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| Big rats and radioactive vats. |
Like Dark Alliance, BoS is primarily focused on the action of
slaying enemies and monsters. Some RPG elements are retained, such as your
character earning experience and gaining levels. When you gain a level, you earn
points that can be spent to select new skills (called perks in the game) or
improve on existing ones. The perks in BoS include bonuses to weapon range,
healing, and critical hit chance. Overall, the perks cover the basics of
increasing your attack and defensive power and total health, but there are no
really interesting or powerful skills or abilities to shoot for which takes some
of the excitement out of leveling up.
The other major RPG element found in BoS is NPC interaction. You’ll need to
converse with various characters that you encounter in the game to advance the
storyline and to receive quests. However, the interaction is limited to
listening to the character speak and then selecting a response. The
conversations are not branching, so it doesn’t matter too much which response
that you select and you’ll eventually hear everything that you need to hear. The
NPC conversations in BoS are crude and peppered with obscenities. The problem is
not so much that the conversations include obscenities, this is an M-rated game
after all, it’s that the obscenities are not used very creatively. The Fallout
games on the PC were full of wit and clever humor, and there’s little of that
here in BoS. Instead, far too often you exchange curse words with an NPC and
then you’re off on your next mission.
The lack of imagination found in the game’s conversations extends to the
missions you’ll receive in the game. They all involve clearing an area of
monsters or enemies and occasionally require you to retrieve an item, but that’s
about it. The puzzles are pretty simple, such as finding the right creature to
kill to obtain a key to a locked door. Since you pretty much kill everything in
sight anyway, there’s not much thinking involved in puzzles like this. Killing
hordes of creatures was a lot of fun in Dark Alliance, but more often than not
in BoS the combat is repetitive and monotonous. Too many enemies attack by
simply running straight at you or by standing in place shooting at you. There
are occasional boss battles to add a little variety to the action, but you’ll
spend most of your time slaying one type of enemy or another that behaves pretty
much the same as the last type of enemy you encountered.
Dark Alliance was built on a simple gameplay design, but could keep you
fascinated for hours on end. Something was lost when the game was transferred to
the Fallout universe, though. BoS has its moments, but you’ll be quite aware of
the repetitive nature of its gameplay while playing it and will only be able to
stick to it for short periods of time. A love of Dark Alliance or of Fallout is
no guarantee that you’ll enjoy BoS.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
68%. A lot of the fun got nuked out
of Dark Alliance when it was moved to Fallout’s post-apocalyptic future.
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