Fallout : Seattle under Siege

I'm a sucker for Fallout-inspired games, and this was a pretty good one. I had a fun time waltzing through the Wasteland with my team. There was definitely a lot of effort put into the mechanics.

It was satisfying to acquire perks and upgrade units in order to assist in a better outcome, although I'll admit that even for a storygame with more game than story, it felt quite linear. I gave the game a few runs and each outcome felt about as rewarding as the other - the most frequent being giving up because your Defenders aren't strong enough. You could get different perks in order to advance faster, but in the end you're still trying to get to the same place; unlike the game it's inspired by, this game only has only one real route to take and doesn't allow for a great amount of deviation from this storyline. I can praise the good use of variables and the like, but I can't say the same for the repetitive grindiness of the game.

The actual story aspect is unfortunately lacking. There's a great atmosphere being built up, with immersive descriptions of each location and event, and it makes me want to explore this world and its inhabitants more personally - only to be left a little disappointed by the lack of actual story. I don't know who my technician is, or those soldiers defending my base and shooting down Deathclaws, and I WANT to know who they all are. Hell, I don't even quite know who /I/ am in this story, aside from the commander of this team. Atmosphere and worldbuilding means nothing if there aren't real characters to put into it and react to the world around them.

As I mentioned earlier with atmosphere, I thought the writing was good, but there were times where the prose felt unpolished and the writing seemed a little off. Occasional walls of text were unappealing, and there were moments throughout the story in which the structure of sentences and paragraphs altogether were clunky or not concise. Overall there wasn't a huge issue with the writing.

I think this storygame has a lot of potential. While I have my issues with the lack of character and life, as well as a few writing "ughs", the game aspect was very well done, and I had a good time playing it through. 5/8.

I deeply admire the effort of this game. It went out of its way to make some interesting mechanics, some sort-of-interesting upgrade-fight-upgrade loop, and some good use of the Fallout background. That's the good stuff.

However, I think the writing seriously suffered. I would just as soon get rid of 75% of the gamey part if the prose could be polished. Just from the first few pages, we're dealing with big walls of unindented text, idiosyncratic spacing, weird capitalization as if the game were in German (the game never quite decides on whether the major stats are capitalized or not, like Defenders), and in general, all the stuff that English professors like to complain about that makes people throw balled-up wads of paper at them, and rightly so.

But that's the little stuff. The big stuff, writing wise, is that the prose is deeply in service to the numbers here, and no amount of the cool inherent fascination of watching numbers go up and down can mask the way the game doesn't want to do storytelling.

I am told "Your defenders fight off the attacking ghouls [5]" or I can "[GIVE UP AND END THE GAME] Without a suitable defence force, the monsters rampaged through your camp, killing everyone."

Hell yes, I fight off the ghouls, because, you know, [5]! And I have 5. So I click that and then I see "Your Group of explorers has taken their equipment, their food, water and medical supplies, and have been commanded to explore the land known as Discovery Park." I'm like, back to the start of the loop. The clicking of the link is the fight.

Fine. Then I "[GIVE UP AND END THE GAME]" I am not going to let all caps intimidate me. But yeah, it just takes me to the rating page.

This is typical of the game. It's such a good idea, but the game is so into the number thing that it forgot that what I want to do is make some choices about how I kick ass. Yeah, I can send that one awesome soldier to fight the deathclaw, but tell me the story of that. Because I really want that story.

I enjoyed the game, but at times there was no suspense that I would fail or die. That may be because I’ve been playing Fallout for years though.

Pretty good

This is an exploration game based on a dystopian world.

The map-building was done well in this game, and the world was well thought out. There was a lot of exploring to do. Most of the information was detailed and helped me gain an insight into the ‘new’ world I was in. The riddle and stat upgrades were also fun additions to the game.

However, the main story of the game is tragically unfinished. Basically, there isn’t much choice involved in the game. You will have to go through all pages no matter what you pick first. You are forced to explore pages and pages of information thrown at you. This quickly gets boring as the same old events happen: you find a monster, you fight it, you go upgrade your stats, and do it all over again. There’s no main objective or purpose besides information you gather from the people you meet.

Overall, this game definitely was full of effort, but more of the ‘story’ part is needed for this setting. 4/8

This game was spectacular! Please make more CYOA stories like this premise.

I did not like how there is only one ending in the entire story. Could you add more?

This was amazing to read and play. I'm going to be honest and admit that I used cheats immediately and without hesitation but it was nice that they were there in the first place!

10/10 will play again

Damn, this is a good game its very good, try it mate, i recommend it to you :)

Fun little adventure. Interesting mechanics - though the links weren't always available for everything and some blacked out when they shouldn't be? But otherwise great! Thanks very much!