Fallout Mac Review (1998)

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published September 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

You are a vault dweller, your vault is in trouble, their water chip is damaged and it’s up to you to go out into the post-nuclear wasteland and find a new one. Although Fallout is advertised a Role Playing Game, I found it to be more like a hybrid cross between an RPG and an Adventure game, not quite either…

Gameplay

Fallout is a very detailed and complex game. Your main quest is to find a new Water Chip for your vault but, in order to accomplish that there are numerous other mini-quests to accomplish. As you travel the wasteland you will come across many different towns or villages, each filled with different types of people, be it Merchants, Police Forces, Gangs, Ghouls, or maybe even some Super-Mutants. One of my favourite parts of the game is all the different weapons you can find, using a flame thrower and watching your enemies be incinerated, or use the laser rifle to slice your enemies in half. I also liked the turn-based combat, so for people like me whose reflexes aren’t the greatest still have a chance to kick some ass in combat!

Fallout is still mainly a RPG, you can create your own character or use one of the pre-made ones. As you advance in the game your character gains experience points and advances levels by destroying your enemies or completing mini-quests. As you advance your character’s level you are presented with choices of perks that allow your character to for example carry more weight or attack first in combat.

Graphics & Sound

The graphics in Fallout are good, not award winning good but still pretty good. I noticed that there were only a few actual “different” character graphics, like you see a guy with a red baseball hat in just about every town. Also, there were only a few different “town” graphic settings, just about all of the walls of just about all of the buildings were the same, I found it a little confusing to remember which building is which.

The sound effects in Fallout are great! It seemed to me that almost every different gun had a different sound effect. To get the best out of the game I recommend that you use stereo headphones or a good pair of stereo speakers, heck you should do that for EVERY game.

Interface

Fallout has a interesting interface, it does not use any of the “Mac” dialog boxes that we are all used to, instead Fallout seems to be completely Operating System independent. I read that Fallout was programed using a platform OS independent programming library. I really hope that more and more game companies will begin to follow Interplay’s example

Difficulty

Fallout isn’t that difficult, there are no really complex puzzles or anything but, there are a lot of quests to go through to complete the game. I played about 4 hours a day for just over 2 weeks to complete the game. So I’d estimate that this game would take the average person about 40 to 70 hours to complete but, believe me it’s time well spent.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am glad to see such a high quality game make it to the Mac. I found Fallout to be one of the best games I’ve played all year. It has a complex and rich plot that should provide any normal person with hours of enjoyment.

Find a copy

Fallout has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Fallout on Amazon.

Ratings use the MGA’s original 1–5 apple scale. Prices, system requirements and web links in this review are from the time it was written.