Fallout - Brotherhood of Steel

The first thing that tells you something has gone sideways is the music. Where the series had trained players to associate the wasteland with tinny 1940s crooners on a broken radio, here you get Slipknot and Killswitch Engage over the fighting. It is not a subtle signal. Interplay, by 2004 a shell of the publisher that had shipped the original two games, wanted a console action title with the Fallout name on the box, and the licensed metal was the honest advertisement for what was inside.

The template is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, right down to the fixed overhead camera, the drop-in second player, and the vendor loop between combat zones. You pick one of three characters — the brawler Cain, the sharpshooter Nadia, the ghoul-adjacent Cyrus — and take a Brotherhood errand into the town of Carbon, in Texas, then outward through raiders, super mutants and the ruins of a place called Los. Stats and perks exist, and the Vault Boy art frames them, but they are a thin skin over a beat-'em-up. Attacks chain, the aim assist does most of the shooting, and the loot is graded rather than interesting.

On its own narrow terms it is not incompetent. The isometric levels are legible, the two-player couch mode is genuinely the best way to play it, and the gore effects have a cheap comic gusto the engine can actually afford. What it lacks is any of the writing that made the license worth having. Dialogue is reduced to a handful of lines per NPC and quests to fetch-and-kill; the wasteland's moral ambiguity becomes a choice of which door to open. Nothing here would survive being asked a follow-up question.

Its real historical weight is as an ending. This was the last Fallout product Interplay shipped before the company collapsed and the rights eventually made their way to Bethesda, and a cancelled sequel died with it. For years it was the punchline that the franchise had to escape, and the fanbase's habit of pointedly calling it non-canon says more about its reception than any score would.

Approach it as a mid-tier PS2 dungeon crawler with an inappropriate logo and there is a weekend of coarse fun in it, particularly with a friend on the second pad. Approach it as Fallout and the disappointment starts before the first fight. That gap between the name and the thing is the most interesting item in the whole package.