Fallout 76 review – a bizarre, boring, broken mess

Fallout 76 strips away most of the things I love about Bethesda’s Fallout games and replaces them with human-controlled avatars. But while other players are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, this is a game world that spectacularly fails them – on pretty much every level.

Fallout 76Developer: Bethesda Game StudiosPublisher: Bethesda SoftworksPlatform: Played on PS4 Pro and PS4Availability: Out now

The high-level conceit here is the question, what if Fallout was multiplayer? And I think this is a grand thing to wonder about. The collision of Fallout and multiplayer sparks all sorts of exciting ideas in my mind, most of which have to do with post-apocalyptic role-playing. What if I ran a town, hosting elections and keeping the peace? What if I opened a shop, selling exotic items to other players in a desperate bid to raise enough caps to survive the harsh wasteland? What if I worked behind a bar, serving drinks to other players, passing on gossip and words of wisdom? What if I was the head honcho of a group of raiders, ordering other players to attack camps and loot the corpses of our enemies? What if I founded my own faction, something like Caesar’s Legion from Fallout New Vegas, perhaps? What if I wanted to infiltrate a player-run faction I didn’t get on with, befriending their leader before stabbing them in the back?

Unfortunately, Fallout 76 does not facilitate any of those fantasies. What it does instead is facilitate boredom, frustration and game-breaking bugs. And I’m not talking about the radroaches that kill you, either.

Fallout 76 is a video game at odds with itself. It feels as if it’s wrestling with what it wants to be even as you’re playing it. Is this a game best played on your own? It certainly seems so at first. After you emerge from Vault 76 on Reclamation Day, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to rebuild Appalachia, Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic recreation of West Virginia, you’re presented with a main quest to follow the trail of the overseer who, like everyone else in the game world, has already buggered off. This main quest leads you towards the kind of places we’re familiar with from the Fallout games: burnt out towns, creepy buildings and cobbled-together settlements. But something’s different. There are no NPCs. Well, that’s not entirely true. There are robots. Lots and lots and lots of robots.