Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game

The game that defined a genre's founding template

Fallout's opening pitch, direct from its own store page, undersells just how influential the game actually was: "You've just unearthed the classic post-apocalyptic role-playing game that revitalized the entire CRPG genre." The SPECIAL character system — Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck — gave players a genuinely flexible foundation for building wildly different characters, and the game backed that flexibility up with quest design that could be solved through combat, dialogue, skill checks or stealth almost interchangeably, years before "immersive sim" became a recognised design philosophy. The official screenshot shows the tone that framework supports: an isometric wasteland scene of overturned, rusted vehicles and scattered survivors picking through the wreckage, the exact aesthetic every subsequent Fallout game has referenced in one way or another. A 2024 review, even while arguing the game hasn't aged perfectly, concedes the point directly: "Fallout 1's biggest achievements are all originating things that later games have done better" — a backhanded compliment that still credits the original with originating them first.

A censorship question the store page doesn't address

What a meaningful and independently-corroborated share of the review sample raises, spanning nearly a decade, is a specific claim about what this Steam release actually contains. "This is one of the best games of all time. But Steam is a steaming pile of [expletive]. Trying to play fallout1 through steam has been nothing but a headache," begins one 2017 review, going on to note the release "does remove children in the game," referencing the original 1997 release's notorious ability to harm child NPCs — a design choice that caused real controversy and led to regional bans at launch. A separate 2017 review states the same thing more plainly: "This version is censored and if I knew that, I wouldn't have bought it. There's a patch out there that lets you play with the censored parts." A 2024 review titled "Censorship: Not Even Once" makes the same point at length, still recommending against purchasing the Steam version specifically on those grounds while affirming the underlying game is "an enthralling RPG experience." This review cannot independently verify every technical detail of what was changed and when, but the consistency and specificity of these reports — multiple reviewers across different years describing the same missing feature and the same feeling of having been misled by the purchase — makes it a documented concern worth knowing about before buying, regardless of where a given reader lands on the original content itself.

Bugs that have nothing to do with the game's age

Separate from any design or content debate, a more recent thread of reviews describes straightforward technical problems in the current release. A June 2025 review reports a specific, reproducible issue: "Just about every time I unequip an item from a hand slot it gets deleted from my inventory." A May 2026 review, from an account with over 200 hours invested, describes something more serious: "Incredibly buggy. Would not let me finish the game — all my save files when going into the end game got wiped and I was reset to start of one of the late game quests." These are not complaints about 1997-era design choices reading as dated — they're reports of the current Steam build losing player progress and deleting inventory items outright, the kind of bug that would be considered a serious release-blocking issue in any modern game. Several older reviews separately recommend the GOG version as more reliably compatible with modern systems, a pattern this outlet has now seen repeated across more than one classic RPG re-release in this lane.

The difficulty debate, separate from the technical problems

It's worth keeping the game's genuinely harsh early difficulty distinct from the bug reports above, since conflating the two risks either excusing real technical failures as "old game quirks" or dismissing legitimate design critique as a technical problem that a patch could simply fix. A May 2026 review captures the difficulty complaint precisely: "the early hours combine punishing difficulty, opaque systems, and an implied time limit," describing bouncing off the game entirely before ever encountering any of the bugs discussed elsewhere in this review. That's a fair, honest reaction to a real design choice — the original game's main quest does carry a soft time limit that can end a playthrough unexpectedly for a player who doesn't know to watch for it, and the tutorial provides limited guidance by modern standards. Whether that counts as a flaw or a defining piece of the game's identity is a matter of taste this review won't adjudicate on a reader's behalf. What matters is keeping it analytically separate from the inventory-deletion and save-corruption reports above, which are not defensible as intentional difficulty under any reading — they are straightforward software defects in the current release, and a player who bounces off the game's harshness has had a different experience than one who loses two hundred hours of progress to a save bug.

Final verdict

Fallout earns its status as a genre-founding classic honestly, and its influence on every post-apocalyptic RPG that followed — including its own increasingly famous sequels — isn't seriously in dispute. What keeps this review from an unqualified recommendation is a combination of a specific, repeatedly-documented content difference from the original release that the store page doesn't disclose, and current, functional bugs affecting inventory management and save reliability that have nothing to do with the game's deliberate old-school difficulty. Play it for the design and the history — both are genuinely worth experiencing — but go in informed about what this particular release does and doesn't include, and keep frequent, separate save files given the reported risk of corruption late in a run.