Fallout 2
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Publisher/Developer: Interplay System Requirements Windows(R) 95/98 CD-ROM Pentium(TM) 90 or faster 16 MB RAM 30 MB available hard drive space Direct X - certified SVGA card Direct X - certified sound card 4X or faster CD-ROM drive Windows(R) 95/98/NT 4.0 SP3 Only 100% Microsoft-compatible mouse Mature audiences only |
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Fallout 2 is my favorite PC RPG. I've played it through multiple times, though this time through I used a mod, the game is good without any modifications. You can begin to actually feel something for the inhabitants of the waste and your character. The "wastelands" are what is left of the west coast of the United States. Fallout from the nuclear war forced the people into vaults only to be greeted upon exit by the harsh conditions of the waste. Humanity is on the verge of extinction and your character is simply trying to help his or her people survive.
Your quest is to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit(G.E.C.K.) and deliver it to your tribe. Many, many subquests can be attempted along the way, but you are not obligated to do most of them. The combat is the best part in my humble opinion and it's what keeps bringing me back. It has a great RPG level system of gaining power by killing enemies and finishing quests. With each level, you are able to develop your character however you choose.
The quests in Fallout 2 are often very original and fun. They are quite often the best way to gain levels, cash and find new equipment and items. A resident of a city may give you a quest to locate an item, kill a person or just do some nogotiative talking. And talking is important. Speech is one of the most important skills for getting quests and having favorable outcomes to your questing endeavors. You can totally botch quests as when you are talking to a character in the game you are given options on how you would like to respond to their statements. A person with low intelligence and speech is going to sound pretty dumb. The dialog does change according to these statistics. Many of your non-combat skills will come into play when doing quests so you will always want to have some abilities in other areas. I believe there is a well you can use the 'repair' skill on in the first village. There are numerous quests like this throughout.
There are times when your character will be faced with a situation you cannot talk your way out of. Doing certain quests guarantees that you will be put into a combat situation. When you enter combat in fallout 2 the game turns from real time to turn-based. Whose turn begins first is determined by the sequence stat which is affected by your perception statistic. Thereafter the next fastest character and so on will go in that 'sequence'. Every action in combat requires you to spend action points. You may have many or few depending on your agility and certain perks you can choose. Moving one hex requires 1 action point. You will usually need to maneuver your character even if you are a gun user as the range of your target affects the accuracy of your shot. Late game you can hit from huge distances with the sniper rifle but early on you will have trouble hitting from even a few hexes away. Firing your weapon will usually be the costliest thing AP-wise you can do in combat and the game has no shortage of kickass guns your character can wield.
There are three different gun types in which you can specialize (small, large and energy-based) along with melee and unarmed combat. Of course you can also raise your abilities in sneak, lockpick, disarming traps, speech and a few others. How you develop your character can vastly change how you play the game. If you focus only on non-combat skills expect to run a lot! However, if you're like me, you stand and fight, mowing down your enemies with your minigun.
Firing your gun opens up multiple possibilities. You can go for a single shot and with enough action points you can possibly even fire your weapon twice in a single round of combat. Alternatively you could fire your machine gun type weapon in burst mode and hit any targets in the cone shaped area of affect (you won't see it but it's like a long narrow triangle). Bursting up close usually causes the largest damage because more of the bullets will hit the target. This is very devastating with a critical hit modifier. Critical hits are random percentage chances that you will deal higher damage and possibly knock out, knock down or injure the body parts your opponent in combat. Which leaves us with the third and final type of gun attack: the targeted shot. With targeted shots you spend an extra AP aiming your weapon but can choose where you would like to shoot the victim. A shot in the head may knock him unconscious. The eyes may blind him and will likely cause the most damage of the types. You can also shoot them in the legs which will cripple their movement. There are more targets on the body you can choose and some creatures may even have some weaker points you can exploit.
Another nice feature of Fallout 2 is the perks system, with every 3 levels you get to choose a perk, this could be anything from increasing your resistance to radiation to improving your rate of fire. Again, it's up to you, but if you want to be able to finish most quests you will need some speech skill, also some Intelligence. Strength, Endurance, Agility, Perception, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck are customizable from the start, spend those points wisely as you will not see much increase in these unless you choose a perk or opt to use drugs. Yes, you can use drugs... and get addicted, I don't use them much.
Fallout 2 has everything I love about RPGs all rolled into one and is one of the only PC RPGs I can recommend at this time. I love the character customization. I love the quests. I love the post-apocalyptic feel. I love Fallout 2: 10/10. The link below is to buy the Fallout 1 and 2 bundle. This is a so much better deal than buying the games seperately and there are story connections between the two games. I highly recommend this method as this bundle is under ten dollars already.The mod I'm using at the moment of writing this review is called Second Apocalypse, it removes the story from the game and gives you 5 shops which pretty much carry every item in the game. I really like leveling up so this is great for me. If you play this mod (after you've beaten the game of course) fear creatures that cause radiation affect such as aliens and centaurs. Rad-Away is only found randomly in the wastes in this mod. Search boxes in random encounters! More information can be found at Wasteland Merc. The mod can be found at this great site.
Update: Haris and Miran released a new mod - much better than Second Apocalypse. You play the role of mercenary and will be given quests in this one. It also adds new weapons and armor to the game. Get it at Fileplanet.
Click here to read my walkthrough of Haris and Miran's Wasteland Merc Mod.
Even more news: A decent size team has been assembled and we are working under the command of Haris and Miran to make Wasteland Merc 2. Yours truly is a dialog writer instead of just a reviewer this time around. It seems we're making good progress.