Other than that, it was interesting to see choices becoming a bit more serious is the game. SOMETIMES it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t, I noticed that a couple choices I was told to make made me ask “Why am I deciding this for them? They can do what they want”. Since this story is quite short, and the characters included are limited, there isn’t too much to be said about how emotionally attached you can become to these characters, but regardless you will be put into situations deciding the fate of their future. In the same way you can play good guy/bad guy in a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic, they’ve now made it so you can go as far as to kill off main characters to the story, or change the lives of them at the least. Throughout Steel Reign, you’ll have to make a couple (not many, but a few) decisions that are actually quite serious, and will more than likely alter the FUTURE of your Fallout 76 adventure. Sometimes I’d make a choice out of 4 possible options, and NEVER see those options again, which is refreshing for a change, it makes what you say matter a bit more. The amount of hidden dialogue, special choices, even flat out story-altering decisions you can make are quite numerous. They are definitely clear if you take your time, obviously that was a speedrunner moment right there, and with this story that’s NOT something you want to do. I had somebody jump onto my stream FURIOUS that the drastic choices “weren’t made obvious enough” so they accidentally clicked on something that made them do something they didn’t want. Steel Reign finally added what we’ve been wanting, what we always have expected, in Fallout stories, and that is consequences to your choices. It’s hard to write up a review for a 3 hour long campaign, so I’m gonna make this short and to the point:

You’re still dealing with most of the same characters from the previous story, Paladin Rahmani, Knight Shin, Scribe Valdez, along with a couple of new characters just recently introduced to further the plot line, or at least start it. Unless you wanna be number 1 speedrunner to spoil it all and then complain about how there was no story or that it was too short, then by all means go for it.

It’s never a race with these things because then you tend to miss out on stuff, like taking a picture with your fellow brotherhood initiates who actually respond to you taking the picture! They have lots of little things like that scattered around, which does add to the experience. The campaign only took me around 3 hours tops to complete, and that was with listening to all the lines of dialogue (not spamming spacebar the whole time) and thoroughly understanding and checking out all the explorable locations. The drama all mostly happens with folks IN the Brotherhood itself, and then sometimes you’ll meet some familiar faces from other stories along the way. This is a very small scale of BoS questing, not quite as large a base, important of characters, or even interesting of situations. For those of you expecting a level of Fallout 4 Brotherhood experiences, you won’t find it here. Regardless, the story picks up almost right from where you left off, and you’re immediately sent around to explore the strange happenings. Regardless of explaining the weird happenings, time doesn’t feel like it really moves in Fallout 76, it just stands very still and things happen, I still feel like I’m on day 1, even though I’ve been playing for 3 years now. My problem is still the time-line just feeling so off. You start off almost immediately where you left, with a couple of “in-between-content” situations explained, just helping you realize that those 8 months separating part 1 and 2 weren’t the blink of an eye in 76. I think Part 1 (Steel Dawn) obviously had more UMPH to it, just because it was the introduction of the Brotherhood of Steel to West Virginia, but Steel Reign feels kinda… tacked on, maybe. I’ll be honest with ya, I wasn’t immediately grabbed by the story enticement this time.

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