Player Comments on 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.

A fun and interesting version of a Fallout story. Some scattered SPAG issues, but nothing too bad. It does a good job of capturing the feeling of the setting, including working yourself into dead ends. Several of the locations are interestingly described, although it might be even better served to have either more descriptions of some of those areas, or to make them bigger and more explorable.

The mechanics are interesting and flexible, although it is easy to get stuck without a clear route to avoid the super mutant raid.

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!

This story is... inserting the work put into it clearly shows and I definitely think the author did a good job here a couple points I do want to mention...

The atmosphere of this story is top notch with elaborate details of every location which truly breath life into every place you visit however I just wish there was more to the story aspect than was shown. In fact the overall story is basically nonexistent! I definitely think this is the main thing that holds this entire story down.

The mechanics are well done and are definitely the main feature the author focused on here. I do agree the simple "Higher number wins" focus hurts the story and can make it a bit of a borefest but to be honest I think this problem would of been minor if the author had a more complex story. What I mean by this is if the story was evolving constantly with new developed threats appearing and actual stakes than the reader would be overlooking the simple number system and would instead be getting caught up in the epic story unfolding.

Overall I think this story is one of flutters best with amazing mechanics that get let down by the story.

truly magical

I enjoyed playing through it!

Fairly good game, with plenty of good variable usage for all the different little perks and items you accumulate along the way. It's a rather fun game to play through within a few minutes. It isn't, however, exactly a great story (though the premise is good) since most of the larger decisions end up in combat or avoidance of it through an item/skill. In that sense, you do lose a lot of that Fallout magic that originally gave you the flexibility to handle situations with entirely different mindsets and routes to take, not to mention all the whacky and zany characters you get to meet along the way.

Certainly not the worst, but not the best either. I'd like to see more of this type of game built on in the future (hopefully), but it's a quick and fun little romp through the Wasteland. Great job on the variables!

I am probably not the target audience as I hate these games based on I don't know building. This is not an engine for this and the gameplay is clunky and is not intuitive. I go choosing stuff and run around menus a hundred times like a headless chicken. There is not characters, no really npcs with personalities or anything besides the stupid grind bad implemented mechanisms.

I give it a 4 because the few exploration and events are very well written. It is sad that a good atmosphere and great writing is constrained by a clunky boring and repetitive building system that only does is make game look slow, repetitive and grindy. I will change my score if there were an option with a normal storygame.

Okay, I’m around 90% sure this game isn’t finished: it’s either that or I’m a complete idiot.
Essentially you take command of a camp of humans in a city and try to help them survive.

Positives:
-The story that is actually presented is really fun to play through, I really liked the fun elements like reprogramming all the robots to be in a play/cheerful.
-When the mechanics actually work they’re super impressive, I felt especially smart when I brought the hacker upgrade and making the pipe bomb gun things was really fun.
-You definitely seem to know a lot of the fallout lore, I couldn’t find anything wrong with what you’d written here and I’ve played most of the games multiple times.

Things to improve:
On the very first page it should be ‘began’ not ‘begun’

Occasionally the ‘guide to Seattle’ dosen’t include both inverted commas.

In the ‘fight the radroaches’ scene there are a ton of strange gaps in the text.

On the ‘go to fort Lawton’ page some of the dialogue is structured wrong. This popped up a few times.

When my team encountered the deathclaw monster, I was sent back to the start with absolutely no explanation but still with all of my resources. I’m assuming they died or something.
This occurred a few different times, so it seems a variety of the paths are unfinished.

Great game, I really liked the levels, the upgrades, the different places, the creatures, robots, and the characters. I gave it a six for just a few small reasons. One is I would have liked to get to know the team (both the adventurers and the defenders.) The second reason is at first I didn't realize when you had to defend the base, that meant you actually didn't do what you were trying to do when you were making a choice. The third reason were some links were still availible in certain places such as for upgrades, but I actually couldn't do them again.