Fallout: Tactics, Tactical Brilliance (read: Stupidity)

Similar to how in a family there are siblings in the weird position of being the middle child there are some games belonging to series that find themselves in a weird situation, although these ones tend to make people say "what even is this" or "why does this exist".

One of these said games is Fallout: Tactics, which finds itself in the weird position of being a spin-off game to Fallout wayyyy back when people wanted a Fallout 3, (before the times of Bethesda), which made a lot of people think it was Fallout 3.

It isn't.

It plays like Fallout (kinda) it uses some of its material, but it's technically its own thing.

Fallout: Tactics Brotherhood of Steel is a game based around, you guessed, tactical combat and real time fighting, as opposed to the turn based RPG that its two predecessors focused on. You can change Real Time Combat into Turn Based Combat at any given time, but the play testers said that Turn Based Combat is for nerds, so they didn't polish it at all.

The story is also different from your regular Fallout. Instead of focusing on your average Vault Dweller trying to do whatever to find the game's McGuffin you're instead a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, a group of technological weeaboos who enjoy the practice of "hikikomori", that is, staying deep inside of their fallout bunkers watching anime and not doing anything productive with their lives. Their favorite anime are those involving mechas and technology, their waifus are the Laser and Plasma weaponry they have in their base. They also like to pester wastelanders (AKA: non-Brotherhood guys) whenever they have technology on their hands because, according to them, those uncultured barbarians are only getting onto the hobby because it's "hip" and "cool".

I wish this was entirely a joke but it's actually close to how the Brotherhood really works.

At one point however, some of the members of the brotherhood had an argument over an anime adaptation of a popular manga, the resulting fallout (heh) of that argument ended up with the manga lovers kicking the rest of their brothers from the bunker and sending them on a quest against mutants or something, just an excuse to get rid of them really.

It worked to a certain degree, the anime lovers said "screw them" and decided to make their own brotherhood, one where anime adaptations wouldn't be judged by manga lovers. The problem was that they had left their animes back home, so now they had to involve themselves with the "posers" in order to regain what they had lost.

The whole point of the game (in terms of the campaign mode) is to do whatever your superior officers tell you to do in order to spread the influence of the BoS and increase it's power over the region. You also get to kill a lot of people too, it's technically a requirement.

In terms of actual gameplay, you're supposed to fight smarter, not harder. There's a reason why Tactics is on the name. The game goes to some lengths to give you information on your mission, you get debriefed and you can even check the map of your mission, where there's a lot of stuff jotted down.

It's simple, but it lets you be creative with how you solve your problems.

We're supposed to enter that Raider stronghold but the guards make it impenetrable? We'll just blow some of their stuff outside to get their attention and make our OWN stronghold that's impenetrable.

Then there's also luck, which plays a big factor on some ridiculous situations.

This being basically the engine that the first two Fallout games used, randomly generated occurrences happen when you least expect it, more so if the character involved just so happens to be unlucky/lucky. Like your gun blowing up on your hands, characters missing so badly that they end up shooting themselves on the foot and knocking themselves unconscious or those times when you're trying to give first aid to one your companions but you end up giving them a concussion. How? I don't know.

But there are times, moments when lady luck seems to be on your side, like one time when a Raider tried to take himself and my squad leader out with a grenade...

There's also other times when lady luck leaves you and suddenly one of your guys gets a bullet through the eye, and other times where one of your squad mates dies to a combination of your own brilliance (read: stupidity) and some bad luck, which happens a lot to me for some reason.

Finally, even though it may not be the FPS experience of the modern Fallout or the exact same experience of the older ones, it's still a good game. You could turn on Turn Based Combat to get that old experience but I wasn't kidding when I said it wasn't polished right. It's not broken, it's just... Okay, play through the game with Turn Based Combat first and then switch it to Real Time, it feels different, really different, like a different game.

Some moments of gameplay may make you want to change to TBC simply because maybe there's too much going on, unless you've played StarCraft before and are a god at micromanaging your guys, which I am not.

...And that's what happens when I try to micromanage like crazy.

But really, if you're into tactical games or shooty games or Fallout as a whole, give it a whirl.

But remember! It's called "Fallout TACTICS: Brotherhood of Steel", don't forget about the Tactics! Otherwise you end up with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

Most people try and pretend that one doesn't exist.

All photos are screenshots taken by me during gameplay.