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Fallout is a franchise that has existed since its first iteration in 1997, serving as a top down RPG before in its later entries transforming into a large first person RPG. Set in Post-apocalyptic America you play as a variety of characters, ranging from Vault Dwellers looking for their family members or a betrayed courier looking for the gang who killed him, you will wander a land filled with choice based quests and a rich narrative full of World building either alone or with a companion as you piece together what happened to result in the birth of this hostile new world.
Fallout Wasteland Warfare puts you into the world by replicating iconic features of the main franchise, such as being able to upgrade and maintain your settlement of survivors and acquiring perks to further advance or specialise your characters into various playstyles, ranging from close range brawlers who will stop at nothing to connect a spiked bat to an enemy’s skull to madcap scientists who rely on energy weapons and gadgets to achieve victory over the less intelligent members of the wastes.
A S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Love Note
This game acts as a perfect homage to its roots in a table top fashion, taking you to every corner of the wild Wasteland, in your journey across various campaigns and quests you will come across malfunctioning robots aiming to remove you from their “equation” to more iconic staples in the series, such as savage Super Mutants who are resilient but not the brightest or the most deadly piece of wildlife you can find: The Deathclaw. These encounters bleed Personality, with each enemy force or faction wanting to achieve an end goal that often opposes the opposing player, leading to small scale skirmishes for power over the other to become the true leader of the Wasteland.
This box comes with everything you could need to get started, including various measuring sticks for the different weapon/ability ranges and tokens to measure status effects, lootable containers and caps which serve as the games main currency for new items. It also comes with an abundance of well written up and easy to understand character stat blocks, including images of the associated mini so there is a minimum amount of confusion during initial setup.
The box also contains sheets upon sheets of information, small cards for different choice encounters and quests the players may bump into, the myriad of weapons the players may recover during their adventures. It also comes with two fold up maps that can be used completely in association with the starting campaigns listed in the core Rulebook, often coming with in game interactable terrain and hazards.
Lastly the game comes with a set of dice that will be needed to play Fallout Wasteland Warfare and a set of starting miniatures including a Deathclaw miniature, 3 Super Mutant Hounds, 2 Super Mutants, Dogmeat, The Vault Dweller, 3 Survivors, 1 Zeta Alien and a Brotherhood of Steel agent. For the price it asks it provides a huge chunk of content for the players to go through, offering hours of playtime just in its starting set.
Wargaming In The Wasteland
A unique feature of Fallout Wasteland Warfare is its take on choice, the game does everything in its power to replicate that sense of worry you would feel when making a large, possibly game altering decision in its video game counter, most cards that you draw from the deck that aren’t equipment or perk cards have a decision to make, for example a mutated animal being stuck in a worn down fence: do you walk away and pretend you never saw it? Or do you try and free it?. Either one of these pathways can have an effect on the battlefield and ensures that no singular skirmish is the same for any player. The game also has a lot of weight behind it in how it handles the standard army war gaming genre, characters who are injured in the battle still remain that way after a mission and will not heal unless you can afford/find something that could dress the wound. This makes every interaction with an opposing troop in the Wasteland that much more tactical and dangerous, with high risk high reward combat that could lead to a crippling loss or detriment for the rest of the campaign.
However with this sense of loss and disaster is a sense of progression, over the course of the initial missions you will see your gang evolve and gain strength, slowly piecing together stronger sets of armour and weapons to fight against incoming enemies, with your heroic troop who acts as a leader gaining access to a wide range of abilities including the VATS system, which is limited to heroic characters. These features can lead to you growing attached to your force, worrying about if they will make it out of your next venture unscathed.
The Start Of Something Grand
Overall, Wasteland Warfare can make you as a player feel a very strong sense of emotion and passion in regards to your faction, putting every tactical advantage at your disposal to its full use to try and help them succeed. This can lead to fun rivalries growing at the table between players, maybe they have a heroic character who killed your longest living troop who you spent multiple missions upgrading and caring for. The game provides depth and plenty of mechanics to read through which can come across as overwhelming or daunting to a player new to the table top war gaming scene but has a solid starting string of quests to get you into the action and understand how Wasteland Warfare plays.
Though the games initial price is more on the expensive side, it provides hours upon hours of content for players to explore before looking at additional miniature sets or add on packs, if you are a fan of the Fallout Franchise or simply looking for a good time sink to play with a friend or family on those rainy stay indoor days I cannot recommend Fallout Wasteland Warfare enough.
