Fallout 76 (PS4)

Description

With Fallout 76 the wasteland wasn’t just filled with characters cooked up to enrich your Fallout experience any more – behind every human scrabbling in the dirt to stay alive (or tramping around in intimidating power armour) was a real flesh and blood player. That proved an interesting experiment, but with the addition of the Wastelanders expansion Bethesda has taken a step back towards its roots. The non-player characters (NPCs) are back in the form of settlers tentatively trying to make lives for themselves in Appalachia, and they’ve brought a new storyline with them. They’re not the only ones tramping around the hills – they’re at war with the Raiders, and sooner or later you’ll have to make a stand for one side or the other. Fallout 76: Wastelanders is looking to bring lapsed players back to the series, but it’s also looking towards new players with the inclusion of the base game alongside the new content. So, some of those original core questions stand in this package. When you encounter another human player will you cooperate, or shoot them in the head and raid their corpse? This is the question that Fallout 76 poses as you stumble blinking from your vault into a post-apocalyptic West Virginia and look at the other survivors around you. It’s a big change for what’s always been a single-player series, but one that makes sense in the era of Fortnite and H1Z1. You and your fellow players are the nation’s best and brightest, chosen to emerge from your Vault and forge a new America in the post-nuclear ashes of what came before. Explore, quest, build and kill mutants until you’ve created a world your forefathers would be proud of. There’s a stronger emphasis on survival than in previous Fallout games. You’ll need to collect supplies and craft them into useful items and tools if you want to survive out there. You can build your own weapons and even your own armour. Best hope that no-one kills you for it, though. The fact that you can build a base helps. The days of basically building a box with a bed in it have been left behind in Fallout 4 and there’s a much larger number of recipes to draw on. The world you step into might be irradiated, but Bethesda has put a lot of work into making it beautiful, too. From the forests of Appalachia to the poisonous crimson expanses of the Cranberry Bog, there’s a lot of terrain to explore and master. Or maybe you’ll just blow it up. The ultimate power move in Fallout 76 is getting control of a nuclear missiles and the code fragments to set it off. Blasting an area with a nuke creates a temporary mecca of rare resources and death. There’s nothing to keep things interesting like a nuke, eh? Like everything in Fallout 76, the choice of how to deploy these tools of mass destruction is yours to make.