The first wave of Fallout 4 reviews are starting to come in

We’ve spent the last seven years waiting for Fallout 4 to be released, but it’s the next twelve hours that’re going to be the most difficult. I’m sure most Fallout fans have already pre-ordered the game, so reviews probably aren’t going to have an effect, but for those of you who still want to see what reviewers have to say, Bethesda has lifted the review embargo it had on the game, and reviews are starting to come in by the boat load. There are dozens of them to read, but the consensus is that it’s buggy, but not as buggy as previous Bethesda games, and has one of Bethesda’s best stories to date. The gameplay is as amazing as everyone expected, though not much different from Fallout 3, which isn’t a bad thing. 

Did you love everything about Fallout 3? If so, you’re in luck because the reviews are in and they generally agree that Fallout 4 is very similar to its predecessor. Even though the game was in development for seven years, it seems developer Bethesda took an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to the latest game in the series. Below we’ll recap some of the early reviews of the game, which almost uniformly praise it as one of the year’s best games despite (or because of?) its similarities to Fallout 3. Polygon gives the game a 9.5 out of 10 rating and it says the game has the best story of any Bethesda game yet. While this isn’t the highest praise since neither Fallout 3 or any of the recent Elder Scrolls games won any literary prizes, it seems the game does a very nice job of giving you genuinely difficult choices to make throughout that have major consequences on the world around you: “Bethesda leverages this dynamic, along with the strongest writing it’s ever managed, to present really difficult choices in the latter half of the game’s “story.” In turn, it’s exponentially more complicated than the Enclave vs. Brotherhood of Steel narrative from Fallout 3 or even the mangled amnesia plot line of New Vegas. It dawned on me fairly early into Fallout 4 that my choices could have unexpected consequences that wouldn’t be clear till later. As I approached the last third of the game, I agonized over trying to do the right thing — or even knowing what the right thing was.Fallout 4 played enough with my expectations of its fiction to keep me guessing, and its endgame is tense and fantastic for it.”