Fallout 2
1998
Audio: French, German, English
- puzzle
- role-playing (rpg)
- science fiction
- survival
- stealth
- comedy
- open world
- single player
The story
A turn-based tactical Western RPG in which the Chosen One is tasked with exploring post-nuclear California to locate and retrieve the fabled Garden of Eden Creation Kit for their famine-stricken tribe, while coming into contact through branching dialogue trees with numerous tribes, factions and micro-civilizations, each with their own virtues, vices, socioeconomic situations and political agendas.
What it’s like
Dusty isometric wasteland rendered in hand-painted sprites, with sun-bleached sand, rust-orange ruins and the flat, washed-out light of a desert noon giving way to amber dusk and sudden neon in the bigger towns. Its sound is a warm mix of twangy guitar and crackling radio chatter, with long stretches of near-silence broken by the clack of a Pip-Boy menu or a gunshot echoing across empty flats. The screen holds still and lets you read: every town is a cluster of wooden shacks, a casino, a slaver camp or a cannibal's cave, and the grim humour lands in the pauses between text boxes. The vibe is dry, wry, sun-baked and quietly bleak, a tone of gallows humour more than dread. Turn-based combat moves at a deliberate pace, so the rhythm is patient, exploratory and talky, a long road trip with frequent detours. Violence is common and sometimes sudden, with gunfights, drug use, slavery and deaths that can be brutal and graphic in text, though never gory on screen; the tone is cruel but rarely cruel for its own sake. It suits a rainy weekend with time to spare, or a long solo session for players who enjoy building a character, reading every conversation and making moral choices in a world with no clean answers.
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