Dogmeat intercepted the ghoul as it rounded the bend on the highway. The dog latched onto the walker’s arm and flung it to the ground. When it scrambled up off the asphalt,　he ripped off one denim covered arm　clean to the shoulder.　The dog raced around　his opponent with the arm clenched tight in his jaw,　dropping it only when the　walker lunged forward to smack　him end over end. Rolling back　up on his paws, Dogmeat snarled and leapt onto the dead human. This time he worried off the other arm near the elbow. The walker resorted to its teeth, biting the dog hard on a shoulder. The momentum of the walker’s attack unbalanced it, and it tripped forward over　Dogmeat. Now on the ground and unable to rise again, the walker tried pushing along the broken highway with its feet, jaws snapping at the dog. Dogmeat circled around to the back and ripped off each leg, one after the other, before leaping ontop of the walker to rip out its unprotected neck. The Vault Dweller watched it all through the scope on her rifle and from the　tenuous refuge　atop a broken down truck.

And yes, that actually happened. That is the highlight of 25 hours of combat in Survival mode.　I’m awfully appreciative of the new Quick Save feature given that I died less than five minutes later. The circumstances of that death lead in large part to a decision I made last night to not finish the game on Survival and reroll at the easiest setting.

I fired a sniper rifle point blank into an unarmored head without VATS and did zero damage. Despite the blood that splashed out of the raider’s head. I then used VATS to fire two shots at point blank range with a 95% chance and both missed. When I came out of VATS, the game glitched and I could not physically control my character. Unable to take shelter behind a wall of rubble, the raider gunned me down with a revolver.

First, there’s the physical glitch to take a look at. It manifests whenever I leave　menu screens, whether it’s Pip-Boy or VATS or a lock or NPC traders. For a few seconds, my　left stick does not correctly direct my character. Forward becomes left, left becomes back,　and so on. In combat that is exceedingly punishing. If you were looking at a map on your Pip-Boy while sneaking around, you can go for a nice plunge off a catwalk. While it’s not game breaking, the few times it happens over a game session is too frustrating for survival-horror.　Amusingly enough, when I went to the Bethesda site to report this bug to whatever sort of technical support there was, the main page for Bethesda Game Studios still reports the game as in development.

The real question I spent several hours last night trying to answer was why wasn’t the combat fun? After a trip to Gamestop today, where the guy at the counter said he had already traded the game in as used because he wasn’t having fun either, I was able to put my finger on it. I needed to give up my end-game sniper rifle. Seriously, why did I gain a　weapon equivalent to the one I used to win the battle of Hoover Dam at level 6?

What happened to those zany first few levels where it was perfectly acceptable to run around killing bot-flies and zoot-suit Raiders with pool cues and baseball bats?

Even on the highest difficulty level, you could clear the first real “combat level” of Prim in Fallout:New Vegas with your Vault Jumpsuit, a baseball bat, and a few sticks of dynamite. A set up that was not workable for the endgame, whichever side you chose.　Yet in Fallout 4, you gain access to every conceivable type of weaponry-miniguns, Power Armor, sniper rifles-that it took clearing at least a third of the previous games to get even a taste of as a reward. I don’t feel empowered, I feel jaded.

When you look at the first five hours of gameplay, and its heavy combat centric approach, you see something crafted as a mini-Fallout specifically for lazy reviewers. All of the things it used to take actual exploration and thought to achieve, are handed to the player on a silver platter. Your dog in less than half an hour. Then you get a flood of high-powered ranged weaponry, with basically machetes as your only melee options. Next your low-level, inexperienced and outsider character is cast as an instantly trusted savior of helpless-yet-heavily-armed Wastelanders. With no requirements, you get to don Power Armor and mow down Raiders with a minigun.

On paper, that sure sounds exciting. But what it really is, it is like people giving you your Christmas presents when they buy them, without even any attempt at surprise or wrapping them, instead of waiting for the actually holiday.

For reviewers however, you have essentially played Fallout in five hours, now go give Bethesda a 10-out-of-10. And they even give you a Deathclaw that you can kill. Go you!

And that’s how you build non-Epic combat. Deathclaws in New Vegas were badass. You had to actually spend some time gearing and training your character before you did something besides sigh and reload your game as soon as one saw its next miserable and pathetic meal. This one is a boss you must kill in order to complete the first Main Quest. And you don’t kill it via skill. You trick the AI into an advance and retreat loop, by walking up and down a flight of stairs in a building you can shoot out of but it can’t enter. So Epic I paused my game and made coffee.

And you can entirely ignore that blinking red light that says your Power Armor has a dead battery. You don’t need VATS to kill the Death Claw with your minigun.

Fallout 4 is both blessed and cursed to be released on “Next Gen” consoles. If this had been released on XBOX 360, I would feel like it was a clear improvement in most aspects of combat in comparison to Fallout 3. Dogmeat is awesome, the molerats benefited a great deal from their overhaul, Mirelurk shell armor really does protect them, and limb shooting overall is more rewarding as a tactic.

Where Fallout 4 falls short though is how combat difficulty is increased. In Fallout: New Vegas, if you wanted to go look for a Death Claw with a pool cue at level 5, the game allowed you to do that. You died, of course, but still. Difficulty lay in the availability of weaponry in a nuclear wasteland and level appropriate armor that rewarded head shots. When you found a better weapon, you had to earn real combat experience and then select better perks.

In Fallout 4, difficulty is a mix of invisible armor on your target and the game itself putting more than a finger on the scales of random-shit-happening. You can see it when you shoot someone point-blank with a high powered rifle in their unarmored head and you don’t even cripple him. And no matter your own personal skill, the game makes things difficult by forcing you to miss. That really breaks immersion.

Hence starter areas in Fallout 4 should have stuck to pool cues and baseball bats.　Because it would be perfectly legit for my new character to not be able to bludgeon someone to death in one swat or head shot a Raider with a BB-gun. Instead, I got my Mojave desert arsenal handed to me when I walked out of Vault 111, which I then can relearn to use by constructing a disco-theme billards club and planting gourd crops for survivors I’d rather see get eaten by Molerats.

I changed my mind in regards to making Dogmeat unkillable. While I could see it being a listed option for the easiest combat mode, for people who wanted to play through the story in a casual way, it should have been removed for Survival. As it is, you can use Dogmeat’s self-heal ability to slowly clear areas you would have otherwise found inaccessible. Also, learning how to tactically employ mortal companions is a legitimate way to make the game more difficult. Remove that and you have to resort to high levels of invisible armor and forcing skilled players to miss to make the combat more of a challenge.

Granted, the number one reason I had to reload in New Vegas was companion death. However, if you are going to make the dog unkillable because that’s inconvenient, please make me unkillable because that’s way more of a downer.

TLDR; Survival mode is made difficult because the game forces you to miss head shots at point blank range. It’s like someone pulling on your sleeve to make you miss a dart board. Way past unfun. Started a new game on the easy mode to play it like Fallout: Minecraft.