Fallout 4 - Best Enjoyed as a Survival Game?

Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Alec Meer says that you're missing out if you're not playing Fallout 4 as a survival game.

It makes more sense. It makes Fallout 4’s theme mean more. As a game played in terms of its storylines and its oddly comfortable towns, the post-society setting barely holds together. Hell, go far enough into The Institute side of the storyline and it’s hard not suspect that there were people involved in this project who were tired of wastelands and wanted to make an entirely different type of science fiction. But out there on the road, Fallout is all about the end of the world again.

Finding old food in cans matters. A small box of bullets in a bath tub is exciting, because for all I know I might never meet a trader. Firing one of those bullets is harrowing, because I can’t know for sure that I can ever replace it.

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I can’t undo an error; hell, I can’t even go shopping. I’m just making do with whatever comes along. A side effect of this is that, whereas in my first play-through I was carrying an ever-growing sack’s worth of grenades, mines and irradiated food around with me, now almost everything gets used. I do feel as though I’m playing the game in the way it’s supposed to be played, even though I don’t believe this was how it was intended to be played.

When Michael Radiatin’s journey ends, as one day it will, very suddenly, [It now has. -Ed] I very much doubt I’ll go back to Fallout 4. It’s a silly game, and there’s nothing to it but fighting. But I do feel I understand it much more now. And I do feel that its world makes more sense when you treat as nothing more than a place to survive within. Ditch your storylines, ditch your companions, ditch your settlements, ditch your overpowered weapons and armour, and play it that way. It’s worth it.

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