See, it’s called Fallout 76 because that’s how big the patches are! Get it?

Thank you! I’ll be here all week!

Fallout 76
PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 (version tested)
Copy purchased

It would be fair to say that Fallout 76 hasn’t necessarily made the best possible first impression on its users. In addition to users hacking the PC version to modify their movement speeds, and the game accidentally deleting itself, F76 doesn’t even come with the game on the disc- if you get a disc at all. The PlayStation 4 version ‘installs’ from the Blu-Ray Disc in just seconds, but the installation is just to prove that you bought the game. Bring on the patches!

And yet I’m still having a good time with the game so far, even if it does seem to be a bit short of Fallout 4‘s standards (and I loved F4, even 100%-ing the game’s Trophies). It probably helps that I didn’t pay full price for the game- as of the time of writing you can still get your chosen version of F76 from Amazon for AUD$49.76 (less than half of the full retail price). It also helps that I was warned going in that the game was… well, even compared to F4, it’s still pretty buggy.

Because I didn’t buy the game on launch day, I had a double whammy of first getting the game downloaded, then getting hit with the mandatory second-week patch before I had a chance to play it. Thus it was that I had to download nearly 89 gigabytes of data before the game would even boot. Given that F76 is an exclusively online experience anyway, this isn’t as bad a problem as it would have been for a single-player game (like, say, Fallout 4). But it is an annoyance.

Even with the second patch, F76 struggled to maintain its connection with its home base. If your internet connection drops, or there’s some problem between your system and Bethesda’s, the game will simply quit and drop you back to the main menu, causing you to lose progress. (There is no manual save, other than going into the game’s options and manually quitting to the title screen yourself.) This happened three times in the first five hours of play, and I even had the game crash completely to the PS4’s home screen.

Luckily, things seem to have settled down since then; a subsequent four-hour play session produced the occasional hiccup (probably due to other players being in my general area) but no crashes or losses of progress. I did run into an issue where my character’s body doesn’t spawn when starting a new session of the game, but this sorted itself out after a few seconds (and, let’s face it, is more of a traditional funny-but-not-fatal Fallout glitch).

Once you do get a session up and running… well, it’s Fallout 4, more or less. Set in 2102, 25 years after a nuclear war between China and the United States, you play as a resident of a Vault (long-term fallout shelter). As the game begins, the Vault has opened and you are tasked with helping to rebuild America, but there are very few other humans around; the people remaining have contracted some sort of affliction and are known as Scorched. There’s also the matter of a few nuclear silos around that the Vault’s owners would really like you to secure…

The ‘very few other humans around’ part is strange. Theoretically, the other inhabitants of Vault 76 only left the same day you did- at most, they would have a 24-hour headstart- yet the only traces of the other residents come in the form of computer log entries and audio recordings. I’m about 10 hours in and (apart from seeing other players online) no other human characters have made an appearance; when you factor in that each instance of F76’s world only has about 20 players in it at most, the game is a fairly bleak, lonely experience. (Which makes you wonder why it wasn’t just released as a single-player game.)

As with Fallout 4, the game is essentially a first-person shooter with role-playing elements. Targeting is tricky, as enemies seem to slide around and teleport (presumably because they are monitored by the server); imagine an online shooter with really terrible lag and you’re halfway there. The pipe pistols and other early-game weapons also feel desperately underpowered; between the inaccuracy and the inability to deal serious damage, I found it better to avoid combat if possible until you start to find shotguns and other weapons with more stopping power. Once you do find those better weapons, you should note that weapons will break with repeated use, Breath of the Wild-style; it may still pay to stay out of trouble until your camp is equipped with a weapons workbench so that you can do running repairs.

Worse, you also can’t use VATS (the Fallout universe’s automatic targeting system) as easily. Sure, VATS is in the game, but in previous games the action would slow down Matrix-style allowing you to accurately target individual limbs or other weak spots on an enemy. With F76 being online, there is no way to slow the action that wouldn’t affect other players; the VATS prompts appear on screen but you still have to negotiate the system at full speed.

There are also survival elements in F76, which means that you are constantly on the hunt for food and water; allowing your character to get too hungry or thirsty has negative health effects. The game isn’t super-demanding as far as food is concerned, but water- and sources of clean water- is a constant requirement. Most food and water in the game is irradiated as well, meaning you need to find medication to cure the effects of radiation sickness- and one of the side-effects of the medication is increased thirst. It doesn’t nag you as much as some other survival-style games, but it’s easy to get distracted while exploring and forget to gather supplies.

It’s even easier to be carrying too much scrap metal for crafting, meaning you can’t carry any additional food. You can return to your base camp and ditch unwanted items, or scrap them to build stuff at your settlement, but fast travel costs in-game money; Caps seem to be really scarce compared to the previous games. You can move your base camp for a handful of Caps, which reduces travel times a bit and allows you to rebuild as you find more suitable areas to farm. (Buildings can also be relocated, but luckily it doesn’t seem to cost anything if they are associated with your camp.)

You can play the game solo if you wish, but there are multiplayer elements that will occasionally intrude on your solitary existence; you can team up and trade items with other players, as well as engage in combat once your character hits level 5. You don’t have to fight other players if you don’t want to, and there is a ‘bounty’ system to reward hunting down those who kill otherwise-peaceful players. There are also events that take place in particular areas of the map; like the events in Destiny 2, they offer substantial rewards but are designed for multiple players to attempt (although you can trigger them while playing solo if you want the challenge).

As is standard with major releases nowadays, F76 offers additional content via microtransactions; you can use real money to buy “Atoms”, which can then be used to purchase mostly-cosmetic additions (like new decorations for your campsite, paint jobs for your weaponry, and Fortnite-style emotes). You can also earn Atoms in-game by completing daily and weekly challenges set by Bethesda, and there are additional one-off challenges you will complete as you progress through the game’s story. The store’s contents are inoffensive enough; there are a few blueprints for items for your base camp (such as generators and water purifiers) that might speed up your progress if you’re having trouble finding them in-game, but otherwise there isn’t anything there that would entice me to drop more real-world money.

Despite my annoyances with the combat- and my sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be pretty short of food and water at some point soon- I’m enjoying F76 so far. It scratches the exploration itch that games like Breath of the Wild (and indeed, Fallout 4) had; I genuinely like the Fallout universe and the world Bethesda has built, and it has a certain atmosphere and charm to it.

Admittedly, it also helps that I didn’t pay $100 for it. At full price I would probably be pretty upset at the game after the terrible experience after installation, but at under $50 I feel a bit better about the purchase. Even then any recommendation is a reserved one at best, and if you’re still on the fence about Fallout 76 at the lower price it might pay to keep an eye on the game’s patch notes.

There is a good game in here struggling to get out if you can overcome the glitches and odd design choices; we’ll see if any more monster patches come out to try and improve things over time.