Bethesda has done it again.

Developed by:Bethesda Game Studios
Published by: Bethesda Softworks
Platforms: PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PC (tested)
Price: $59.99

Fallout 4 made me remember why I love video games. It’s the kind of game that’s so absorbing you will forgo eating, drinking, or sleeping to play. It’s the kind of game you’ll get up off the couch to turn off and only realize later that a half hour has gone by and you’re still standing there, controller in hand, before giving up and just sitting back down to play. It’s a game where there’s always something more to be done, another location to be explored or new problem to fix, some new enemy around the corner that needs to be turned to ash with a laser rifle.

No one doubted that Bethesda knew how to make another compelling open world game, but it was hard to imagine what they could do with the story of yet another vault dweller. Fallout 3 should have closed the book on that story.

See, in 2077 not only did the world end in a flash of nuclear war, but many people survived in underground shelters called vaults. In two of the three previous Fallout games you played a vault dweller so you can play someone who breaks out and experiences the wasteland for the very first time, much the same way a player would be. But in Fallout 3 you played as a baby born into a vault and experienced every important moment of his life- from his actual birth to going to school underground to finally escaping this strange society to the ruined wasteland of the earth to make his mark upon it…. mostly by shooting mutants right in the face.  But after playing through an entire life as one, what more was there to say?

Fallout 4 cleverly sidesteps this problem by making you as a man or woman who’s stuck in time. You were initially a resident of a suburb of Boston in the year 2077, a person with a nice home, a wife or husband, and a small baby named Shaun. Over the prologue to the game you play through a series of events that leads to you being frozen inside a vault and thawed out almost 200 years in the future as the only survivor, waking to find that your baby has been taken from you in the meantime.

Thus starts by far the most story-driven main plot of a Bethesda game yet made, one that still offers up a staggeringly huge open world with literally hundreds of hours of gameplay alongside a driving impetus behind the main character. A rescue mission of revenge is certainly nothing new-- it’s used as the main plot for countless games-- but here it works wonders in keeping you on point for the main story campaign, something that many open world sandbox games struggle with. In Fallout 3 you were trying to save the world and fight some fight or something-- who cared? Many people had too much fun completing the dozens of sidequests to bother finishing the battle. But Fallout 4 provides you a great personal investment. You need to find out what happened to your boy, especially when you start learning that this world (set 10 years later than any other Fallout game) harbors many new threats. Most of them revolve around the mysterious Institute, a shadowy organization that has created human-like androids called Synths that are indistinguishable from humans, and in some cases seem to be replacing humans. Or is that just paranoia?

Besides that, you’ve got everything you’d expect from a Fallout game. You’ve got the same kind of soundtrack, with crazed radio hosts blaring catchy and subversive tunes, the same wonderfully dark sense of humor, the same hard decisions to make. You can play as a hero and do great deeds, or just kill everyone and loot their bodies. 

You’ll likely lean towards hero here, though, as you’ll also be tasked with bringing some semblance of civilization to Boston. To do that, you’ll found settlements around the land. This is when you’ll be shocked to learn that Fallout 4 lets you play SimApocalypse (SimPocalypse?) and construct entire cities from the ashes. Remember all the worthless junk you could pick up in the last game? Here, each and every piece of trash strewn in cabinets and filing cabinets has a use-- every single wrench, pencil, and tube of glue. Choose to create an object for your settlement and you’ll automatically scrap the required it down to its base component (steel, adhesive, ceramic, etc.), which you can use to make gun or armor modifications and structures for your home. You can keep your settlements happy by making sure they have enough places to sleep, wells for water, and food planted on the land. You can set up defenses like turrets to make sure raiders think twice before trying to steal anything, or even set up radio beacons to bring more settlers. Eventually you’ll be able to set up supply lines across the land and will be amazed at how attached you start to grow towards some of these people and locations. This is all thanks to your hard work and your skill at murdering anything that moves.

You see, Fallout 4 doesn’t tone down the violence in favor of growth-- you’ll still spend most of your time gunning down all manner of things. You’ve got the usual Raider and Super Mutant camps dotting the land, as well as toxic dumps inhabited by the zombie-like feral Ghouls, giant mutated animals, and insects. The VATS system is back with that turn-based combat feel. With the click of a button you can activate VATS to target any head or limb of an enemy and dispatch them with ease, and the game has a new system where you can choose to fire off a critical hit after landing a number of shots and filling up a meter. The kills are as bloody and over the top as ever.

The guns are even more absurd and varied this time, and more accessible thanks to a better quick-select system. You can modify any weapon or piece of armor you find to make it do what you want it to-- or just scrap extras to make parts for your better guns. Loot is even more important in this game, especially with the inclusion of new legendary weapons. New, much-stronger legendary versions of every type of enemy can appear, and if you don’t kill them quickly they’ll heal and mutate into even more powerful forms. They make for tough battles, but you’ll always want to engage them, because they drop legendary weapons or apparel. Here you’ll find weapons with abilities you can’t craft on your own-- everything from a rolling pin with spikes jammed into it up to a minigun that shoots incendiary bullets. As with every other weapon in the game, these can be upgraded piece by piece to create something totally customized for you. You can ever rename them to give it even more of a personal touch.

The fact that you’ll be getting so many awesome and unique weapons will make carrying all that crap that much harder. One way to get around this is to try to stay in Power Armor, a giant mech suit you step into early in the game and can upgrade and refine with new parts and mods over the many hours to come. You can carry much more while in the armor, not to mention take a whole helluva lot more damage, but you are slower and reliant on Power Cores to keep going. If you stock up on them for missions where you have to kill a lot of enemies, you’ll find the going’s much easier. You might not actually ever want to leave the armor! Just try jumping off a building in it (you take no fall damage in the suit) and smashing into the ground with a thunderclap. You’ll never want to wear anything else.

Simply exploring the world is part of the appeal of Bethesda’s open world titles, and Fallout 4 offers tons of quests and stuff to find. You can team up with a hardboiled robot detective to solve murder cases, recapture a castle from a gigantic monster that had made it its lair, fight an immortal telekinetic man, and even walk the Freedom Trail, learning the history of Boston from its Revolutionary War days and finding a group of people who are planning its future. Each and every companion you find has their own backstory and side missions, and synths are a big part of the story. At some point you’ll have to determine just what it means to be human There’s a lot to find in this beautiful wasteland. 

And it is beautiful. Some people have been concerned about the quality of the graphics, and to be honest, at the beginning of the game the character models don’t seem that impressive. The people you see are all deep in the uncanny valley and the animations, while decent enough to make the game playable in third person for the first time, still look weird. But it’s not until you start to look at the world around you and realize how much detail it has that the engine will start to amaze you. The woods and ruined cities are astonishing, and it’s even more impressive when you realize that every object in your settlements can be tinkered with and moved around at will. Scrapping junk and adding in new objects is instantaneous and you can build up a town in a manner of minutes. 

The game does have some bugs, though. You’ll have moments where someone is doing weird things while talking to you, like walking away or facing a wall. NPCs kept referring to my female protagonist with a masculine pronoun, which was maddening. There are times when the framerate chugged during a battle against a ton of ghouls or when an enemy got stuck in a wall, and sometimes when you walk under shelters during a storm the rain will pour down your screen anyway, like tears in the rain. There are more than a few glitches to be found here, but you know what? They didn’t bother me. I had no problem ignoring them because the rest of the experience is so compelling, so utterly addictive. Fallout 4 is a perfect game, the kind of game that you can completely lose yourself in-- even more so when you realize that there’s no level cap and you can keep upgrading your character and adding new perks until the end of time. 

Bethesda has absolutely outdone themselves here. Even if it featured no quests or story, Fallout 4 still would have a world so detailed and fully realized that you’d want to explore every inch of it. Step foot into the wastelands of Boston-- but just be warned that you won’t want to come back up anytime soon.

Alex Riviello spent 80 hours in Fallout 4 over the last couple of weeks, and has many more to go. Follow him @alexriviello.