You face a gradually strengthening set of foes, find an increasingly exotic and powerful arsenal of weaponry, and fight in a decent variety of battles, including raids, jail breaks, and desperate defenses. It's a blast to build up your squad, tweaking their stats and skills, outfitting them with new guns and ammo. It's a hoot to roam across the wasteland, meeting Phil the Nuka-cola guy, or the Four Horsemen of the Post Apocalypse, or encountering bands of mutant cockroaches fighting to the death with deadly radscorpions. By the time you hit the robot missions, however, the game begins to lose its charm. Unless you want to steal and gamble for everything, you have to scour each battlefield meticulously, toting back anything remotely salable.
Encumbered characters move at a snails pace as well, making the game a logistical nightmare.
Even then, the game still has a strong allure that is difficult to explain. Perhaps it's the Fallout setting, with its dark humor, quirkily fascistic Brotherhood, and ultra-violent combat. For fans of Fallout, there's more than enough good gameplay here to justify a purchase. If you are not enamored with the Wasteland, however, and have a low tolerance for roughly finished and rather buggy games, you might want to wait and see how well MicroForte and Interplay patch this one up.