Surviving the Wilderness
With this setting more fashionable than ever, Fallout 4 is postulated as one of the best “simulators” for survival in post-apocalyptic world that we have ever played. Always prevail fun over realism, but with a difficulty over the average, as even a few enemies in the middle of nowhere can be able to take our lives, and we must learn to manage resources well if we want stay helpless at the first change.
Once the prologue finished playing out to the wilderness and make a living, this time by the city of Boston and the surrounding area, and the feeling of helplessness and not knowing where to start is very accomplished, the game overwhelms you with its many possibilities from the beginning. You’ll have to hydrate, while taking care not to drink water that is contaminated by radiation, which reduces your maximum health, and not abuse alcohol or drugs, because you can get addicted. You have to eat to get healthy and get some benefits, but you must cook uncontaminated food, and you also have to sleep from time to time to regain health.
Knowing how to manage ammunition, money and the huge amount of items you pick up on stage is one of the playable keys, and you’re going to spend hours doing it. The inventory has a weight limit, and this time you take everything that is good for something, even junk. This is due to the new system of craftingor creation, one of the greatest successes of Fallout 4, whereby all objects contain some components used to build other objects or upgrade weapons and armor. For example a pocket watch may contain ‘gear’, ‘silver’ and ‘spring’, a pack of cigarettes ‘plastic’, ‘web’ and ‘asbestos’, and something more complex like a laboratory microscope has ‘gear’ ‘Glass’, ‘crystal’ and ‘fiber’.
When using these components you do not have to go looking what it contains. The game does this automatically, and if for example we need an ingredient in particular, we can create have it be pointed out to us, which is certainly a great help. We’re not fans of “crafting” but have been introduced with confidence, and makes sense on an adventure of survival in a post-apocalyptic world” because you’re going to spend hours searching for valuables on the stages, having to decide why and if you should constantly carry these items or not.
When cooking food, building objects, creating drugs or upgrade weapons we have to use a few workbenches that can be found in the settlements. Small populations can manage to get resources and benefits, and you can build and improve to your liking. Each settlement has a number of people -you can enlarge or reduce it to attract people or moving to other settlements to increase the number of food that is produced per day -You can create gardens with different types of foods, but must have someone to watch – you have to create wells to find water, and generators for energy to function as lighting parts or other types of machines. You also have to make sure to pay attention to your defense to protect the settlement from attacks, and accomodations enough for all inhabitants. Depending on how you do these requirements, your happiness will adjust accordingly, which translates into a higher productivity of settlers to obtain more resources.
As you can see, this part is surprisingly elaborate, and we’ve only scratched the surface. Thanks to the components that collect and elements in the area of the settlements we can remove all the rubble of a demolished house and get their components in return- to build all kinds of objects.
While trying to create all these, it can be quite complicated at times. We do miss some sort of free camera to manage the settlements.
