The launch of Bethesda’s huge new title, “Fallout 4,” was a couple of months ago, and millions of gamers, including me, anticipated its release. “Fallout 4,” released five years after “Fallout: New Vegas” and seven years after “Fallout 3,” is a single-player, open-world, RPG shooter.

In the game, players can essentially do whatever they want at their own pace and create their own adventures for themselves. In other words, the game is far from linear. There are a variety of side quests and things to do other than just follow the main storyline.

Players will never run out of things to do before investing a significant amount of time. There’s hundreds of hours of content in the game between the main story, side quests, and the new crafting mode, “allowing.” This makes “Fallout 4” well worth the hefty $60 price tag that comes with new releases.

Immediately after creating a new save file, a short cinematic is shown, describing the backstory to the Fallout universe. This is very helpful for new players, as it describes the Fallout Timeline, which diverges from the real world’s history after World War II. Once the cinematic is over, the player is brought to the character creation screen.

The character creation screen has seemingly thousands of different combinations and dozens of options to create the character in any personalized way. The player has the ability to make the character look nearly exactly like them in real life or like a famous celebrity. Soon after character creation, the interactive dialogue begins.

The interactive dialogue can be an extremely important part of the game. Whenever the player engages in a dialogue with another character, four options are given for possible responses. Each option can change the outcome of an event, considerably or hardly at all, depending on the event, and it could change what other characters think of your character as well.

Dialogue is one of the parts that makes Fallout 4 an open-ended, “choose-your-own-path” type of game, but where it really shines is in the post-apocalyptic recreation of Boston. Many have complained that the map is too small, which it may be when compared to other games of a similar style, but it’s also insanely dense. One can never wander around the map without running into a location, event, or a group of enemies. There are quests all over the map and it’s easy to go from one location to another and start doing something completely different.

All within about an hour of starting the game, I was able to find a suit of power armor and a minigun. The power armor in “Fallout 4” is different than in past Fallout games. It cannot just be worn continuously and then forgotten about from then on. It’s powered by fusion cores, which can be bought or found throughout the map. The change in user interface and the camera movement, while wearing it gives a sense of actually lugging around a hulking suit of metal armor.

Shortly after acquiring the power armor, I was tasked with the quest of clearing out a small town full of a raider gang. It seemed easy enough. Raiders were the first enemy encountered in the game, and even when I first encountered them they were pretty easy, so with my newly equipped power armor and minigun, they should be even easier.

The raiders weren’t much of a problem, as always, but in the middle of the firefight with the raiders, a giant, devilish creature emerged from the sewer called a “deathclaw.” Even while in the power armor, it was difficult to fight on higher difficulties.

Bethesda gives the player a sense of power and strength once the power armor and minigun have been acquired, and then not even five minutes later they completely rip that power away as a “deathclaw” pins you to the ground, unable to move.

“Fallout 4” has made quite the first impression on me, and I look forward to seeing what else it has in store. Bethesda definitely has another huge success in their hands. “Fallout 4” has proven to be a solid game and possibly the best release of 2015.

Kevin Blandeburgo is a Video Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.