There’s a Fallout game that is considered
by many to be one of the worst games of all
time, but calling it bad is an insult to games
that are truly awful, like Hotel Mario or
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5.
Can You Beat Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
Without Wanting To Die?
Can You Beat Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel?
That’s it.
There’s no challenge.
Playing the game is the challenge.
The opening cinematic, aside from the metal
music playing in place of the 1950s music
the franchise is known for, actually does
a solid job of setting the stage for a Fallout
game.
Then come the decisions, which difficulty
to play on and which character to play as.
I chose the easiest option to wake up from
this nightmare as quickly as possible and
went with Cyrus as my character because he
seemed like the one who would be able to take
the most damage.
The backstory is vague at best: you’re a
Brotherhood Initiate who’s looking for missing
Paladins, and that’s it.
It was abundantly clear what audience this
game was catering to when the leader of the
Raiders was a woman in heels wearing next
to nothing and dual-wielding pistols.
After talking to a nearby entertainer and
asking her about the men in big metal armor,
I went inside the bar to investigate.
Here I got into combat for the first time.
There’s actually a lot of thought that goes
into combat, you can punch people, or, you
can punch people.
Yeah, that’s it.
You literally have one form of attack, the
X button.
There’s no block, no light attack, no heavy
attack, just attack.
You have a chance at landing a critical shot
that does more damage and you can use different
weapons, but that’s it.
Brotherhood of Steel is a 15 year old game,
but come on, this is garbage by any standard.
Once the raiders were defeated, I informed
Armpit and he told me to talk the the Mayor.
I also leveled up.
Believe it or not, there is some customization
available in this game.
There are skills that are admittedly pretty
generic across the board, but it’s better
than nothing.
What’s really truly incredible is that this
game has more armor customization than Fallout
3.
The slots are: Head, Body, Gloves, and Boots.
In Fallout 3, you’ve got Body Armor, Headwear,
and Glasses.
I also found out, before leaving the bar,
that I did have 2 weapons available from the
start: Iron Gloves and a Homemade Pistol.
Jesse, the one armed merchant’s got melee
weapons, firearms, and armor for sale.
It took me a while to find Richard and saw
that the game really takes advantage of it’s
M rating.
To get the information from Richard, I would
have to go clear out a warehouse for him on
the other side of town.
Inside the warehouse are 25 radscorpions to
clear out.
I tried using my pistol on them but it really
sucks.
The damage is ridiculously low and unless
you’re locked onto a single target, you
have next to no chance of hitting anything.
I fought my way through some of the radscorpions,
picked up some of their tales, punched a few
giant rats to death, and the monotony of this
game’s combat really started to become apparent.
There’s also a whining dog that would.
not.
shut up.
It was so frustrating.
The other thing that was frustrating, because
I’m a pussy that requires handholding, is
that the game doesn’t tell you where the
enemies are.
That’s fine on its own, you explore the
level and take out all the enemies you find,
which became significantly easier once I found
the Spiked Baseball Bat.
It becomes a problem once you get down to
a few enemies left.
You find out that there are 2 radscorpions
left and you have no idea where they are.
Your only option is to mindlessly run around
the level until you find the one radscorpion
left.
I’m not asking for the game to tell you
where every single radscorpion is, but by
the time you’re down to the last few radscorpions,
you’ve done most of the work, just mark
them on the map.
Then I entered the Warehouse Auxiliary Storage
where there are 23 more Radscorpions to kill.
I thought it was just the 25 in that one area.
Nope.
I’m gonna go ahead and spoil the surprise
by telling you that there’s a 3rd area with
even more ing scorpions.
This game is just so unrelentingly horrible.
See, what you’re watching now is the core
of the game.
This is it.
This is all there is.
I spent close to an hour clearing out all
the radroaches.
Imagine you were a Fallout fan in the early
2000s, you rent this game from Blockbuster,
and you spent an hour walking up to radroaches
and pressing X.
The inherent problem is how dull combat is.
You don’t get new abilities as you level
up and get deeper into the game, it’s the
same throughout the entire playthrough.
When you’re playing an action role-playing
game, you expect the action to be fun, but
it’s not.
At one point I blew up a barrel just so there
was something else to look at.
Once most of the radscorpions were dead, I
backtracked through all three areas, clearing
out the occasional rat as I came across it,
until I returned to the entrance where a giant
stone block that previously blocked off a
new room has now been moved.
Inside that room is a giant radscorpion, the
first boss.
I love the text that appears before you face
the Giant Radscorpion, but that’s not enough
to make this fight interesting.
The first minute or two was spent blasting
away at its claws so I could do melee attacks
without it blocking the damage.
When that predictably didn’t work at all,
I spammed stimpaks and used my Combat Knife
to slice them into oblivion.
I ran for a while, trying to take a shot or
two before it caught up to me and did big
damage.
Then it dawned on me that I had enough Stimpaks
to spare that I could just stand in place
and keep firing at it until it died.
And there was still 1 radscorpion left.
Somewhere in one of the three areas I just
spent an hour clearing out is a single remaining
radscorpion.
This game…
I just…
I hate it so much.
God saw my struggles and helped me out, it
only took 10 minutes to find that scorpion,
and with the warehouse finally cleared out,
I returned to the mayor, he pointed me towards
the crater at the edge of town, I sold some
gear to Jesse, and entered the crater.
The one good I’ll say about the crater is
that it does feel like it fits into a world
where a nuclear war took place 200 years ago.
Giant holes in the ground where death is all
but certain litter the landscape, puddles
of water that probably should be irradiated,
and destroyed buildings with no roof.
That’s where the good ends, though.
There are these little beetle things that
are sometimes annoying to fight.
Not because they’re tough, they’re not,
they take a few hits to die and that’s it,
but because hit detection sucks.
I spent several more minutes than I would
have liked exploring the area, killing bugs,
collecting items, and trying to figure where
my objective was until I found the entrance
to the crater lower level.
Once again, I was a little impressed with
the overall feeling of the area.
It really did seem like this crater was a
breeding ground for all sorts of irradiated
creatures.
A little ways into the crater, I realized
I had a Torch that was stupid effective against
the beetles and rad scorpions.
And if you’re wondering how radiation works,
it just does damage over time.
Sorta like Fallout 4, but sorta not at all
really.
After pushing my way through all the creatures,
I entered the Crater Pit where not only did
the Mayor surprise nobody by being the bad
guy, he somehow made it down there before
I did.
Richard is the 2nd boss in this game and it
was here I died for the first time.
His unique offensive ability is that he throws
explosives that detonate after a few seconds
and do a large amount of damage.
He’s one of those bosses that has a high
attack with low health.
He exploded as one does, and his death set
off a chain reaction that triggered the collapse
of the entire crater.
You have to escape before it caves in around
you!
I put an exclamation point there but it really
doesn’t deserve it.
You just have to run back to town.
There’s no timer or anything, sometimes
the screen shakes, rocks fall, and there are
now raiders.
Nothing crazy.
Back in town, the Raider Matron had her goons
light Armpit on fire, then he died.
The raiders have begun destroying the town.
And guess what, you have to clear them all
out before you can do anything.
Three areas, 60+ Raiders to kill, same as
the warehouse.
I bought a Sledgehammer from Jesse before
making my way to the other areas.
It’s better than the torch, but it doesn’t
make this any more interesting.
Everything I’ve said about combat applies
here.
There’s nothing fun about it.
There are Flame Raiders that explode when
they die so ranged attacks are advisable,
but they’re basically the same thing as
the irradiated rad scorpions.
If anything, this was worse.
I spent more time looking for Raiders than
I did killing them.
Few things in life are more annoying than
seeing “1 Raider Remains” and having no
idea where it could possibly be.
I spent a solid 10 minutes looking for the
last Raider before I found it.
The doctor was sort of impressed and guess
what, I get to defeat more Raiders.
Jesse told me that they’re all camped out
at the old mill on the edge of town, he handed
me a key to get through the secret exit in
the warehouse, I upgraded my armor, and went
to take on more Raiders.
They’re tougher and do more damage than
the ones I fought a few minutes ago, and there
are mines on the ground that are annoying
and can’t be destroyed.
Oh, I swapped out the Sledgehammer for a Cleaver
some… who cares.
I have a Cleaver now.
Speaking of now, it’s a good time to point
out something about this run.
There have been times where challenges have
been put on hold for a few months to allow
me to regain my sanity, but this one is different.
I started it way back in the long ago… in
September of 2019 and came back to it in July
of 2020.
So, in the interest of keeping my brain on
the inside of my head and not all over the
wall, I’m gonna real quickly skim over the
rest of what I did in September.
I killed more Raiders in what I can only assume
was the Lumber Yard.
There you go, you’re caught up.
Jesse let me know that I had to fumble with
the machinery if I wanted to reach the Raider
Matron, and I entered the Mill Storage Area
ready to kick some butt and cry for being
back in this nightmare of a game.
The first thing I did was check the controls
to make sure I knew what I was doing, apparently
there’s a Special Move that didn’t work
for me once ever.
I also messed with the graphics to make it
look better again.
The sledgehammer is fairly solid against most
of these clowns, it takes them down in a few
hits assuming you actually connect with their
body and they don’t back away as you swing.
After leveling up again and dumping the points
into the Special Attack just to see if it
did anything, I pressed deeper into the Mill
while wandering around with no real idea of
where to go.
That’s a common theme with this game, being
lost.
If you’re close to the objective a yellow
cross will flash on the mini-map, but it cold
really do with a Titanfall 2 system where
you can always see where you’re supposed
to go if only so you don’t have to spend
more time playing this game than you have
to.
Tougher foes were in the next room as well
as a series of locked doors.
The dual-wielding maniacs did solid damage
against me, I ran through the electrodome,
died to the shocker, realized I hadn’t saved
since the last time I saved due to a limited
number of save slots and was more lost than
ever.
It seemed the door I was supposed to go through
was locked, and my mind wasn’t powerful
enough to figure out what to do.
You might’ve noticed that there are progress-saving
machines every 11 inches.
This is because the developers knew you’d
need to save often, you wouldn’t want to
play this game for more than a few minutes
at a time.
This would be a great mobile game in that
regard.
God, imagine if the first console port of
a Fallout game to a phone was ing Brotherhood
of Steel.
At some point while I was inside I nuked a
reactor which unlocked the path to the Raider
Mother, went back outside to barter with Jessie,
which was where I learned I had more actual
armor that I hadn’t been using for some
reason, most likely my own ineptitude.
Before an eternity had passed, I found myself
in the lair of the lady who was conversating
with what appeared to be a Super Mutant.
Then he left and I was left with her.
For the leader of a Raider group, she was
awfully forthcoming with the information I
was after.
Then I had to kill her.
I used what’s commonly referred to in the
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel community as
the “wombo combo” to annihilate her with
one part toxic gas grenades and another part
standing in place with a submachine gun and
pressing the fire button while spamming the
Stimpak button until she died.
Back in town, my ignorance got the better
of me when I hoped that was the end of this
game.
Oh no.
Not even close.
I met up with some sort of a Lonesome Wanderer
to whom I returned a Vault 13 flask I’d
found.
A smart man would’ve put one and two together
to make two and realize that he was the Vault
Dweller from the original Fallout, or he was
supposed to be.
He learned me about a city of ghouls called
Los, I had a short seizure, watched the giant
monster man instill terror in lesser beings,
and began asking around town about a group
of Brotherhood paladins.
The first guy was Harold, likely the same
Harold living in eternal anguish in Fallout
3.
Apparently he slipped Ruby the Town Friend
a scab if you know what I mean.
Something of his detached while he was inside
her, that must’ve been an interesting experience,
one I’d like to experience for myself one
day.
I kept asking around, sold some items to a
ghoul to buy a pair of Electro Gloves, and
entered the arena to score some easy caps.
You get 100, then 200, then 300, etcetera
whatever.
But it was more trouble than it was worth,
so I headed to the docks via the East Bridge
to continue my search for the Paladins.
Here, ghouls are introduced as an enemy and
they are not much different from Raiders aside
from a different appearance, different death
sounds, different weapons, and attacking in
en-masse.
The Power Fists could dispatch of them in
two-three punches, so they were a non issue
for the most part.
I got lost again trying to figure out where
to go, you’re supposed to jump on pipes
to traverse to other parts of the map.
Things got harder when the big green ghouls
appeared closer to the docks.
Maybe they’re supposed to be Glowing Ones,
maybe not, I really don’t care.
They, along with the ghouls in this area,
tested my resolve like no other group of enemies
did.
After saving the points of the last two level-ups,
I could finally summon a loyal animal companion
to fight by my side, the one and only Dogmeat
joined the party, and that was a lie he was
nowhere to be seen.
This game sucks.
Once I reached another save post, the dog
appeared, he can die over and over again but
will respawn when you pass by a save point.
More minutes of fighting later, and after
entering a new area filled with even more
ghouls, I died, lost some progress, decided
to ignore most of the enemies in my way, entered
what I thought was the right area, it wasn’t,
so I kept fighting as best I could, using
the majority of my stimpaks in the process.
In yet another new area, I found the cousin
of that ghoul merchant from earlier, sold
a few excess weapons I didn’t need, and
made an important decision.
The only way I’d get through this was with
either about 15,000 caps worth of stimpaks
or a lot of alcohol.
And the last time I drank a lot I got into
a shouting match with my air conditioner,
so that was out of the question.
The audio of that shouting match is in the
Mitten Squad Discord Server’s Good Noodle
Board if you want to hear it.
With hundreds of Stimpaks in my pockets, I
continued my journey in Hell by freeing groups
of prisoners who were also stuck in this hell
with me.
Well, I freed at least half of them.
I lost interest in their wellbeing when I
couldn’t find the rest of the keys to the
gates.
Then, it happened, I found Professor Rhombus,
the king of shapes, being tortured by the
Ghoul man, who I then had to kill.
I used the same tactic on the equally as attractive
women I faced a little while ago, stand with
thousands of bullets until he died.
Then I had to escort Rhombus to where he hid
the key to the secret entrance to something.
And, you’re not gonna believe this, Brotherhood
of Steel actually managed to do something
better than other games.
Rhombus ran just as fast as I did.
It was amazing.
Then a suicide ghoul exploded him, he got
back up and was just fine, then it got me
real good, which ended my life, causing me
to have to do the entire escort thing again
because I hadn’t saved recently.
With the key to my possession, I entered Vault
Ten Warehouse Storage in search of the Secret
Vault.
More ghouls and such were inside, nothing
particularly noteworthy to be honest.
I got a Monster Ripper though, that was kinda
cool.
A two-handed Ripper seemed like a pretty Fallout
weapon, I could see it being in other games
in the future.
There were also some Super Mutants inside,
which were negated by the Monster Ripper.
It wasn’t anything crazy or interesting
or fun.
However there was another boss fight in the
form of a series of automated turrets that
erupted from the ground like possessed Jack-O-Lanterns
to beat me up with their bullets.
Luckily for me I still had my several hundred
Stimpaks, so there wasn’t any reason to
die.
Then came Chapter 3.
That’s right, we’re only 2/3 of the way
through this.
Sort of.
You’ll see what I mean later.
My task inside the Vault was to learn of the
Mutant leader’s plans.
I don’t even know what to say about this.
If you find radioactive fire-hose urination
funny, you’ll like this game.
A hoard of spider-things were lurking inside.
I’ll say maybe one more good thing about
this game, it sets the scene of Super Mutants
having taken over a vault pretty well.
There’s blood and stuff and I’m unhappy,
it’s a great time.
But just when you think this game can’t
get worse, it does.
There are puzzles.
Very, very light puzzle elements.
Like, you move these shelves out of the way
using a console.
It’s… whatever.
Eventually I got the pathways cleared, rampaged
through more vault corridors filled with mutated
units, played as a little scooter, died as
a wall-e, and found Attis, the leader of the
Mutants, king of the Vault, the Lion in a
field of hamsters or something.
He was the toughest boss so far, I had to
actually put some effort into beating him.
But I still had hundreds of Stimpaks.
Even if he was an immortal God from the dimension
of sentient marbles I could’ve beaten him
with the power of time and American ingenuity.
At long last, Attis fell before me, I beat
the final boss, and the game is over.
No it’s not.
This does not end.
The torment is forever.
He cut my arm off, dropped me in a hole, someone
woke me up from my attempt at dying, I followed
her through the Vault Ruins on the way to
the gardens, and realized something else about
this game that I like: The Vault really does
fell massive, like it could be the home of
thousands of people.
I got a replacement arm that looked just like
my old one, couldn’t be a robotic arm, that
would’ve required effort, and I was off
to escort a Vault technician through a robot-infested
sub-basement.
Guess what, this, surprisingly, was actually
horrible.
The techno-loser can’t defend himself, there
are robots everywhere, you’ve gotta go through
these side passages to deactivate laser barriers,
leaving him standing there defenseless the
entire time.
The one good thing is that if he dies, another
takes his place, but then you have to run
all the way back to the start of the level
to pick him up, then escort him back through
the level.
He activates the power and sends you to connect
two circuit breakers.
More robots and such, not really anything
difficult or exciting.
But then, it gets worse, worse than ever,
worse than anything in this game so far.
There are these stupid ing lasers blocking
a bunch of different paths along with consoles
used to turn certain lasers on and off.
For example, and I’m just making up this
example, console 1 turns on laser 2 and 3
but turns off laser 4, then console 2 turns
on laser 5 but turns off 2.
It’s more strategic stuff that someone with
a functioning brain could probably figure
out, but the thing is, my Air Conditioner
was still unusable, it was like 94 degrees
outside and the window unit I was given was
in other room because it was missing a piece
so I had to seal the gap with tape and cardboard.
I was in no mood for anything that required
effort on my part.
That being said, I got through it after some
trial and error.
The vents were opened, allowing the vault
dwellers to escape, there was another boss
battle against these disgustingly inaccurate
Nightkin that pushed my poor little iMac to
its limits, and I assumed the end was near.
The dwellers could escape, as I could I.
Again, no.
I needed a keycard to progress.
And where is that card?
Why, it’s back in the Vault Ruins I wandered
through back when I was missing an arm, of
course.
What what’s down there?
Deathclaws which were the strongest and most
annoying non-boss enemies in the game up to
that point.
And once more, I got lost.
I had no idea where to go or what to do.
The Deathclaws kept respawning and took a
-ton of effort and time to kill.
Hopelessly lost, sweating profusely and tired
of this game, I called it quits.
Even without a challenge, this game was so
bad that it broke me.
Not only could I not beat Fallout Brotherhood
of Steel without wanting to die, I couldn’t
even beat at all, and I’ve never been more
content with failure
in my life.
