Your reaction to Fallout 4 will depend greatly on your expectations. If you're a fan of the series - or at least Bethesda's rebooted first-person take on it - then you'll find everything you wanted, and more. If you despair of Bethesda's creaking game engine, with its frequent glitches, stutters and occasional fatal crashes, then you'll also find everything you feared.
Fallout 4 is one of the most contradictory big-budget releases in recent memory. It's insanely ambitious and utterly absorbing, a game that has clearly had thousands of hours poured into every detail of its compelling world. At the same time, it's often falling apart at the seams and pushing its game engine far beyond its comfortable limits. If you were expecting the move to powerful new generation console hardware to smooth out the kinks that endured in Bethesda's RPGs for the decade-long lifespan of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, you'll be disappointed.
And yet I can't bring myself to slam the game too hard. For every minute spent cursing the inconvenience of some random glitch, there are 30 more where I'm completely, wilfully lost in the desolate ruins of Boston, dreading the moment when real life intrudes and pulls me back out. Maybe such creaky, chaotic rough edges are just the price that must be paid for game environments that are this detailed and alive.
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