Fallout Tactics may carry the name of Fallout, but reading its description and looking at its promotional material, a fan of the Fallout franchise would know that it is not exactly another Fallout game.
It doesn't hide the fact that its gist is not about some Vault citizen who has yet to see the outdoors venturing out into the new world after a nuclear apocalypse. In fact, it flaunts its subject matter, which is the struggle of a splinter faction of the Brotherhood of Steel to bring (its own brand of) order to the Eastern side of the former United States of America, specifically the region around Chicago.
The game promises an exciting experience playing as members of the Brotherhood of Steel, which was a faction introduced in the first Fallout game and one that has an interesting history. It is also practically one of the most heavily armed and technologically advanced factions in the Wastelands of the former USA. (There is another faction that can rival its prowess, but that's another game and another review.)
Starting the game for the first time, the player would realize that this is not exactly a well-fulfilled promise.
Instead of fully-fledged members of the Brotherhood clad head-to-toe in powered armor and toting big guns, the player starts with a bunch of raw recruits who have been conscripted from the townships and villages that had agreed to Brotherhood protection. This is shown in the (otherwise inconsequential) intro cutscene, which actually involves no character of particular importance to the story.
Like the earlier Fallout games, the player starts the game by creating a player character. Here, the player can see that nothing much has changed with respect to character creation: the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. statistics system is still there, together with the usual resistances to the usual sorts of harmful stuff that can be found in games of the Fallout franchise and other derived statistics.
There are a few exceptions, however. Firstly, Speech has been removed, as this game has promised a lot of combat action over diplomatic deeds. The Explosives skill has been renamed to Trapping, in order to accommodate the inclusion of the use of non-volatile traps under this skill.
There is also a new skill, Pilot, which has been introduced to accommodate a feature that had been curiously absent in Fallout 2, despite the presence of a vehicle. Pilot allows the player character to drive vehicles in this game, which play a role in moving the party across the dangerous wastelands. (Unfortunately, the gameplay potential of vehicles is hamstrung due to mission designs, as will be described later.)
Oddly though, despite the focus of combat over other forms of activities that the player characters can be involved in, there are some skills from the original Fallout games that have been retained but see little practical use here. Gambling and Science are two particularly noteworthy mentions.
At the risk of including minor spoilers, this review would mention that Science sees little practical use outside of uncovering Easter Eggs and hidden, off-the-path goodies that can only be obtained through meddling with what appears to be high-tech devices.
(However, certain combat-oriented perks require a level of Science skill as a prerequisite, though these perks can be considered not worth the trouble of building up an otherwise worthless skill.)
There are gambling dens in this game, but the player can obtain so much cash from simply looting everything and selling them off to vendors such that this skill is practically useless; it sees little use outside of gambling dens and is also heavily luck-dependent.
As for traits, Fallout Tactics retains most of the traits that were present in the very first Fallout game, including the once-criticized Night Person. However, considering that time spent completing the campaign is no longer a factor of success and failure, this trait would see little use as players can exploit the passage of time while traveling in the Wasteland to enter missions at favorable hours.
(There is no other way to pass game time, unfortunately; the Rest mechanic in the original Fallout games is missing here.)
One of Fallout Tactics' greatest contributions – perhaps its net best, in terms of benefits - to the franchise is the new traits that it has for non-human characters. The player's party can consist of non-human (or at least non-regular human) party members; the game designers have decided to emphasize the multi-racial themes in this game by having a bunch of very interesting traits that these party members can have.
Most of them have very amusing benefits and setbacks, though some may not be so entertaining because they affect gameplay adversely. For example, the Beta Software trait for robot characters simply introduces hiccups to their AI scripts, making them unresponsive at very inconvenient moments.
Others actually have net benefits, such as Fear the Reaper for Ghouls which increase the rate at which a Ghoul gains perks, but dips his/her HP to very low levels when he/she levels up – a minor inconvenience if the player plans ahead and keeps the Ghoul behind cover. This trait is, of course, not befitting the philosophical design of Traits of the Fallout franchise.
One of them, Rabid, which is for Deathclaw characters, is simply broken, because it does not confer one of the benefits that it promises.
An observant player will also notice many design oversights in how the game designers created the pre-made characters (other than the main player character) for this game, through examining the mistakenly assigned traits that some characters have.
Nevertheless, these new traits are one of the defining aspects of this game that lets it step out of the shadow of its inspirational in-universe predecessors.
After creating the main player character, the player can choose to play a training mission that will teach the basics of the gameplay of the game quite satisfactorily. Afterwards, the player is thrust into a relatively easy first mission involving the scourge of every post-apocalyptic wasteland: Raiders.
The combat in the game can be played out in three ways: the traditional turn-based mechanic, which is not much different from that in the first two Fallout games, the Squad Turn-Based (STB for short) mechanic or in real-time, which this game promised to be a "first" in the Fallout series; it is called the "Continuous Turn-Based" feature or CTB for short.
Unfortunately, CTB is very, very difficult to use. It uses certain elements of the traditional turn-based variant, namely its use of Action points. Every character, friend, foe or neutral will have their Action Points expended with each action that they make, except movement. The "Sequence" statistics, which govern who goes first, who goes next and so on in the traditional mode, are completely unused in this mode.
Combat can become hectic in CTB, with every character involved expending Action Points as fast as he/she/it can. CTB's flaws can be experienced during these moments, such as the lack of a pause button that would have helped tremendously in coordinating the actions of party members. It is also affected by other deficiencies of the game, such as a lack of AI scripts to make party members more autonomous in battle, e.g. the extent of their AI is up to where they just stand on the spot and shoot at any nearby enemies. They lack the scripts to perform any other action.
This makes CTB a very, very impractical gameplay mode, at best.
STB, on the other hand, would be a welcome feature. The player has control over every player character in the party, not just the main player character, so this accommodates the squad-based combat of this game. In this mode, characters belonging to a faction get to have their turns resolved at the same time, or at least consecutively, without having the Sequence statistic governing their turns.
Unfortunately, this also means that the Sequence statistic, and the associated perk Earlier Sequence and the trait Kamikaze, are completely useless in any mode other than Traditional Turn-Based.
The controls for player characters in this game are very much a lot like those in the original Fallout games; characters still move about in maps that have invisible hex-based grids and player characters still perform most of their actions through point-and-click orders, for instance.
Fallout Tactics has the addition of several features new to the Fallout franchise, however. These are features that veteran players of tactical combat games would recognize. The first-most noticeable feature is the ability of humanoid-shaped characters to crouch and go prone. This allows characters (on both sides of the battle) to make use of any cover, as well as to gain accuracy bonuses to firing ranged weapons from these positions.
Another set of new controls would be the tabs and hotkeys for each of the squad member in the party, which can have up to six in number. Speaking of hotkeys, there are a lot more hotkeys in Fallout Tactics than in previous games, including those for actions that existed in the originals. Considering that controlling and coordinating up to six player characters can be a handful, these additional controls would be very much welcome by the player.
Gearing out the player character has been an important gameplay aspect in the original Fallout games, and it is perhaps even more important here. Six player characters allow for a lot of versatility, and conversely, the player will be facing tremendous numbers of enemies, as well as a wide variety of them, so they have to be equipped for any contingency.
The inventory system appears to have been retained from the original Fallout games, though with a larger tab for visual representation of more icons for items on-screen. As for the icons of the items themselves, they appear to be much cleaner and have more high-resolution artwork than those icons in previous games (including for items that were present in all Fallout games, such as Stimpaks). They also happen to look very different from each other. This makes navigating through the inventory system a bit easier.
(Variants of the same type of ammunition do however appear to be colour palette swaps, though this is likely for the sake of expedient association.)
It is a bit disappointing that some of the items that had been introduced in Fallout 2 to help manage inventory, such as briefcases and bags, are not here in Fallout Tactics. However, these items were useful for a single player character that travels alone; in this game, six player characters can provide quite a lot of carrying capacity (especially the superhumanly stronger and tougher races).
Like in the previous games, each player character can equip one set of armor and two weapons (swapping from one to the other and vice versa with a single button-click and no AP cost) at a time. That there are now up to six player characters means that the player's squad can bring a respectable variety of firepower to bear down on enemies.
As for the items themselves, most of them are understandably weapons and ammunition. The rest of the items that are practical are food items, healing equipment, drugs, and – specific to this Fallout game - repair tools.
Most of the weapons in this game have already been introduced in Fallout 2, such as World War II and Cold War era guns and Fallout's iconic, rugged-looking sci-fi weaponry. Most of them, however, have been re-skinned with new in-game models and inventory icons, as well as some new stats; chief among these are the conventional rifles in the game, which have been tweaked to accommodate the fact that they and their ammunition are quite ubiquitous.
Some of the supposedly new weapons also happen to be old weapons that had been simply renamed, such as the Impact Gloves that are actually Power Fists of yore.
There are new weapons, of course, though many of these appear to have been included in the game so as not to waste the time and effort that the game designers have spent on making them. Weapons that give such an impression tend to be those that have little practical benefits over the entire game, such as the new Lacerator, which is a glove fitted with spikes on the backhand. This example of a weapon has its attractiveness mainly oriented around its lavishly done inventory icon; in-game, it has no actual unique model whatsoever.
In fact, there are several new weapons like the Lacerator which belong to the 'Unarmed' and 'Melee' categories, but which do not have much long-term appeal. Such novelty but otherwise weak weapons appear to populate other categories of weapons too; for example, Throwing weapons also include entries like the chakram, boomerang and throwing stars, all of which look but are otherwise pathetic weapons.
Fortunately, the ranged weapons which are new to the Fallout franchise are a lot more interesting and useful.
For example, there are new 9mm handguns. The 9mm round is very, very ubiquitous ammunition, so it would be pleasant for a player to know that there are many weapons to use it with; for example, there is the Beretta pistol, Browning High Power and an assortment of other 9mm pistols, each with their own lavishly created inventory icon. In addition, there are several different SMGs which also use 9mm rounds and are exclusively seen in Fallout Tactics.
There are also a variety of rifles, shotguns and heavy machineguns to be had in this game, with most being based on real-world counterparts. Like most of the pistols and SMGs, most of these have only been seen in Fallout Tactics.
(One of the new 'Big Guns' is particularly noteworthy: the Browning M2. It is perhaps the most notorious weapon in the game for having a tremendous damage output and at a long effective range too, though these characteristics do make it a much overpowered weapon and makes friendly fire terribly, terribly costly; these are two facts that the player will learn the painful way, as it is rarely found outside of enemy hands.)
There are also a few guns that would be amusing to use, for they tie into the theme of weaponizing anything that scroungers of the post-apocalyptic world could find. A good example is the Water Gun, which would have looked like a harmless water-squirting toy gun if not for a modification that allows it to squirt acid instead of water.
Sadly, there are very, very few new energy weapons. Considering the prominence of the designs for Laser and Plasma Rifles in the Fallout franchise and how snugly their looks fit with the themes of Fallout, this can be a disappointment to some who have been looking forward to plenty of new energy weapons with rugged designs.
Unfortunately, the implementation of these weapons is not without some flaws, despite what the very detailed and impressive inventory icons suggest.
Weapons of the same category tend to share the same in-game model, disappointingly enough. That they have lavishly done inventory icons appear to suggest that the game designers have included these weapons out of fancy, but at least they are not as impractical to use as the new melee and 'unarmed' weapons and – most importantly – adhere to the goal of the game being a much more combat-oriented Fallout title.
Despite the presence of guns new to the Fallout franchise in this game, getting these new guns can be a bit tricky, as the game designers appear to have overlooked how to make them more readily available for looting or purchasing from vendors. One example is the Spasm Gun, which is practically a mean and long-ranged stun gun; the weapon can only be obtained from a special vendor available only in a very, very rare special encounter in the World map (more on special encounters later).
Not as impressively varied as the weapons in this game is the selection of armor and clothing apparels in this game. Most of them have been imported over from the original Fallout games, with some of them having upgraded variants but with little else to differentiate them from their predecessors.
The genuinely new ones are the armor items for non-human races, assuming that they are of the sort that can wear armor of any kind. These armor pieces change the appearance of non-human characters, but otherwise are so limited in selection that an experienced player would have the impression that they have been designed to give the different, more powerful looking sprite variants for these characters some actual in-game, gameplay substance.
Nevertheless, the comparatively limited selection of armor items gives enough choices to deal with the variety of harm that will be directed in the way of the player's squad.
As mentioned several times earlier, player characters in the player's squad can consist of more than just regular human characters. As the player progresses through the campaign and solve story arcs, he/she will gain the opportunity to recruit characters of different races into his/her squad.
Each of these races has its own unique qualities. Ghouls can wade through radioactive places and are resistant to poison, as well as have access to special perks and traits that make them so much harder to kill. Super Mutants fulfill the role of a meat-shield (at least until the player develops a terrifically tough Ghoul, if he/she is inclined) and a heavy fire support platform. Deathclaws are great sneakers and can easily maul and incapacitate enemies in close combat. (Their attacks tend to knock opponents down, causing them to lose precious action points.) Beastlords and Raiders are alternative humans who have better physical stats than regular humans. Robots have tremendous natural defenses and are immune to a lot of status effects which typically affect fleshy races.
These multiple races especially play a role in multiplayer, in which each player has to set up a party to battle other players with.
However, the inclusion of these non-human races was not without flaws. There are plenty of bugs associated with these non-human races, with these bugs usually concerning perks and traits associated with them as well as restrictions to the items that they can use and the acts that they can perform.
There are design oversights, like Super Mutants and Deathclaws being unable to use healing equipment. This example also makes skills associated with such equipment completely useless to said races. Such an oversight may seem minor and understandable, considering these two races' lack of hand dexterity, but the player is not informed of this by the game and its documentation in any way. A player who does not know the Fallout lore better would be unwittingly spending points on skills that will never be utilized by these two races.
Some flaws in the implementation of these player characters do not affect gameplay negatively per se, but can be exploited by the player for cheap benefits. For example, Robot characters can actually use Stimpacks, for some unknown reason, and they can also be 'healed' using Tool Kits (though they cannot be healed through First Aid and Doctor Skills).
As the player progresses through the game and explore the Chicago region, the player will earn experience points for his/her squad, mainly through the completion of missions and killing enemies. Experience gained is duplicated for each party member instead of shared throughout the party, so the player has an incentive to have a full roster for maximized gain.
(However, it would appear that party members only gain duplicated experience if they happen to be close to the party member responsible for the experience gain. The game does not appear to inform the player of this.)
Experienced gained would eventually count towards the achieving of point thresholds, which of course result in level gains. Gaining levels confer the usual rewards to be found in previous Fallout games: skill points to be distributed among skills, and every few levels or so, a perk.
It is noteworthy that some of the non-human races here gain perks at a different rate, in order to compensate for their different combat prowess and/or other differences compared to regular humans. The game, again, does not appear to inform the player of this, not even in its documentation. This oversight makes plans to build an efficient killing machine of a party difficult without the player having to resort to guides.
As mentioned earlier, there are new perks in Fallout Tactics, and most of them have to do with the non-human races and the new Pilot skill. Many of them confer very good benefits, but almost all of them are concerned with the resolution of combat (i.e. fighting). Considering that the game is mostly about combat, these perks would not give as much replay value as perks from the previous Fallout games, the latter having included a few options that were more oriented towards story exposition or helping the player gather supplies.
Of course, some of the more powerful combat perks require that the player plan ahead and their prerequisites often clash with those for another alternative powerful perk. This does provide some replay value, albeit forced.
Being members of the Brotherhood of Steel, the player characters are expected to perform missions in certain maps. These maps have only one mission each, with some having secondary objectives. They are much unlike those in the previous Fallout games, where maps usually consist of settlements with plenty of NPCs and objects that accommodate the designing and inclusion of plenty of quests.
Most of these missions require the party to go on foot. While some missions do have understandable scenarios where bringing in vehicular support would be difficult, there are many other missions where such support would have been welcome. Unfortunately, unless the mission provides a vehicle on-site, the player has to leave behind any vehicles that he/she has. (Coincidentally, vehicles provided for by mission designs are the very same ones that the player gets to collect and keep.)
Such game designs effectively reduce the utility of these vehicles to exploring the World Map. Some special random encounters even remove the vehicle, only for it to be returned after the player exits the map for that encounter.
Yet, when the game does allow the use of vehicles, some vehicles can be tremendously fun to use. The most notable one is the APC, which can accommodate all six party members. Thus the party can move at the speed of an APC on the World Map, instead of moving at the rate of the slowest vehicle if the party has commandeered other vehicles or at the rate of on-foot travel if some party members cannot be ferried by vehicles.
In random encounters with hostile enemies, combat-worthy vehicles like the Tank and APC make CTB a viable and time-efficient method of resolving battle. Vehicles can make ramming attacks and are not subjected to the Action Point system, so they can be used to literally mow down said enemies while the passengers fire away from inside the vehicle. Such moments provide plenty of gleeful contrast to the more methodical and tactically demanding missions.
(These moments are also the prime reason for the inclusion of the new items known as Tool Kits, the usage of which is the only way that vehicles can be restored after being damaged.)
In addition to accommodating maps associated with missions and locations for random encounters, the World Map also accommodate the presence of B.O.S. bunkers. These act as home-bases for the Brotherhood of Steel, and gameplay-wise, are places where the player can stash items and vehicles away for future use. They are also places where the player can recruit pre-made player characters, the roster for which will expand as the campaign progresses and through completing special random encounters.
Bunkers also contain the category of vendors known as Quartermasters, who are vendors that the player can never subject to acts of thievery, unlike the others who can practically have their entire table of offerings pilfered outright through exploiting the Stealing skill and plenty of game reloads to bypass the consequences of getting caught red-handed.
The Quartermasters would have made for a viable in-game economy of sorts, what with their massive array of theft-proof items for sale and their endless supply of B.O.S. scripts, which is the currency that the B.O.S. uses. Unfortunately, their inventories do not update on their own; the player will have to advance the story for updates to be triggered. Otherwise, the Quartermasters will never make restocks.
The design of these bunkers does create some disbelief vis-à-vis the story. New bunkers being created were supposed to depict the Brotherhood of Steel shifting their operations HQ, but the player can still visit previous bunkers and see that nothing has changed, as if the game designers had not bothered to make sure the presence of bunkers in the World Map adhere to the campaign story.
The Fallout series has been known for graphical depiction of a post-apocalyptic world made so by nuclear devastation. Fallout Tactics continues that tradition, showing that the Chicago region is not that much different from other regions of the former USA that had been subjected to nuclear bombing.
Therefore, most maps in the game consist of terrain made dry, dusty or sandy and with plenty of cracks. More than half of them also contain ruins of civilization, with dilapidated and crumbling buildings a common feature. Of course, not all maps are this dismal; there are also maps where the desire for stability and peace is reflected in the reconstruction of settlements that was once towns, or completely new towns comprised of shanties and other ram-shackle but otherwise sturdy buildings.
Fallout Tactics has no problem fulfilling the theme of harsh lives in the Fallout franchise.
These maps were also designed with the core gameplay of the game in mind: combat. There is plenty of cover to be utilized in such maps, allowing shrewd players to end their squad members' turns under cover and thus protected from enemy fire. Thankfully, the mechanic of drawing line-of-sight appears to be sufficiently decent to accommodate the rigours of shooting from cover and at enemies behind cover, though the game also applies modifiers from cover to facilitate the luck-based gameplay. If there is a flaw to be had with line-of-sight mechanic, it is that there is no significant visual aid or indicator to show the player that a player character can draw a bead on an enemy target that is in view; the only help that the player has from the user interface is a delineation of whether an enemy can be targeted or not that pops up when the mouse cursor is brought over said enemy.
The maps in Fallout Tactics also include buildings with multiple levels. At first glance, this would appear to enrich gameplay, for there are many missions that can be tackled by taking paths that flank enemy forces and/or catch them behind their cover.
However, this map design is affected by one of the lingering and most frustrating issues that were in the previous Fallout games: the obscuring of models/sprites behind walls and obstacles facing the camera. Fallout Tactics attempts to remedy this with highlighting all models on-screen such that they can be seen even behind cover, but the game does not highlight anything else, especially cover objects obscured behind other objects. Windows are affected the worst, especially those on walls whose 'outside' surface (if applicable) is facing the camera, as many of these block lines of sight instead of allowing these to be drawn through them.
The introduction of additional floors and levels only makes this issue worse. The drawbacks of the fixed camera can be seen most clearly when there are multiple characters within the same building and their highlighted outlines mingle with each other's, confounding efforts to target these characters for various actions. Buildings with multiple levels are also poorly represented by the auto-map, which seems incapable of showing topographies which include more than one level. This happens to hinder the coordinating of the progress of multiple squad members through said buildings.
Fortunately, maps with such multiple levels are quite few in the game.
The Fallout games were also known for having 2-D sprites and models that are well-drawn and animated. Fallout Tactics does not use the Fallout engine, but uses Micro Forte's own Phoenix Engine, which allowed for even more detailed sprites and plenty more seamless animation frames. The engine accommodates the huge variety of enemies in this game quite nicely.
This meant that another trademark of the Fallout games, which is the portrayal of graphical deaths, is especially magnified in Fallout Tactics, as befitting a game that is more concerned with combat (and its messy consequences).
Most of the death animations in this game are more graphical than those in the original Fallout games. For example, in the originals, catastrophic death from laser damage results in the victim collapsing into a non-descript puddle; in Fallout Tactics, the victim only partially melts, but the incompletion is 'compensated' with animations that portray a lot of agony.
It is thus fitting that the game has both in-game and documented warnings that taking on the Bloody Mess trait is very, very not for the weak-stomached.
14 Degrees East and Micro Forte are organizations that are different from Interplay and Black Isle. (The former is a division of Interplay.) These differences can be seen in the departure of the design of some models and sprites which belong to creatures and characters that were in the previous Fallout games.
For example, the Deathclaws in Fallout Tactics look very different from those in the originals, purportedly being closer to the originally intended designs for these intelligent beasts. Some of the different designs for creatures that were already in the Fallout series are refreshing, especially those for the Super Mutants, who appear more dignified and agile compared to the hunchbacked and lumbering ones in the originals.
However, despite being different from the companies that made the original Fallout games, the two decided to design this game with much of the originals in mind. For better or worse, the game adhered to Black Isle Studio's and Interplay's mantra of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" for much of its gameplay framework.
This meant that some game designs that were functional but not exactly palatable to every Fallout fan are still there in Fallout Tactics. The chief-most of these is the luck-based gameplay.
Just about every action in the game is still governed by dice rolls subjected to modifiers brought about by the character performing said action and other external factors. This means that very frustrating occurrences, like an enemy scoring a very lucky critical hit on a player character who is well behind cover (but can otherwise still be seen) and a player character completely missing a target at point-blank range with a Minigun burst, can happen.
Players who find themselves having very bad strokes of luck would be tearing their hair off in this game, as very bad luck in this game often translates to a very miserable death of a player character, or otherwise very serious harm that cannot be promptly attended to.
Of course, this can be brushed off as mere bad luck, but most players would be reaching for the game-reloading button by then, thus breaking the immersion of the game and reminding the player that much of the gameplay in this game is held hostage by very fickle digital dice.
The audio of the game appears to be mostly imported from those in the Fallout games. The forlorn windy howls, creaks of badly rusted metal and the rustle of dust and sand over rock return in this game to fill out its aspect of aural ambience. The sound effects for weapons and user interface audio cues (e.g. button presses) also appear to return.
However, not all of the audio designs of the game have been conveniently ported over from the original Fallout games. The music soundtracks appear to be new, but they are quite subdued – including even the ones used to accentuate combat, despite the focus on combat in this game.
All player characters lack voice-over, other than the customary screams, yells and groans to accompany combat sequences with. NPCs that are important to the progression of the story do have voice-overs however, and these are usually more than decent. All player characters and NPCs also appear to have portraits of their own, and many of these appear to be subtle Easter Eggs and other pop culture references, which can be amusing to know once they have been discovered.
There is a multiplayer feature in this game, which perhaps sets it apart the most from previous Fallout games. In multiplayer, players enter matches, which have only two game modes: team deathmatch (called 'Skirmish' here) and Capture-the-Flag. These two kinds of matches would have been bland, if not for the fact that the players involved can create their own party from scratch, or load-up those that they have made already and saved onto the hard disk, according to points limits set by the match. Players can also customize the equipment that their parties have.
Battles can indeed be a lot different from each other if players resort to a variety of permutations of characters and gear.
This review would give an assessment of the story last, because the story is perhaps only in this game to give a premise to the heavy amount of combat in this game. It should suffice to say that the splintered Brotherhood of Steel faction faces many hurdles in its quest to bring about order to the Chicago region, and the player is tasked with solving these hurdles with extreme prejudice, e.g. lots of fighting.
Much of the story progresses in only one direction, and there are hardly any pivotal story-moving decisions that the player has to make, if any that has significant consequences at all. Still, the story does not appear to have the impression of simply being an excuse for all the combat in this game, i.e. it still gives enough meaning to the player's struggle and can actually be fairly entertaining.
In conclusion, Fallout Tactics is not exactly like the previous games, what with its very linear story. However, if a Fallout fan had wished for a Fallout game with tremendously more focus on combat, then Fallout Tactics fulfills that wish very, very well.