At the start of Fallout 4, we are reminded that war never changes. And for the first time – to my knowledge – we get a glimpse into life before the Great War. At the end of WW2, we find out that atomic energy became a source of power for cars and robots, and that the world fought over natural resources as a result of consumerism.

The game begins where the trailers left us, in the house that Dogmeat is scavenging through. Pre-war, of course. You’re introduced to the character creation, where you get to choose the look of your character; male or female, black or white, thin or fat. You catch my drift. You can build some really good character models if you have the patience. Once completed, there’s a knock at the door from a Vault-Tec representative. He offers you the chance to book into a new programme, which we can accept in any number of ways: sarcastically, genuinely or thankfully. It’s then that we hear the sirens. Just as you enter the Vault, you see the first bomb drop.

Under no illusions about what has just happened, you get filed through the Vault into what we are told is a check-up pod, only to be frozen in a cryotube. You wake up only for one short period of time, where you see your son being kidnapped and your partner shot. Your baby boy has been taken and you are powerless to do anything about it. When you finally manage to break your shackles, you escape from the Vault and into the wasteland for the first time.

It’s here that the game truly begins. There is no option other than to explore the world, but missions will pop up frequently enough to fill out your Pip-Boy. The world is well realised and still retains a very brown feel, but exploring a town or abandoned house really pulls you into the desolation of the post-nuclear wasteland. At one point in the early game, as you come across your old neighbourhood, you find a Chem lab that one of your neighbours had been hiding. The local neighbourhood drug dealer, actually.

The world is massive and it will take some time to open up all of the buildings in the game, of which there are hundreds. Each has some form of interior, usually housing raiders or super-mutants, and usually with a lot of good loot hidden away inside.

There have been some changes made from Fallout 3, the first of which is that your character now has spoken dialogue. This may not seem like much, but it vastly improves interactions with NPCs. The facial animations are a little bit flat and something Bethesda needs to improve on, and the dialogue tree doesn’t give too much information about what you are about to say either. So while you may be thinking one thing, your character may say something else. This is really only a problem early in the game, and once you get used to the dialogue tree you generally have a better idea of what your character is likely to say.

There are a few issues in the early game as well. Weapons you find will become outdated and useless very quickly, and it can take a while before you find something else that does enough damage to balance out the weaknesses. The controls are Bethesda’s own, and until you get used to them they can cause all sorts of problems. The Pip-Boy is assigned to the B button; in other games this button normally has a very different function. Crouch is assigned to clicking the right thumbstick, and again other games usually use that differently. The control scheme, in general, feels wrong and backwards.

When building in a settlement there are no tutorials at all. It throws you into the workshop and expects you to know what you are doing. I know it’s not just me that had this problem because when I Googled it there were numerous forums asking for the same help. It’s crazy. The settlements themselves have to be rescued from a local problem to get them on your side. Help them out and they will then allow you to harvest materials, food and such from their local resources. It’s an important part of the game, and to not give you some missions explaining how to build the basic functions a settlement needs in order to survive is silly.

Bethesda used this as a selling point for the game and it’s not explained in any depth. There are some issues with the way fences are placed, and it would be nice to see them sit a little flatter and tighter to the ground. Build anything on a slope and your fences can hover 3ft off the ground. Having said all this though, there are some impressive constructions that have been made using the tools available, and they are well worth checking out. The whole system, in my opinion, could use some tightening up.

The storyline is okay, the NPC characters are okay, but there’s nothing that is really all that well written. There are a few missions with one companion who I thought was pretty good, but for the most part I ended up using Dogmeat. Dogmeat is the best. He is well animated and if you look at him, he will stare at you and tilt his head. He will follow you around, and if he finds anything worthwhile he gives a bark for you to follow him. Sometimes this can lead you into a bullet storm though, so just be careful. The companions all have their own unique abilities as well. Some can pick locks, some can hack computers and while everyone will have their own favourites, the companions tend to balance out whatever skills you may be missing.

Unlike Fallout 3, you can now max out the skill tree, much like Skyrim. And there are a lot of them as well. Each is balanced under the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. tree – Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. Each branch dictates one or more features.

Weapons can all be upgraded to godlike proportions now. A nice feature. As long as you have the crafting materials and the right skills, every part of your gun can be changed. From the barrel to the ammo capacity, the sight, the stock and even the calibre of the ammunition. Everything has an effect on your weapon: the damage, the range, the firing ability and the weight. The more you add to a weapon, the heavier it becomes, but it also becomes more unique with every mod.

Item management is better this time around, although you can get overburdened very quickly. Items can be transferred to a companion to cut some weight, but you will need to put some points into that very quickly. I found that selecting a settlement as a home base and storing all my junk was the best way to go, but at least in the early part of the game you will need to do this often. I also found that early on it was difficult to find a vendor to get rid of all my useless stuff, and I had to stop collecting until I got to Diamond City.

The VATS system now works in a slowed-down bullet-time function, with the percentages changing as your chosen target moves. I only found myself resorting to it in emergencies and not as a go-to tool, as I would be more accurate nearly all the time. Some smaller enemies will just rush at you, and trying to hit them when they are at your feet is really hard; again, in the early part of the game this is a problem. VATS does balance this out a little, but it’s still not something I would resort to every time.

Despite working on Fallout 4 for some time, Bethesda has still not squashed all of its bugs. It has a lot of technical issues. I have experienced textures not loading in, the game crashing (only once, but it has happened) and game-breaking frame-rate drops. It’s frustrating that the developer has not fixed issues that were already apparent in Fallout 3 and even Skyrim.

The game itself looks good – not great, but good. It’s nothing spectacular. It’s a vast improvement over Fallout 3, but this time around Bethesda have no excuse for these recurring issues. Yes, some players defend Fallout 4 by saying it is a vast and open world, and that problems are to be expected. My response: Grand Theft Auto V doesn’t have this many issues.

For what it’s worth, Fallout 4 is a good game. It allows you to explore at your own pace and makes you feel like a wasteland survivor. Bethesda, for me, are the masters of the B-game AAA title. It’s slightly broken, but at the same time you don’t care because there is a lot of fun to be had in the world. The real shame is that apart from a few new features, it doesn’t add too much to the Fallout series. The main quests are all a little generic and forgettable, and while there are a lot of repeating side missions, there’s not a great deal of variety in the game. The world itself is the main star though, with a lot of secrets and Easter eggs in and around the Boston area, where you will spend a lot of time just wandering around the wasteland discovering new things.

It will always be the new upgrade for your rifle or finishing the building on your settlement that keeps you coming back. There’s a lot to do in Boston, but the best parts of the game are always going to be your stories and not the one the game gives you. Exploring the city to see how the human population has evolved and changed the way it lives to fit in with the environment is a wonderful thing to experience.