allout: Brotherhood of Steel is not a role-playing game, a fact that has to be stated off the top, because the Fallout franchise's two original installments were open-ended, character-building focused RPGs. In Brotherhood, the characters earn experience but they are limited in how they can spend it. Brotherhood is a linear game of kill or be killed, so players have the choice of spending experience on either making the characters better at killing or making them better at not being killed. To enjoy the game, players must understand that what they are getting into is a rollicking hack-bash-and-shoot fest, not a "live the epic" RPG.
Set in the same world as the other Fallout games, Brotherhood takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, although this installment happens a couple of decades after the other two. Players control one of three members of the Brotherhood of Steel, a paramilitary unit devoted to restoring civilization. The overarching plot is that the Brotherhood has been scattered and the character is trying to bring them together again. As the player finds each member, that member becomes a playable character. While searching for more brothers, the characters will fight many, many monsters while freeing villages, exploring ruins, and foiling mutant plots.
The form of the game will remind players of the Gauntlet and the Hunter series of games, although the multiplayer mode in Brotherhood is limited to two players. The game's perspective is outside the characters in an almost straight-down view. The camera automatically follows the characters, zooming in occasionally for dialogue encounters and (much more rarely) to build suspense by not showing what is on the other side of a door. The characters use a wide variety of melee and ranged weapons to battle the mutant monsters, as well as some character-specific special powers. The fights with the many waves of smaller monsters are broken up by fights with boss enemies.
Graphic language, but disappointing graphics
Brotherhood is a game that is steeped in profanity. Nearly all the characters speak as if they were residents of the gunney room on a U.S. Marine base. The speeches are often funny, but if the player's kids haven't had their vocabulary expanded in this direction, Brotherhood is a game that should be played after the little ones are in bed. It is puzzling why the creators went this far over the top with the language while making both the gore and the sex in the game relatively discreet.
The graphics in Brotherhood are disappointing. One of the major pastimes in the game is finding and equipping ever better armor for the characters to avoid being killed. Despite its importance, the characters' images remain unchanged no matter what they are wearing. This would be more forgivable if the characters weren't already so small on the screen that visually it hardly matters which one you play. The differences are there in the cutscenes, but some of them are done in the game engine with the camera zoomed in. These close looks only emphasize how little detail the characters have.
The actual gameplay of Brotherhood is good, despite being limited to only two players at a time. Both ranged and melee combat make use of a lock-on system, which means that the character is always attacking the closest enemy, but is also always hitting them. Dodging is harder, as it is mostly limited to rolling, and the roll animations often take the character far enough from the enemy that the lock-on is lost. There is a wide and interesting variety of weapons, and they have good animations and sound effects. Players should also note that on the default difficulty setting, the game suddenly gets much harder two-thirds of the way through; it would have been better if the difficulty ramped up slowly over the whole course of the game.
As Brotherhood of Steel was in its last stages, Interplay shut down Black Isle Studio in a cost-saving move. I'm sad that their last game was an action title and not a true RPG of the kind they did so well.
— Eric
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