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Be honest. When you think of an RPG you think of dungeons, swords, and dragons. In 1997, Interplay decided to dump that cliché and make you think of guns, mutants, and nuclear fallout.
Fallout is a massive RPG with 2D sprite graphics, played from a third-person isometric perspective similar to Baldur’s Gate or Diablo. You can choose from three pre-made characters or take the plunge into the deep character creation system to make your own unique adventurer. It’s all skills, perks, and traits. Your traits actually affect your conversation choices and the impression you make on npc’s. Unfortunately, due to the small sprite graphics, you can’t really customize your appearance other than your gender. Also, the resolution is limited to 640 x 480, but the sprite animation is smooth and the locations are full of little details. It is a journey through a world where most of humanity and all governments have been destroyed by a massive nuclear war, and now survivors are left with a barren wasteland to start over in. Scattered throughout the continent of North America are underground shelters called vaults, where for generations people have lived unaffected by the nuclear radiation. These vaults have electricity, air conditioning, and purified running water. As luck would have it, the computer chip that controls the water purifier in your vault has malfunctioned and YOU have been picked to be the first person to leave the vault, travel the wasteland, and find a new one……. somewhere.
The game world seems almost unlimited as you travel the scorched Earth from town to town meeting npc’s, doing side quests, making friends and enemies, and maybe even owning a pet dog to help you in combat. Most of the character dialogue is just text, but special characters have animated CGI faces with a full range of emotion and well done voice-overs. Be careful what you say to people as they are often offended without you even trying. But the beauty is that if you screw up you can just find another way to continue your quest. Fallout even has a reputation system that keeps track of your actions and npc’s will respond accordingly. For example: If you make a habit of killing children or civilians, some characters will be intimidated by you, some will harass and attack you, and some will run away in fear. Fallout gives you complete freedom to be as sadistic or heroic as you want without any moral corralling.  The combat is turn-based and slow, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. Things can get pretty bloody. I’ve seen heads explode, gaping holes punched through peoples chests, and people even ripped in half. You’ll sometimes be outnumbered by entire gangs of raiders or mutants, which can lead to tense situations. The giant radioactive scorpions can get annoying, but luckily you’re never actually forced to stay in a fight if you don’t want to. Human enemies will talk trash to you and spout rated R lines of vile hatred all through the combat, which makes blowing them to pieces even more gratifying.  The combat is all based around action points, and everything from taking a step, firing a weapon, throwing a punch, using a med kit, and even just going into your inventory uses a small amount of action points. Once you run out of action points, you have to end your turn and sit and watch as the enemy makes their move. This form of combat may seem unfair or just plain boring to people who are used to RPG’s like Diablo or The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and if you don’t level up the right traits, you may find yourself too low on action points to do much in a fight and become frustrated as you’re gang-banged by the multiple enemies. But for players who stick with it, you’ll find the turn based combat to be engaging and exciting like a violent game of chess. The soundtrack is very moody and captures the feeling of being in a desolate, dangerous world at the end of civilization. The sound effects are likewise very well done and really enhance the immersion into the game. You have 150 in-game days to find the water chip and return to your vault. You’ll spend most of those days walking across the wasteland as a dot on the map screen, running into random battles or falling over rocky terrain as you look for towns and other places of interest. (This makes exploring not as interesting as it should be, but it saves time as most of the game world is sand and rocks.) Once you think you’ve beaten the game and found the water chip, you end up with another larger main quest with no time limit. Based on how you play, the game could last you a few hundred hours, and you’ll see your character grow from a wimp in a Vault 13 bodysuit into a badass in war-torn battle armor. Fallout is an epic, immersive RPG with depth, freedom, npc’s with character, and loads of atmosphere. Those who make it to the end will feel that it was worth it. Plus it works just fine in XP without any need to use compatibility modes! Sound 8/10 – Atmospheric music and realistic sound effects draw you into the game, and what little voice-acting it has is well done. Too bad there wasn’t more. Graphics 7/10 – Detailed and well animated sprites and backgrounds, but the 640 x 480 resolution makes everything a little fuzzy on modern LCD monitors. Limited to 256 colors. Gameplay 9/10 – Fallout has depth, size, and freedom to rival even modern RPGs. The turn based combat may frustrate fans of hack n’ slash. Overall 8/10 – A great classic RPG that broke out of the dungeon and into the post-apocalypse.
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