Fallout 76 review: New direction for popular series is a touch underwhelming

Despite pedigree as part of one of the best role-playing games of the modern era, the multiplayer Fallout 76 ultimately fails to live up to expectations.

What would you do if you survived a nuclear war and emerged from your fallout shelter to discover everyone else was dead and the only people left in the world were you, your fellow shelter residents, and a lot of angry mutants who want to kill you?

Welcome to the world of Fallout 76, developed by Bethesda for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, where your character is one of the lucky residents of Vault 76, a massive underground fallout shelter located in the Appalachian region of the US and designed to protect its inhabitants from the nuclear Armageddon of World War III.

Fans of the Fallout series of role-playing games know the vaults were less about surviving a nuclear holocaust and more about a twisted social experiment — one vault’s water chip was designed to break and there were no spare parts, another vault was full of clones of some poor sod named Gary, another vault was designed for the rich and famous, another one’s blast doors were rigged not to close, a handful of ‘control vaults’ were designed to actually work properly, you get the idea.

Vault 76’s thing is that it was designed to keep its occupants comfortably and safely ensconced and entertained for 25 years, after which point it would open all its doors and let them out into the world, as the song goes. And in true Vault-Tec style, just to make sure everyone left, the life support systems would all be turned off within 24 hours of “Reclamation Day”, which is when Fallout 76 starts.

The game starts familiarly enough, with your character waking up in the aftermath of the Reclamation Day party and staggering bleary-eyed through a series of presentations about how Life In The Outside will work, before finding yourself outside the giant vault door with almost nothing except your jumpsuit and the general indication of which direction you should go.

The environmental storytelling in the game is very well done — such as this crashed space station you’ll encounter.

Unlike every other Fallout game, which has been single player, Fallout 76 is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game — which sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately isn’t.

When dedicated Fallout fans like myself said “We want a multiplayer Fallout game”, what we meant was “We want something like The Elder Scrolls Online, but in the Fallout universe” — not “We want Fallout 4 with no human NPCs or dialogue choices or branching quests and also random other people from the internet in our game for some reason”.

The graphics are identical to Fallout 4 and while they were OK to pretty good a few years ago, compared to other AAA games on the market they’re just not very good now. It’s clearly time for Bethesda to upgrade the engine they’re using for their RPGs, especially when you look at things like Red Dead Redemption II or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for examples of how incredible open worlds can look nowadays.

There’s a lot of ill-thought out stuff in here, too. For example, there are long audio tapes with people’s backstories and recollections of events etc on them, which I love listening to. It’s a bit hard to fully appreciate them, however, when you’re being interrupted by someone breathing into a microphone or just generally being a prat, or when you’re constantly under attack by mutants — which happens all the time.

Because it’s been well-publicised there are no human NPCs, it means you’re effectively chasing ghosts. When a quest directs you to find so-and-so, you know you’re going to find a corpse or a holotape (or both) there, and if you’re really lucky it’ll turn out the person you are looking for is actually a robot.

Debonair movie star or nuclear fallout shelter resident? Why not both? You can create any character you like. BYO backstory, though.

What there isn’t is interactive dialogue, branching quests, major decisions, or pretty much any of the RPG stuff that made the previous Fallout games so great.

The economy is broken, too. Taken looted items and weapons to robot vendors will net you literal pocket change, while health items, ammunition and resources cost ludicrous amounts of money to buy. As you level up you’ll find more of this stuff lying around the world (or on the bodies of vanquished enemies), but for the first few levels it’s tough going.

There’s no shortage of enemies though — mutants and rogue robots, generally — and while the Fallout 4 combat system worked alright, it isn’t as effective in Fallout 76 and sometimes seemed to have trouble registering when I’d hit an enemy at point-blank range.

Particularly galling is the loss of the VATS targeting system, allowing you to pause the game and target shots to specific areas for extra damage or effect (shooting a gun out of someone’s hand, crippling their leg so they can’t chase you, etc) — now, it basically functions as an auto-aim in real-time.

The terrible inventory management systems from the previous 3D Fallout games returns as well, with keeping track of all your odds and ends an unnecessarily fiddly exercise.

The general game performance can charitably be described as “sluggish” and “unpolished”, with massive frame rate drops, enemies seemingly appearing out of nowhere (or seem to teleport suddenly), and some odd lighting effects and glitches at times — not to mention broken quests that don’t update, random server disconnections, and the like.

A patch issued two weeks after the game came out addressed some of the issues, but there are still entirely too many glaring problems in the game and overall it’s less polished than a Soviet tractor which has been left outside since the Iron Curtain collapsed — a state which is frankly inexcusable given the ostensibly AAA nature of the game.

Thematically Fallout 76 is missing the compass of the other titles in the series, which were usually asking or exploring big questions in some form — good vs evil, past vs future, authority vs individualism, that sort of thing — and instead it just exists.

The survival aspects from the “hardcore” modes of Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 are integral to Fallout 76, with your character needing to eat and drink and craft food and supplies and weapons and armour to survive. At present your portable camp (which you can build beds, workbenches, generators etc for) can only hold 400lbs worth of stuff, which fills up disappointing quickly when you start finding guns and armour which (for some reason) can only be used at a much higher level, as well as needing to stash all the screws, scrap metal, wood, rubber and assorted odds and ends you need to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

The absence of human NPCs is, in my opinion, a huge mis-step by Bethesda. I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but it just didn’t work for me. I don’t want to wander around a totally abandoned world listening to audio logs, I wanted a fully realised and inhabited world I can get involved in and help shape the destiny of.

The “Everybody’s dead, Dave” thing might have sounded like a cool idea in the development meetings, but it also creates a desolate and lonely world where the other (human) survivors you encounter are, at best, a mild nuisance and at worst an active threat. Instead of displaying actual survivor names (like Jane Smith or Fred Bloggs), we get gamer handles and encountering ‘xXxBonglover69xXx’ or ‘88PepeFan88’ while out on the country roads of post-apocalyptic West Virginia lacks a certain something in the immersion department. The 24 players per server limit means I doubt we’ll see settlements, trading outposts or raider gangs forming, either.

There are no shortage of mutant enemies in the world, but the discerning survivor doesn’t wander the wasteland without their trusty 12ga shotgun — or a laser gun, for that matter.

On that note, there’s no effective way to opt out of player-vs-player (PvP) combat in the game. If someone starts attacking you, you’ll get cash rewards and take reduced damage, but eventually they’ll wear you down and kill you — and then take some of your stuff before you can respawn and recover it.

Setting aside the frankly inexcusable lack of polish throughout the game, there also ultimately somehow manages to be less stuff here than in Fallout 4 — indeed, the whole game felt like an unfinished DLC pack for Fallout 4, where they’d done all the worldbuilding and environmental storytelling but hadn’t gotten around to the NPCs or dialogue trees or branching quest stuff before someone decided it needed to be released.

To give credit where it is due, the environmental storytelling is excellent, the setting is interesting and piecing together some of the stories provides for some insights too. It’s also great to see some of the quirky humour the series is known for making a return, including a town mayor insisting his biggest campaign donors couldn’t possibly be guilty of the grievous OH&S violations they’re accused of, on account of how they’re his biggest donors, or a computer sending you on a quest and noting it would come with you, but doesn’t have any legs. The character creator is also very detailed, allowing you to create — and change — your character in a vast number of details.

These highlights aside, right now I am deeply disappointed by Fallout 76 and think that rather than being a direct hit, it has failed to detonate.

As a hardcore Fallout fan I really wanted to love this, but as it stands right now, there’s not a lot to recommend this over Fallout 4 and I sincerely hope there’s either some major content updates in the works to add human NPCs and the like to this game, or else a Fallout 5 announcement incoming soon.