Fallout: Sweden forgot to add some features, I think...



Alright, I read the reviews and decided to try this critically panned game anyways when it came up for free. I started out hating it, then gained understanding as I progressed, then gave up in frustration. I never played multiplayer because that's not my jam, but I did make an effort to get through the game, really!

I think what the developers were going for here is a post-apocalypse-by-robots sim, not necessarily a fun game. There appears to be no aim assist at all, which, if I'm being nice "took some getting used to", but in reality was an infuriating mechanic in the very early minutes of play. Trying to shoot a robot dog with a handgun was nigh impossible and you have to shoot these robots four thousand times for them to die. There are cave paintings on buildings telling you where to shoot them for maximum damage, I think, but again, aiming is impossible. There is not a single one-shot enemy in this thing. I kid you not, multiple clips to kill the first robot dog. And it only gets worse. You need to launch tens of rockets into the big robot boys in order to take them down. When I got to the base in the airfield where there were four of the large robots guarding it, even after trying to lure one away at a time, I got tired of dying. This was even after I hid in a church and used up most of my ammo destroying robots for an hour as "rival" bots discovered me and sent waves of dogs, walkers, and two of those big ones. To top it off, leveling up is soooooooooo sloooooooooooow, armor/clothing gets you massive rewards of 2% bullet resistance or explosion resistance, and some weapons maybe do more damage? It's hard to tell from the menus, which I guess is like real life...

The attempted sim aspect continues throughout the rest of the design choices as well. A big open world with lots of nothing in between some houses. NPC's who sound like real people because they don't sound like voice actors (some people say this is bad voice acting, but I found it kind of endearingly quaint). Lots of time spent on making it obviously Sweden, like including Volvos and Saabs (but rebadged). There was definitely a lot of effort put into this game. There are a good amount of side missions and the base-capturing/building/defending thing exists even though I did not like it one bit. The main story is kind of far-fetched but fine for as far as I got through it. In general, I think it was a good game idea but the combat is just an absolute nightmare for a single player, both mechanically and difficulty-wise.

So, if there's a robot apocalypse, don't escape to Sweden, I guess. The robots are extra tough there.

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