Fallout 76 is the most recent installment in the Fallout series made and published by Bethesda. Set in the deep valleys and Appalachian mountains of West Virginia 25 years after a nuclear war, this is not only the first Fallout game to take place in West Virginia, but also the earliest set Fallout game in the timeline.

This latest Fallout was highly anticipated before being released November 14, 2018, but also highly criticized. One of the mainstay complaints was the use of an updated version of the Gamebryo engine, used to run games from Fallout 3, to Skyrim, to Fallout 4. This engine is well over 15 years old, and in tech terms is insanely obsolete. There are many game-breaking bugs present in almost all Gamebryo engine titles that Bethesda has still yet to find a way to fix if they even attempted to in the first place.

Yet another criticism is the fact that Fallout 76 is an always online multiplayer game. Every game in the series before this was a single player RPG, but with this installment Bethesda decided they wanted to capitalize on the multiplayer looter-shooter market. This along with major changes to the crafting, VATS, level up, perks, and enemy balance systems made large swathes of the community criticize Bethesda for “losing sight” of what the Fallout series is meant to be and for taking it a different direction.

As a result of such prerelease bad-mouthing, Fallout 76 came with record low preorder and day-one sales. All of this on top of no nice characters being in the game, enemies animations being glitched, enemies and friendly players being invisible, and how lacking the anti-cheat system was among many, many, many other issues has led to the game being basically dead on arrival.

And yet even after all of this, Bethesda has had the gaul to not only add cosmetic micro transactions into the game that can be acquired only with real money, but also reintroduce game breaking bugs with recent patches that have yet to be fixed. This, on top of the fact that Bethesda has falsely advertised and overpriced much of their merchandise related to the game leads me to not recommend the game to anyone.

You are better off buying the previous installment, Fallout 4, and actually enjoying yourself instead of putting yourself through a buggy, laggy, broken shell of a game.