Let’s talk about Fallout Tactics: A Post-Nuclear Tactical Combat Game, the action role-playing spin-off to the Fallout computer game franchise!
Made in 2001, and seemingly outsourced to the company 14 Degrees East (as opposed to being produced by Fallout’s parent company Interplay) and developed by Micro Forté Studio, Fallout Tactics has an interesting place both in the Fallout canon and fandom. While it continues the story of the Brotherhood of Steel from where the previous games left off, fans weren’t too keen on the game’s sudden change from role-playing adventure game to tactical action shooter. This included things like removing the speech skill and dialogue options, and gameplay being built around squad missions instead of the individual hero’s journey. It’s definitely a culture shock if you’re playing the game straight off the back of Fallout 2.
I am not though. The year is 2019 and good lord Fallout 2 came out twenty-one years ago. And thanks to my laptop being a nuisance, I could never actually get Fallout Tactics to work on it. Until now. So what I am now writing are my very first impressions as a die-hard Fallout fan.
Now what I should make clear are my Fallout fan credentials. Not so much to prove that I’m a fan, but more to suggest to the readers what kind of Fallout fan I am. Fallout has a lot of different subcultures at this point so I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea right off the bat. I’m a fan of Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas. Yes I’m one of those people. I’ve played through Fallout hundreds of times and Fallout 2 several times, and New Vegas upwards of ten thousand times? I don’t know how many play-throughs I’ve done but I know I’ve sunk more than three hundred hours into it (at least). I’ve played Fallout 3 and like some things in it but I’ve only played through it once, and I have not played Fallout 4, Shelter, 76 or Brotherhood of Steel.
I should quickly put a qualifier out to say that I am not a Bethesda game hater. But otherwise I’ve not been a big fan of their later games and am very much a Fallout west-coast nut. (I have played through all of Oblivion though). This isn’t to spurn anyone away or anything though, but I know that people are obsessed with biases so I figured I should be upfront about my fandom. My feelings are this: if you like any Fallout game, you are a Fallout fan. If the only game you like is Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, I’ll question your taste but not your fandom. I find there’s too much toxicity about Fallout, and while that might be appropriate considering the nuclear theme, it’s a little tiring.
Okay, finally, let’s talk my first impressions of Tactics! My first feelings are hot damn have I missed Fallout. I’m not one for desperately needing new games out every year, but it is great experiencing some new Fallout content. I’m talking the pure aesthetics of the Tactics opening cutscene, which depicts a Brotherhood of Steel truck driving into Chicago. It’s very Mad Max, which some fans might balk at, but considering you could get the Chrysalis Highwayman car in Fallout 2, seeing vehicles in Fallout feels appropriate. I don’t think Fallout should ever go full Mad Max, it’s always been its own thing, but having no cars or vehicles in Fallout 3 and New Vegas always felt weird to me. This is cool though, and there’s more of a rock and roll edge to it, with the Mordy Ferber Ain’t Got Not Lovin’ song kicking things off. They couldn’t have signalled the series tonal change better.
No projections this time though, as we’re apparently taking a look inside the Brotherhood of Steel codex. The Brotherhood have always had a bit of a knights of yore theme going on with them, and I think it was Fallout Tactics that really solidified that. They’re guys going on quests head-to-toe in heavy armour, fighting monsters in dangerous environments and taking orders from scribes and elders in robes. That was apparent in Fallout 1, but you definitely get the sense of it here, actually reading from a codex. If anything, it distinguishes it from the projections I mentioned earlier.
They got Ron Perlman back for this one, which was a nice surprise. Slightly different take this time, but the same general reasons are given for why the nuclear war happened, Perlman saying it was “the inevitable result of the path humanity had chosen.” I’m always interested in the opening narrative because they actually set up the politics of each game in interesting ways. Fallout 1 talks about how the war happens for the same reasons war always happens, but suggests that a change occurred due to the resources, oil and uranium, becoming both the spoils and weapons of war. Fallout 2 talks about overpopulation and “purely human” reasons for why the bombs fell. Fallout 3 took it in the most radical direction, with the phrase “the destructive nature of man could sustain itself no longer” implying that the inherent evil of humanity was the cause.
So here’s Fallout Tactics, with greater detail into why the war happened than any other. It discusses how there was a great optimism on both sides (presumably the USA and China) for victory, but the war effort soon led to societal collapse. It’s also fascinating in noting that the people in the vaults were “the wealthy, the powerful, the influential and those deemed necessary to their survival”. On the one hand, this conflicts with the idea that the Enclave were using the vaults as social experiments, but it still raises an interesting point about the origins of many of the Vault dwellers. It certainly explains why the few successful vault communities are a bunch of elitist, xenophobic arseholes.
Another minor conflict is that it implies that the Brotherhood of Steel came from a vault. This isn’t quite true, though it’s not entirely wrong either. The Brotherhood were the guards put in charge of protecting scientists in the Mariposa Military Base. When it turned out that the scientists were using human subjects for their super soldier experiments, the guards killed them all and escaped to a vault. I recall people complaining about this inconsistency, and it’s even made a joke of in New Vegas when Caesar laughs at Midwestern Brotherhood members for not knowing their own history, but it really seems like a minor nitpick (so far).
The point about the Brotherhood keeping technology to themselves is maintained however. “The technological saviours of mankind” is a fairly appropriate description, and it’s good to see that the conflict over new members and their secrecy is still a central point, even though the story in Tactics deviates from this. The minority that were pro-new members are sent west to destroy the remnants of the Master’s Super Mutant army from Fallout 1, but when lightning hits their airship (there’s something wonderful about the Brotherhood having airships that I can’t explain) they’re left to make the best out of a bad situation in the ruins of Chicago.
One minor nitpick. The Brotherhood somehow managed to find a vault? Then again, I suppose if there were any inhabitants it wouldn’t have been a problem for the Brotherhood to clear them out. These guys have power armour and laser guns.
You start out as a tribal initiate, that you’re free to customise. I did a stupid thing and made a medic/repair character, thinking that I was going to make a number of other characters for my squad. Nope, you just have the one “Warrior” protagonist, and every other squad character is made in-game. Oops. Ah well, this just ups the challenge. Plus it’ll be a beautiful moment when I actually find something my character can repair in this combat-based game.
Also, your drill sergeant/commander is voiced by the late great Ronald Lee Ermey, famous for playing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. (You know the one, the one where they brought him in as an instructor on how to be a drill sergeant but he was so good they just put him in the movie instead). Fallout has always boasted incredible voice actors and Tactics is no exception (hell they even got Tony Jay back for Brotherhood of Steel…so that game’s not all bad……..) I can not get enough of Ermey giving me mission briefings, which is great because he gives them at the start and end of every mission. If he dies it may well be one of the saddest moments in all of Fallout.
After you’re given your briefing you’re thrown straight into a mission. Some raiders have taken over a tribal village and you have to rescue the hostages and assassinate the raider leader. Don’t think the Brotherhood are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts though. They’re doing this so the tribe will give them members to help swell the Brotherhood’s ranks. You get the sense of the Brotherhood becoming somewhat of a feudal kingdom. I’ve done a couple of missions and you already start seeing the Brotherhood expanding their sphere of influence pure-imperialist style. They seem to function on a protectorate basis, so tribes and villages still have their own laws and customs while enjoying the Brotherhood’s protection, with the Brotherhood expecting loyalty, resources and recruits in return.
At this point though, you’re doing missions, such as rescuing hostages from bad guys. I’m actually really enjoying the combat so far, and this may well be the first game in Fallout where I haven’t been bored by stealth. Stealth is always going to be slow in these games, but as it’s so much more of a necessary component in Tactics, it actually feels far more fluid and fun to mess around with than in say, New Vegas, where stealth always feels more tacked on than necessary, and very clunky. Here though, I’m digging the combat mechanics. I can position squad members around corners so they can both shoot a target at the same time, I can position snipers, sneak behind enemies…I can crouch! It’s a big shift from the companions in 1 and 2 always having minds of their own. While you could say they had more personality by not being controlled by the player, I’m enjoying not getting shot by Ian every twenty minutes.
One thing that was definitely a bit of a culture shock for me, and I’m sure for a lot of Fallout players, is the continuous turn-based combat mode. This is a system where everyone attacks one another at the same time, but the characters’ action points effect how much they can do in each moment. So while a guy with a handgun can fire three or four shots, a guy with a sniper rifle can only fire one or two shots. The rifle is more powerful, obviously, but slower. There is an individual turn-based mode similar to that in the original Fallouts, but I haven’t actually felt the need to change to that yet. I’m enjoying the speed and fluidity of just jumping round corners and blowing enemies away immediately. It stands in contrast to the combat in Interplay’s Arcanum, which also had a continuous turn-based mode but wow that game felt impossible and slow to play with it. Turn based felt much better in that system as most of the combat was hand-to-hand, whereas most of the combat here is gunplay. I have noticed that the continuous turn-based mode really makes melee combat tricky, so I might change to individual if I want to play some melee characters, but right now, jumping round corners and shooting enemies with shotguns suits me just fine.
You know, this might not be the Fallout 3 we all wanted, but damn is it great seeing an updated isometric Fallout from Fallout and Fallout 2. The raiders finally have some real personality to them, the Brotherhood base is awesome, we’re meeting more tribals, it’s really great just seeing a big, new Fallout world.
Don’t get me wrong though, removing speech was a big mis-step. I can imagine that this, and the mission-system, were the two things that prevented Fallout Tactics from being truly embraced by the Fallout community. While you could maybe explain away the mission-system with the game’s story and context, it’s sad playing a Fallout game with all that wonderful dialogue missing. It’s like playing Fallout 3 all over again (sorry, I’ll keep Bethesda jokes to a minimum, I promise). The voice acting and actual writing have all been stellar so far, the raider interactions are especially fun, but not being able to respond to them feels off. This is the series with combat dialogue like, “I think killing you will help, I’ll feel a lot better” and “How about you die, then I leave?” so it does suck that you’re running around like a Legend of Zelda mute. Contrary to Fallout 4’s opinion, the protagonists in Fallout weren’t silent protagonists, they just didn’t limit their dialogue options by having using voice actors for them.
I should also quickly discuss Fallout Tactic’s sense of humour. I remember years ago reading a thread discussing the sense of humour of the Fallout games, and how, Fallout 1 in particular, perfectly blended bleak, dark humour concerning the end of the world with sillier jokes like the combative one-liner dialogue. Fallout 2 went a bit more off the rails with fourth-wall breaking jokes making pop culture references with a more ironic, jokey protagonist, and Fallout 3 went all out on the violence as comedy (such as blowing up Megaton with the atom bomb and blowing people up in especially gory ways). Tactics is noticeably bloody, which is surprisingly satisfying, especially when you’re blowing people away with shotguns (I’m really enjoying these shotguns aren’t I?) and there was one especially funny moment when a raider threw a grenade into a wall and accidentally blew himself up into a million extremely gory pieces. As a horror fan who loves films like Braindead and The Evil Dead series, I can’t get enough of these extraordinarily bloody hijinks, but I can understand if they’re not for everyone.
One thing I imagine a lot of modern sensibilities won’t be keen on are some of the sex jokes. Fallout Tactics was made in the era of South Park and Family Guy when jokes about sexual assault were very much the norm, especially in the circles that developers of Tactics would’ve been in. That and it’s not exactly new to Fallout; there’s a reason Myron from Fallout 2 is despised. It’s a detail that does feel uncomfortable sometimes, so I thought I should mention it. I think this was what people in the thread were talking about when they criticised Tactics for having a juvenile sense of humour.
Okay so, so far I’ve rescued the hostages, defeated the raider leader, then gone on to another base where I rescued a tribal leader (and some lady…according to my commander she’s all mysterious, so she’ll probably turn up later) and I’ve just now run the rest of the raiders out of town and found a weird robot arm. My commander’s also said they’re gonna crucify all the raider corpses to send a message to our protectorate states, so it would appear Daenarys Targaryan has also played Tactics. So we’re getting some good world-building and story here at least, despite the lack of characters to talk to. It’s also funny realising that Tactics is actually a closer successor to the classic Wasteland than Fallout originally was, as this is very much a “rangers going out and fighting wasteland enemies” game. I’m excited to see where the story goes, and to see how my non-combatant protagonist fairs. It is funny how she’s being called the “Warrior” when I’m pretty sure she’s killed all of two people. My snipers and stealth guys have done most of the work.
I should also point out that I generally don’t play tactical shooters or stealth games (Although I have recently finished Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2…so…maybe I should write about them as well at some point) so I’m sure Tactics will be a lot easier for gamers into games like Ghost Protocol and Rainbow Six than they are for me. I’m enjoying it so far though, as each mission has presented different challenges that change things up. Next time, I’ll be writing about the first vehicle to actually move on-screen in a Fallout game!
Brooking The Vault 
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