into hostiles. You'll be lucky to kill anything. If using the machine gun turret, you have to lay down and hit for a a continuous 5 seconds to take out enemies right above the grunt level. Being they're lax in targeting AI partners, they'll focus on you as the driver and usually hit the vehicle which will shield while you whip around (AI drivers typically drive like they are trying to parallel park every 50 ft). Because of this, co-op may actually be harder on Legendary than single player in some parts. I actually had a Scorpion get blown up 100 ft from the garage I pulled it out of by a knight, a regular mob, and a couple slow shooting anti-vehicle turrets. The turrets and knight took multiple shells to knock out; when I finally got to a checkpoint, I was stuck in the scorpion and was continuously getting it blown up within 5 secs of checkpoint reloading. Barely enough time to abandon ship, and my partner operating the turret usually dies because they don't abandon the vehicle before it explodes. I was dying within a few seconds because they could are ridiculously accurate. If you're flying around and they have a 1/4" of room to hit you on the fly, you best believe they'll get you. There is hardly any type of cover, to make it remotely fair. It's beyond Dark Souls difficulty, and feels cheap at times. They either need to spread the aggro more evenly and make the partner AI as smart as enemy AI, or decrease enemy health/weapon dam/accuracy. As for multiplayer, Warzone is awesome. However, there are spawning issues in Arena, and some in Warzone. You often spawn in and immediately get head shot before you can even move. Sometimes you spawn two feet from where you were killed so whomever killed you gets an easy double kill. They need to address that, because that will cause some people to rage quit. It felt like "Battlefront Beta Light" with the spawning. I also am not crazy about some of the maps in Arena, some just look like modern art and are ugly as sin. They're easy to get lost in or turned around in, and with that ugly architecture in some levels it just makes your head hurt. Most of these issues can get fixed in updates, so I'm not going to destroy this game over some pet peeves. If you loved Halo before, you'll love this one. It is improved upon; but it does require some fine tuning.

First off, I'd say any review that was done after a couple of hours of playing this game is not going to accurately represent this game. I played this game for about a month and a half before I got tired of it. What this game suffers most from is from being over-hyped and our own expectations being so high that it would be hard for this game to ever meet them. With that said, much of the criticism is legit; however, most of the reviews are shallow and give this game a score on either extreme at the absolute extreme. Is the game repetitive? Absolutely. You'll feel this even more when you play alone. This game is meant to be played with friends, and it's definitely more enjoyable when you have someone else in your fire team to chat with. Is the story lacking? Absolutely, again. In fact, the game goes out of it's way to rub this in your face with lines like "I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain". It's like the story was built to make you buy the DLC, like the whole main game you paid $60 for is a teaser for DLCs that are to come later. What will really make you mad, is when you find out that the DLC is already on the game disc or original game download, and the DLC you purchase is nothing more than a digital key to unlock it. Another criticism you'll hear, is about the game's loot system. It was obnoxiously atrocious and Bungie's response before fixing was even more obnoxious, by blaming the players for not getting or appreciating what they were trying to do with it. They've fixed this, but let me tell tell you how it was. You get as rewards, or random drops, what they call engrams. You take these engrams to this guy called "The Cryptarch" who decrypts them to reveal an item. These engrams dropped as certain colors: white,green,blue, and purple. White was for common gear, and you don't need the cryptarch to decode them; however, he sells them and they can either become common (white) item or uncommon (green) item when you purchase them from him. Green engrams are uncommon, but they have a chance to become blue (rare) items or white (common) items; these too, at some point will become straight item drops that are automatically a green item that doesn't need a cryptarch to decrypt, usually around level 14 you'll start seeing that not all green engrams need the cryptarch. Now you have blue engrams, which were updated with later patches. These had the opportunity to drop green (uncommon), blue (rare), purple (legendary) quality items or crafting materials or some sort of special currency to use at special vendors. After a patch, they removed the opportunity to become green items and increased the likelihood of obtaining a legendary (although the odds are still extremely slim). Those dropped relatively rarely. Now the legendary engrams, which hardly ever drop and this is what got everyone so mad early on, would have the chance to becoming a green (uncommon), blue (rare), purple (legendary), yellow (exotic), crafting materials, or special currency. What had everyone complaining was that these items would become blue items or worse 80% of the time. After the patch, they removed the chances of them producing green or blue items. The loot system was terrible at launch, and it seemed the only way to get legendary or better equipment was to grind for special currency and buy them from the various vendors. Activities rarely provided any loot back then. That's all been fixed in patches though. The main problem with loot is nothing really looks all that different, and there isn't much variety to the weapons. Legendary weapons don't feel that legendary either; and the exotics (the actual legendaries of this game) are only slightly better with a unique ability. You also can only have one exotic weapon and armor piece equipped at anytime; which is lame, because they aren't that much better than other types of gear. Another criticism maybe with the leveling, or light system. I agree, it's lame. It makes being able to do raids, some strikes, weekly or daily challenges completely gear dependent. The ideal level in this game is level 28 (Hit the level cap of 20 and have an extra 8 levels of light to equal level 28). You need gear with light on it, and you need to upgrade said gear to get it that high. If you want to continue playing in the Crucible (PvP), it won't concern you that much; but if you want to do raids and get the best gear in the game, you need to grind crafting materials and legendary armor gear to get to the appropriate level. What is amazing in this game, is the gameplay and the graphics. It plays extremely smooth. The foundation is there, but Bungie may have done too much to alienate much of the fans. Once Call of Duty came out, most players have left. This game still has huge potential, but they need to fix their missteps in order for this game to reach both the hype and our expectations