Fallout 4 - A Serial Killer Review

Rock, Paper, Shotgun's John Walker is going through Fallout 4 by killing as many characters as he can. Unfortunately the game isn't designed well for such an evil approach.

My goal in setting forth on a murderous rampage through Fallout 4 was to see how the game would react to it. Would it adjust itself to my mercenary ways, start to reveal new pathways – perhaps something like Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood recruiting me to their gang? Or would I simply shut down all the interesting routes, failing too many quests and closing off chains that would let my character properly develop? What I wasn’t expecting was for the game to simply not cope.

I don’t know if that’s an unfair expectation – I wouldn’t expect most games to cope with my deliberately trying to kill every major character, along with all the minors. It’s relatively ‘normal’ in games to have plot-critical characters either impervious to bullets, or not even let you fire at them. But this is Bethesda, and there’s something about the tone of FO4 that suggests a greater freedom – the issue is, that freedom is assigned in a strangely arbitrary manner.