Duck and Cover

Gamespot's review: 7.3 out of 10 [a "Good" rating]

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/rpg/fallout ... index.html

It's basically a simple, mildly entertaining, and somewhat uneven pseudofuturistic dungeon crawl for one or two players. - Greg Kasavin

Brotherhood of Steel isn't a long game, and it weighs in somewhere close to 10 hours from start to finish. However, it feels pretty long because the nature of the gameplay is very repetitive.

The action-oriented gameplay is occasionally interrupted by dialogue sequences, which seem overly drawn-out--you'll probably find yourself skipping over the speech and skimming the text so that you can proceed to the next fight posthaste.

The role-playing elements here are even lighter than those of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. You gain experience levels from killing lots of stuff and from solving quests, which earns you points that can be spent on various perks for your character. These may increase your potential to inflict damage, or they may increase your health or armor. They may also grant a few special abilities, which aren't very special. And that's basically it. You don't have to think about any statistics or anything.

Brotherhood of Steel looks pretty good. Fallout fans will recognize that the settings in the game are reminiscent of the series' gritty locales. However, the presentation is pretty uneven. The occasional cutscenes that use the game's 3D engine look quite poor, and the close-ups of the character models (seen during dialogue sequences) look pretty shoddy, too.

The game's audio seemingly could have been better with a little more tuning.

The action is repetitive and straightforward, but the game features a lot of cool weapons and tons of stuff to hack or shoot at, plus it's got some of the charm that helped make Fallout a genuine classic.

Somebody please tell me, pretty please, as to why this game got a 7.3 rating with such serious flaws? At best it's ho-hum-been-done-before.

Ratings don't mean shit. One man's 7.3 could be another man's 2.3. I just finished reading the article and it's pretty good for what's supposed to be an unbiased point of view. Boring repetitive gameplay, a poor 3d engine, and lots of pointless swearing are some of the key features he discussed.

Mad Max RW wrote:Ratings don't mean shit. One man's 7.3 could be another man's 2.3. I just finished reading the article and it's pretty good for what's supposed to be an unbiased point of view. Boring repetitive gameplay, a poor 3d engine, and lots of pointless swearing are some of the key features he discussed.

To a majority of console gamers, ratings are the most important shit. They take a quick gander at the rating, and if it's from 7 [or 70%] and up, it's deemed as a worthy buy. Reading this guy's review, the main theme that keeps coming up is that it's extremely repetitive. In my view [and I'm not the reviewer of course] a game that's extremely repetitive, doesn't bring anything new to the table, and is "mildly entertaining" doesn't qualify for a 7.3 rating. I expect IGN to put their review in the same ballpark, around 7.0-8.0 Once console gamers see those solid scores, they'll expect the game to be a worthy purchase. Most console gamers don't read much of reviews [mainly due to the fact that they're younger] and just look at the screenshots and review scores.

Most console gamers don't give a shit about online reviews. They hear about what games to buy mostly from commercials, magazines, and word of mouth. A couple 7+ scores isn't gonna make FOBOS a success. For crying out loud, IGN gave Invisible War a 9.0 and it's been a fucking disaster.