Coupling that with Bethesda’s still-unimpressive character animations, Fallout 76 isn’t a good-looking game except when viewed from the exact right angles.įallout 76 isn't a good-looking game except when viewed from the exact right angles.When you look closer, it becomes obvious that Bethesda’s ambitious idea to replace all human NPCs with other players results in a lack of meaningful interaction with the world.
My favorite is traveling the lengths of the Cranberry Bog, where the pinkish-red fields are seemingly inviting from afar but turn out to be full of a snaking system of trenches and alien forests that hide the worst horrors of the wasteland, but there are many more.īut while the lighting and art direction of these different regions are great at setting the eerie mood and tone of a destroyed Appalachia, the actual objects like trees, shrubs, buildings, cars, and more somehow look flatter and less detailed than those in Fallout 4 did three years ago. As you emerge from Vault 76 you’ll start in a relatively peaceful forest and venture out into more dangerous pockets of the irradiated wasteland. On the surface, Fallout 76 is another dose of Bethesda’s tried-and-true open-world RPG formula on a larger-than-ever map that’s begging to be explored. There are bright spots entangled in this mass of frustratingly buggy and sometimes conflicting systems, but what fun I was able to salvage from the expansive but underpopulated West Virginia map was consistently overshadowed by the monotony of its gathering and crafting treadmill.
Like many of Vault-Tec’s underground bunkers, Bethesda’s multiplayer riff on its post-nuclear RPG series is an experiment gone awry. After more than 50 hours plundering the irradiated wasteland of Fallout 76, the greatest mystery still lingering is who this mutated take on Fallout is intended for.