Developer: Micro Forte
ESRB Rating: Mature
Genre: Tactical Simulation
Platform: PC
Publisher: 14 Degrees East
Release Date: 3/14/2001
What is Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel?
Fallout Tactics is the next game in the Fallout series, focusing primarily on combat. Although there are RPG elements, the game is primarily a tactical simulation where you control a squad of up to 6 soldiers very similar to the game X-COM: UFO Defense. Since Fallout Tactics is for the most part a newer updated version of X-COM: UFO Defense, I will often compare them to each other.
What does this game do well?
Fallout Tactics has a lot of different options that can completely change the way the game is played. There are four difficulty settings and three different types of turn based play. The most popular is squad turn based combat, where all of your characters move, and then all of your opponents move. Slightly less popular is individual turn based combat, where each character moves based upon their speed. You and your opponent’s moves will be interspersed, which makes coordinated attacks more difficult. The last mode is called continuous turn based mode, which is just real time mode. It is very hard to control your characters with any accuracy in this mode, but it is useful for running around the map quickly or shooting mutants with iron pipes for weapons.
Fallout Tactics allows for return fire even during the other player’s turn. You may set your character on overwatch mode, in which he or she will shoot at anything that enters acceptable range. You may also specify when your character will shoot by setting accuracy thresholds. For instance if you set the threshold to 66%, then your character will not fire unless the shot has at least a 66% chance of success. You may also set the aggressiveness of your characters, allowing them to shoot anything that moves, or hold their fire until they get into proper position.
Another nice feature is the wide selection of weapons, both realistic and fictional. There are a dozen or so pistols, lots of rifles, and several heavy weapons including miniguns, a rocket launcher, and a .50 caliber Browning machine gun. There are also several plasma and laser weapons, a whole slew of grenades, and tons of knives, spears and other melee weapons.
In addition to the 18 campaign missions, there are over 30 special encounters that you may or may not find in the wasteland. Special encounters can unlock new characters, drop unique items, or just provide you with some comic relief.
This is the first tactical simulation to allow multiplayer, although there is no cooperative play. Quite a bit of patience is required if you want to play turn based, but the real time mode provides a faster, low strategy alternative.
What could this game have done better?
I have a lot of complaints with this game, but not because it’s a bad game, but because I love tactical simulations and I’m a perfectionist. The game is great, but since it is not a popular genre, this game might be the only experience that a gamer might have with tactical sims. It is too bad that this game has a lot of little problems that can add up, and potentially damage the genre as a whole.
X-COM: UFO Defense is the gold standard in tactical simulations. If you have never played it, you are really missing out because it is simply amazing, and it is one of my all time favorite games. Fallout Tactics has newer graphics, more equipment, and a lot more options, but it is still lacking some basic features that even X-COM had. In Fallout Tactics, the isometric camera angle is too low, obscuring items, characters, and terrain. The problem is exacerbated by the inability to cut away the higher levels of the terrain so you could see the bottom floor. Tall buildings are especially problematic, both obscuring everything behind them and making it difficult to see the different floors inside the building. In the future, it is likely that you will be able to rotate the point of view like in Neverwinter Nights, but the technology was not available at the time.
Another feature that Fallout Tactics is lacking is an enemy indicator. In X-COM, if your character could see an enemy, a small indicator would show up in the lower right corner of the screen. You could click on the box and it would center the camera on the enemy’s position. This feature is incredibly helpful, and without there are times that you stumble upon an enemy that you should have seen a long time ago.
Fallout Tactics also has problems with the game engine itself. The biggest detractor for me is that there really is no true turn based play. When your characters are not in combat, the game defaults to real time mode, where you can run around and access your inventory without the worry of action points, etc. However, the game does not automatically enter turn based mode when you see an enemy. You must manually enter turn based mode or allow the enemy to fire upon you. When in turn based mode, your characters do not stop moving when they see an enemy, but will continue along their path and get into further trouble. Even worse is the fact that the computer can interrupt you in the middle of your turn, which completely defeats the whole idea of “turn based play”. None of these problems are game killers, but they add a small amount of frustration to the gameplay and force you to save and reload at times.
Indirect fire also leaves something to be desired. While there are a large number of melee and standard weapons, there are also quite a few grenades, traps, land mines, and a rocket launcher. Grenades in particular behave poorly, with virutally no physics to aid their delivery. You cannot lob grenades over obstacles, throwing a grenade is almost identical to shooting a bullet. If you use grenades, you will frequently get into trouble when you try to throw a grenade that should hit the target, only to have it bounce off a low wall and kill the grenadier.
There is also a programming flaw involving stray fire. When bullets miss their intended target, there is a chance that they hit another character nearby. However, in Fallout Tactics that chance is a guarantee. In fact you can burst fire at a character with a 0% chance of success and still hit everyone standing around him or her with absolute certainty.
I also don’t feel like this game is as consistent with the Fallout universe as it could have been. For one, the dialogue full of profanity and is in general crude and somewhat juvenile, which doesn’t really fit in with the mood of the game. Overall, the game just doesn’t have the grim and gritty feel that the earlier games had. This is partially due to the fact that the Brotherhood of Steel is the most technologically advanced faction in the post apocalyptic world, but even when you visit wasteland towns, everything seems to be lacking the rust and decay that comes with 100 years of disrepair.
There are two other things worth mentioning, first is that the missions are extremely long. Some of the missions took me over 4 hours to complete, which strongly encourages the player to save often on separate save slots just in case you kill someone that you needed to save or enter the mission without the proper equipment. The other thing that has always been prominent in Fallout games is the horrible economy. Halfway through the game, I had 6 of everything, and $200,000 to spare.
Should I buy this game?
This game provided me with weeks of solid entertainment. I still haven’t finished the game though, considering it contains almost 100 hours of gameplay. There are a lot of things that I would have liked done differently, but I was still pleased with the game as is. I bought this off Interplay’s website for $4.95 and shipping, and for a game this good you just have to buy it.
The post Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel appeared first on Od Studios.