Fallout 2, if it was made by guys whose balls had rotted and fallen off. Typical lazy ex-Obsidian employee project slop, just the 2014 edition.
I almost turned the game off on the character creator because it was so archaic and barebones. About 8 options for each of the handful of categories you could "customize". Each hairstyle is fixed, you cannot change the length or color of any and there's only about 2 white and 1 blonde style, the rest are brown/black. The only reason I didn't is because the game give you an option to choose each character's religion and brand of cigarettes that they smoke. I'd never seen that before so I was intrigued enough to continue, only for their religion and cigarettes to not come up in gameplay even ONCE after 16 hours.
You can't even change your character appearance after character creation. There's no wardrobe or haircut to be found anywhere in this "immersive and deep RPG open-world". Want to role-play in your role-playing game? ♥♥♥♥ that. Your makeup might as well be a tattoo, it's never coming off. That hair is a helmet, it'll never grow or change shape. Forgot to put a backpack on one of your characters at the start of the game? Cool. You'll never see one again, not in loot or in a store. That character will walk around the Wasteland like they're on a leisurely stroll through the park. There's also no progression to look forward to. Your character's appearance will not change based on what armor they find. Your level 1 char will look the exact same as a level 100 would.
Story is barebones and just enough to be the filler you need to send you from point A to B. You're a new ranger team, your job is to find some stuff another ranger fumbled and then travel to repair some far off communications towers with it. Along the way you run into dozens of snags, detours, and setbacks. There appears to be a cyborg/android menace being built up in the main quest, so it's shaping up to be a lot like "The Master" from Fallout 1 who is the big baddie you have to find the lair of and stop from flooding the world with his personal army, or Fallout 4 with the "Institute" and their android threat. Pretty generic stuff.
Traveling the world is tedious. The camera is awful and I often found myself unable to see the small rooms/interiors my squad was inside of, and no amount of zooming in or out or rotating the camera fixed this frequent issue. The worldview seemed too narrow even when zoomed all the way out so I'd pan all the way to another area, click it, then let my squad travel that way cause clicking the ground every 5 feet was too annoying. Every time you pass an otherwise irrelevant and purely visual game asset the dialogue window would load up with some long description of the fence you just passed or the old machinery you don't care about, so you read about it and then think "What was the point of telling me that other than to waste my time?
NPC's are all dumb uninteresting hicks. You enter dialogue with one and they never shut up. Click one response and it brings up 3 more responses to select, so each person ends up being 10 minutes or more of exposition. You begin to dread entering a new area and having to plow through the text walls you'll be faced with. Not only that but the "woke" ♥♥♥♥ we started to see everywhere from 2012 onwards is here too.
The leader of the one of the major settlements is a black woman. The leader of the other settlement is a guy everyone hates, and if you do the quest "correctly" a woman will be voted in as mayor instead. The leader of a nomad camp is a Native American chief type who has one arm and is said to still be stronger than you or anyone else. Because handicapped people are definitely the most physically capable and leadership material. In fact, the one-armed chief is so strong and badass all his guards hacked off one of their arms too, just to fit in and be better guards/members for his club. Awesome huh? Oh and you're basically the only ranger squad in the game. The others are just flavor text. You pass one team by early in the game who says they have no time for you. You meet another team right after who once again just walks by you, except this one is led by a black guy who was listening to P-Diddy, doing a little jig, and told me he'd "Spin yo block wit mah goons if you eva step outta line, yeeeee suckaaaaaa". His team is specifically there to kill other rangers who don't do what the Ranger HQ wants. Really made me want to score for their team, that.
Your first squadmate is some G.I. Jane femme-fatale trope named "Angela Deth". Very believable and hardcore name. The type of thing some guy who has a furry sparkle unicorn costume in his closet thinks is cool. She'll regularly disobey commands and act out of line to prove how "tough" she is too. The second squadmate I found is basically Pocahontas. Some native "noble-savage" who despite dropping the fake accent shortly after meeting her is textbook generic Native American stereotypes. She fights with a sniper rifle from afar with guerilla tactics cause she's too cunning to fight in the open, and gets pissed if your gunfire accidentally hits animals during combat. She'll threaten to leave in the middle of a shootout if your buckshot passes too close to a cow in the distance even if 0 damage was done. The third companion is some native boy named "Ralphy", who runs up to enemies and tries punching them. He's a rare companion you can only get if you rescue him from drowning via skill check. And he runs around punching people in a t-shirt. Yeah.
Combat is dull. It's better than XCOM 2 at least, since there's no timer over your head ticking down every turn. You can actually take time to strategize. All the turn-based mechanics are still there, including friendly fire. But the enemies are as basic as they come. What will you be fighting? Giant maggots. Giant roaches. Giant wolves. Giant rabbits. Giant vegetables. Giant zombie people. Giant zombie flies. And raiders. That's by and large what you'll be getting the whole game, that's literally all I've fought so far. "LOOK AT ME, I'M A LEGENDARY GAME DEVELOPER WHO CAN DO WHATEVER HE WANTS. GUESS WHAT I'M GONNA PUT IN MY GAME TO MAKE INTERESTING ENEMIES! EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE IN REAL-LIFE, BUT BIGGER! SO CREATIVE HUH! DURRR!!! DURRRRHURRRRHURRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!". These devs are pathetic.
I got burned out on the lame story and gameplay. Last thing that happened was finding some guy at a bar who I needed to track down for a quest, just to have "Angela Deth" promptly blow his brains out in front of everyone to prove how tough and cool she is. That guy just so happened to be the only Snake Squeezin's dealer in a town full of potentially violent addicts that we want to win over to our side, and my team mate just murdered him in broad daylight. So that makes sense. I wanted to take her outside like that scene in "Heat" where Deniro walks that wannabe cowboy goon out the restaurant then turns around to gut-punch him and blast him in-between two cars for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up so bad. Instead I just turned the game off. It's just too stupid.
