Definitely the shortest entry of the 3D fallout games, but still fun the whole way through.
My playtime is a tad inflated from idle time, but overall I would estimate my playthrough of just the main story with side exploration here and there took me roughly 25 hours. (I still have more of the map to explore as well as the DLCs)
I think the dislike for this game is a bit overblown. While I agree with the sentiment that New Vegas is better in comparison, the game itself is still worthwhile and equally as interesting as any other fallout. I will say however, this was by far the lbuggiest Fallout I've played. Now, I did play on Linux and didn't install any patches for the game (considering most people on ProtonDB claimed the game was perfectly playable), but I will say it was better than the experience from when I tried playing through it on Windows.
There were multiple times my compass would get stuck and Galaxy News Radio never played any music after [spoiler] repairing the relay dish [/spoiler] for some reason. Those were the two biggest issues I found with the game. I was also forced to cap the game to 60FPS to avoid intermittent crashes that would occur in certain quests and when fast travelling.
As far as the story goes... yeah it's alright. Like Fallout 4 forces you to care about your son you've known for 3 seconds, where Fallout 3 forces you to care about your dad you've known for 5 minutes... so that's good at least. But the whole plot of the game just feels very weak and it's not played out how I would have hoped. Things just happen wayyyy to fast to even have a second to care about what's going on. Both New Vegas and 4 make you feel like you're gone on this grand adventure by the time you reach the end of the game. When I got to the final mission in this game, I legitimately had close to 60% of the map unexplored. And that'd not because I didn't have the urge to explore, I definitely did. The game just gave me no incentive to do so. I already had good weapons and perks by the time I got there that there was no drive for me to go out looking for new things. Not to mention navigating the wasteland in this game is pretty odd. You're forced to take metro stations in order to get to different locations within the city, and it just makes everything feel really claustrophobic.
Other than that, I would definitely recommend this game to anyone interested in playing a fallout entry.
