Review: My Week with Fallout 4

I had intended in the weeks leading up to the release, to play the game for a few hours, get some experience and share my initial thoughts. Well, it's been almost a week since the game was released and I've managed to play at least an hour each day which should tell you something about this game.

So far, it's everything I wished that it would be.

At this point, spoilers are everywhere, but I'd like to keep this review spoiler free. If you want spoilers, all you need to do is google.

To make playing this long awaited game possible, I arranged to take release day off from work and made plans that while I'd be home for the day, that I'd be playing the game rather than resorting to typical mommy duties as I do. Also a large factor in gaining enough game-time during release was a last minute decision to attend the midnight release.

Copy of game in hand, I loaded it up at 12:15 and was carefully crafting my character at 12:40. I spent a little more time than I should have on character creation, not because it's unimportant to get the likeness correct but because I was under the assumption that I had to craft both the male and female characters on the startup screen.

The brief tutorial ended (without me even really noticing it- nice job Bethesda) and I was off into the full Commonwealth wasteland.

I managed to get 11 hours of play in during that first day. An achievement in itself. I actually had to stop playing at one point because my eyes hurt too much, not having properly marathoned a game in over a year, my eyes were not used to staring at a screen for so long!

By now, I've read a few other reviews (because when I'm not playing Fallout 4, I'm thinking of it) and I wanted to address one major point here. Settlements:

I'm not sure why the gaming community as a whole seems to be so frustrated by the lack of instruction on how to operate the settlements (which are completely optional and only seem to enrich gameplay) but I find myself laughing each time someone writes about how they didn't know how to set one up. I applaud Bethesda for the execution of settlements and the lack of intruction. It really has helped with the immersion factor for me. Also, it's not like I had everything about settlements figured out, there were a few things that I was stumped on but someone else had figured it out!

This game to me is all the good of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, all rolled up into one wonderful package with improved graphics. Yes, there are some of the "usual" release day issues (I only had one though, and it was because I behaved in a way the game didn't expect) and there's the characters speaking/weird mouth matching up thing.

One minor spoiler- I haven't heard "Sweet Caroline" yet. This game is set in Boston. If I don't hear the song, I'm going to be a little disappointed given where the major city of the game is!!

Ok, time to go play more!