You know when you're onto a good game as a critic. Why? Because you feel really cross when you have to stop playing that game to begin writing the review. Every moment spent typing is a moment where you could be shooting monsters, exploring worlds, or trying to smack your laser gun with a bit of wood and an alarm clock, in the hope that it'll become marginally better.

 

Fallout 4 is one of the best games I've played this year, though I admit that isn't saying much. Not that it's been a bad year, just a vaguely unimpressive and largely forgettable one. But Bethesda's new blockbuster is the glacé cherry on what has otherwise been a rather tasteless fairy cake.

 

So we return to the American wasteland, but this time in Boston, playing as a random schlub of differing gender with a military history, who spends an awful lot of time looking in the bathroom mirror before his or her day starts. He's just a regular guy with a nuclear family (arf, arf) until the bombs begin to fall and he retreats with his wife and baby son to Vault 111, where he's promptly put in a fridge and left to snooze for the next couple of centuries. He wakes up in time to see his wife getting killed, his son getting pinched by a mercenary and hey presto, that's basically everything he needs for all the generic hero motivation that video games love these days. He escapes the Vault to find the world has basically managed to pull itself together after the atomic genocide, albeit with a lot more glowing monsters and crafting tables than there were before.

 

Actually, all this is smaller, character stuff that's put to one side after a while. The wider campaign is focused around the shadowy actions of a robot-producing organisation known as "The Institute," as well as the ethical conundrum concerning whether or not machines can be considered people. And once I've stopped blowing up mutants with plasma grenades, I'll probably have a proper think about it.

 

If there's one problem I've had with the Fallout series for years, it's that the tone can be a bit too up and down. The games have always been famously camp in its portrayal of the nuclear holocaust, with their giant scorpions and posh household androids, but the central plots are often uncomfortably serious. Fallout 3 had a scene in which you were forced to watch your father die of radiation poisoning through a sheet of glass, then promptly decided it was going to have a big dumb robot laser fight not long after. Can we decide on a tone here?

 

But Fallout 4 seems to have a bit more of a lean towards the silly side, and on the whole I like this. When it embraces the absurdity of the core concept it shines, with over-the-top ideas and characters that stick with me far longer than any dead family scene. Not that there isn't a bit of the serious nonsense, including one very boring chapter where you have to walk through a man's brain (it's less interesting than it sounds, trust me), but on the whole Fallout 4 is more colourful, more joyful than any of its previous brethren.

 

It's also got a fair bit of polish when it comes to the gunplay now, and thank Christ for that. Previously the games had settled for the bare minimum when it came to shooting, and now it's a bit more organic. You can bash people with your rifle, throw grenades without having to swap to them manually and power armour now acts like a limited form of vehicle, which are all good improvements to the formula.

 

The big new feature is crafting, which I think has been said about every game in the last two years, but for what it's worth, Fallout 4 does it well. How it functions mechanically is that all the garbage and junk objects that served no purpose in the old games can now be broken down to their base components, whereupon you can bring them to a workbench and modify your weapons or armour to give them better damage, aim and so on. You can also use it to build settlements, but I found this rather dull and unrewarding, so tinkered around for a bit before quietly slipping away and allowing it to get overrun by giant crabs.

 

There are some other things I dislike. The main campaign gets a bit woolly later on when you find out more about the Institute, and the new dialogue system is annoyingly vague when it comes to summing up speech choices. If somebody asks you your opinion on beef Wellington and an option comes up saying "cutlery," for example, what the hell does that mean? Will your character complain about the lack of suitable eating utensils, or claim that he doesn't like to eat it with a knife and fork, or just attack his conversation partner with a selection of desert spoons? Too often I'd take the wrong meaning from one of these little speech titles and watch in dismay as my little blonde avatar ruined every friendship he had. I guess it really is realistic.

 

And whilst I'm nitpicking, why is this game so poorly optimised? I've got a good gaming laptop and took time to install all the drivers I needed, but even on the lowest settings the frame rate would occasionally plummet like a sparrow with an anchor tied to it. I'm really getting sick of it, because this is the third major game I've played this year that handles like a fat guy on a unicycle. Oh publishers, maybe you could do a little testing to see if your games function before releasing them to the public?

 

This problem irks me, but it's nowhere near as bad as Arkham Knight was and generally speaking I played the game without too much difficulty. The fact is that I'm willing to overlook a lot when it comes to Fallout 4, because I've been having such a blast with it that the faults seem pretty small by comparison. Quests that focus on detective work or have you pretend to be a famous superhero are a welcome break from the old "go to this blitzed suburb and clear it of bandits" structure, and it's a lot smoother when it comes to so much of the basic gameplay.

 

Fallout 4 is exactly what everybody thought it would be - an upgraded Fallout 3. Whilst it doesn't do much new, it does nearly all of it very well, and at the centre is a real sense of heart and enthusiasm that's all too rare in gaming today. Think of it as an unpolished diamond, worthy of critique but ultimately shining bright. Bright enough, I think, to get it that elusive fifth star. Bravo, Bethesda, you've done it again.