Recent reviews by Consentacles

It's not the worst thing I have ever played, and I have to say my expectations were pretty low going in... but this game is underwhelming. It feels incomplete, with a small gameplay loop that quickly becomes tiresome and unrewarding, and cute little features that end up going nowhere.

Contrary to the name, you do not flip castles in this game. The missions--of which there are only a handful--consist of walking around somebody's castle/dungeon/house picking up trash, scrubbing stains, and repairing furniture. It's not exactly thrilling and there's really no room for creativity, but honestly, I don't hate it. It's kind of relaxing. It would be even more relaxing if the scrubbing and hammering animations weren't so agonizingly slow.

Outside of missions, there is a village building mechanic. You're given a standard snap-together build system that, unfortunately, doesn't work very well, and lacks several components necessary to make a satisfying build. The roofs don't have eaves and you have no half-size build pieces to work with, so you will create what looks like a 3-year-old's drawing of a house, completely flat and lifeless. And since there is no real roadbuilding or terrain editing system (okay, you have these dinky little paths that are barely wide enough for one person) your town will never really look like a town. It'll just look like ugly houses scattered around an overgrown field. Oh yeah and some of the build pieces will trigger each other's collision and explode when you try to snap them together.

Once you've built your house, you can find a tenant for it. Except the tenant never actually shows up. Their rent just miraculously appears in a basket, and the house spontaneously manifests trash and broken objects. Both of these mechanics are horribly executed--rent payments hit their limit so quickly that by the time I'm done walking around town collecting rent, it's time to walk around collecting rent again. Houses also get trashed way too quickly, and because the game's collision mechanics are as primitive as can be, heavy wooden furniture and stone fireplaces get pushed all over the house by randomly-spawning piles of straw. You can also buy animals, which stand in one spot and do nothing.

This game isn't entirely without charm. It feels a bit like a high schooler's first self-made game--hideous, barely-there, more of an idea of a game than a complete game--but the idea, and the potential to become something better is there. But Pyramid didn't follow through with that potential. They just slapped a twenty dollar price tag on it and sent it on its way. Guys you can get so much better games for twenty dollars.

But I guess if you can get it on sale for $0.94 like I did, and you have literally nothing else you want to play at the moment, it should be fine.

I liked the base game quite a bit, but I like Far Harbor even better. It adds a huge amount of new content to the game. The new worldspace is gigantic--hours and hours of exploring even without the quests--but the quests are also some of the best this generation of Fallout has to offer: They're more human, more engaging, less linear, and unlike Nuka World and Fallout 4's main quest, you don't have to make ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ choices just to keep the quest going.
The world design is worth mentioning in that, like Dragonborn's Solstheim, it brings forth an environment that looks and feels so different, it could nearly be its own game. Far Harbour is dark, it's cold,there's mud in your boots and everything sucks. Whereas the Commonwealth sort of just reminds me of Eastern Washington (which is admittedly, a godawful place to live) Far Harbour really does feel like the end of the world. The new semi-aquatic wildlife is pretty darn creepy, and even the same old Ghouls and Supermutants feel a little bit scarier amidst their new horror movie backdrop.

So here's to hoping that Fallout 5 is more like Far Harbour than Fallout 4.