Much shade has been thrown at Fallout 76 for its buggy release and lack of a single-player campaign. That's justified. The game is buggy, and it does feel empty if you don't play it with friends. Still, the game's resolution of junk mongering is a key triumph. Fallout 4 introduced the concept of turning trash into treasure, but the idea came to an unsatisfying and early end as you quickly found everything you needed to succeed. Fallout 76 provides new purpose to your junk-sucking adventures, and if you're a greedy loot goblin like me, you're going to love it.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun referred to Fallout 76 as a softcore survival game. If you are you looking for more about Fallout 76 Bottle Caps check out our website. You're tasked with building bases, collecting supplies and eliminating monsters. The softcore tag is a fair one because you never lose the equipment and weapons you've built, and the same goes for overall character progression. Fallout 76 is a risky release from a successful and confident gaming studio that can likely afford to miss if fans don't fall in love with their new take on a proven franchise.

And that continues beyond the visuals and world design and right to the core of the gameplay. Fallout 76 is ostensibly a loot shooter, where the core of the gameplay is traveling around the world, killing enemies, and grabbing the items they were holding/protecting. Fallout 4 and its predecessors never really had the best shooting mechanics, but VATS and the RPG nature of the experience made up for it. However, that's not the case with 76, as the poor shooting mechanics remain, but VATS has become something totally different, and mostly useless, and enemies are even dumber than before.

In Fallout 76, your stash is limited, as is your campsite. You have a budget for objects in you camp that gets no explanation, so any grand plans for a sprawling homestead are set aside the moment you realize a second-story for your home is basically impossible. You can technically build more on claimed workshops, but you lose ownership on those at an astounding rate. We claimed and rebuilt the same workshop three times in a day because we had the audacity to log out for 30 minutes to eat or use a toilet.

This kind of simpatico interaction is encouraged too strongly throughout the game, as PvE encounters are crippled by limitations. You can only deal minimal damage to others unless they choose to return fire, and even then, combat feels woefully imbalanced. Melee-based players with a strong V.A.T.S. ability seem to almost always dominate the field, for example, and the hit boxes and responsiveness of the controls feel fidgety and loose.

It would be difficult to oversell how bad Fallout 76's enemy AI is at the moment. When they aren't glitching, which happens far too often, they are just dumb. Of course, as all enemies are infected or irradiated humans animals, that's not surprising, but the Scorched and Super Mutants act like intelligent beings. They duck behind cover, taking shots at you whenever you're exposed. They just never do this well.