Hopefully the two guys who made these BOS reviews won't care if I repost them here:
There you have it - deemed mediocre or worse by two non-"rabid Fallout fans"
Pathos said:Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
XBOX
7 Hours or so
Fallout:Brotherhood of Steel (F:BOS for short) is, in all respects, a pretty mediocre action/RPG hybrid. The game takes the amazingly robust Fallout universe and plugs it into a hack-and-slash shell, but it comes off feeling more like a Fallout homage than a Fallout game itself. Unfortunately, the general mediocrity of the entire game becomes more apparent as the game progresses, with the last hour being nothing more than a chore to play.
F:BOS follows the same formula laid out by Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and BGA2 - even going so far as using the exact same engine, albeit with a few minor enhancements. There is now an auto-targeting system which vastly improves the player's ability to attack mulitple targets, and the new map system which highlights objectives prevents a lot of the random wandering around that was so prevalent in BG
The sound and music are completely generic - so much so that I can't even remember hearing if I heard any music in the game. Almost all the dialogue is spoken, ranging from sub-par voice actors to downright hideous (though, granted, they're not nearly as bad as the atrocious voice acting in the seminal Star Ocean 2). The real problem stems from the dialogue itself: It's hamfisted and generally sophomoric - a sense which permeates the entire game. Characters swear like a mongoloid sailor, oftentimes when it makes no sense at all (For example: Cyrus, the melee character, says "Shit" almost every single time he misses a swing). The combination of incredibly poor writing and the overuse of swearing becomes, again, extremely tiring by the end of the game.
This adoslescent dialogue is, again, indicative of the theme of the entire game. One of the first characters you see in the game is the leader of the Raiders, a woman glad in metal Dominatrix gear. Now, as much as I may like that particular mode of dress (I'll go into my sexual proclivities in some later review) it's so out of place in the Fallout world as to be incredibly thematically jarring. The fact that she has tits so large she would simply have to crawl everywhere due to an inability to walk around with so much weight on her chest is just another nail in the coffin. But this is just one small example of a theme that is echoed throughout the game: It feels like the head writer, head artist and head scene designer are all 12 year old boys given run over a design company.
But all's not bad. The game is, as BG
Generally, the game is pretty close to the Fallout canon. The post-apocalyptic world is held pretty consistent, with the deserts and cities (what little you see of them) looking suitably barren. However, as mentioned before, the game seems to be more of an homage than a real Fallout title. Some of the characters you meet later ingame are terribly inconsistent with how they've been portrayed in earlier Fallout games, and the near-constant renditions of Pipboy in the endgame seem to be more of a desperate measure to remind the player they're playing a Fallout game (as opposed to just some generic post-apocalyptic game) than anything else.
There is, however, one caveat: The end boss of the game is so shockingly bad as to almost ruin the entire rest of the game simply due to its overwhelming shitiness. I won't spoil it, but I'll simply say that I sat there for a full two minutes dumbfounded at the leve of contempt the developers must have for either the players themselves or for the Fallout universe. It's odd, too, since as I've already described, the game holds reasonably well to the Fallout universe throghout the rest of the game. However, the end boss is such an amazingly obvious cop-out and thematic inconsistency as to really bring into question the developer's intentions.
The game is either a reasonably fun multiplayer co-op game or a somewhat distracting single player experience. As the characters have very few (if any) individual perks, the replay value is limited at best. But, again, if you're looking for a generic hack-and-slash and for some reason don't want to go buy the vastly superior BG
Score: 1.5 / 5
Cost: $50
Value: $10
RevKrule said:
There you have it - deemed mediocre or worse by two non-"rabid Fallout fans"
