Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Generally speaking, over the past few years Prima guides haven't really been bad. In fact with how useful their Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition guide was and how incredibly handy it was to have their HUGE Skyrim Legendary Edition guide, I was expecting a bit more from Prima than this. This guide is big. You'd assume a really big guide would be jam packed with information, but it isn't. Not only does Prima's Fallout 4 guide require a LOT of navigation to get all the information you need out of it, but the information itself isn't in depth in any way. To begin, the guide looks pretty good. The cover (at least of the collector's edition) is very nice and the pages are perfectly glossy (even if a little thin). But the layout and design are usually pretty simple to follow. It doesn't quite thematically breathe Fallout the way the Fallout 3 guide did, but upon first flipping through it you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was a really in-depth guide. After all, it's thick, every page is filled with screenshots, tables and what looks to be information. But... what does that information say? How does it guide the player? This is where the guide becomes problematic. The guide jumps right in, attempting to help you understand the game. It'll tell you about the basic things that the game itself will tell you. For those hoping to get more information on the various systems and how they work the guide doesn't go far. It doesn't necessarily have to, but it also doesn't spend a lot of time here. Once we get to the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. perks, though the guide begins to show the flaw that's going to keep players from truly mastering Fallout 4. Everything concerning your attributes and perks are things the game itself already tells you. There are no suggestions as to how to utilize or suggestions for players who wish to play a specific way. So much of what's here is ripped directly from the game itself. There's no real strategy or suggestions of how to utilize the perks to your advantage. Going beyond that the guide mostly talks about other basics. It'll tell you things such as how combat works (a very basic rundown) before going on to detail the enemies you'll run into. There are only a couple of paragraphs. No strategies on how to fight these enemies, or suggestions but I suppose that I can deal with. We then go into things like your inventory where there are lots of tables. I don't have too many qualms here except for one: Your weapons. The guide only tells you the most basic of basic things about the weapons. Every now and then there are some tips, but the guide spends far more time telling you ABOUT the weapons rather than giving tips on how to USE the weapons or how best to customize the weapons. The guide talks briefly about mods... but once again it spends a lot of time telling you ABOUT them and not how to utilize them. Even if you manage to get through all that, the walkthrough itself is going to be terribly problematic. Before the walkthrough there is a list of all the quest, but I found this to be quite useless in comparison. For instance, it's great that it tells me the quest type, but... I'd like to know where it is. It tells you what page to find the quest on but say you want to do a quest in a specific location... it won't tell you. It just won't tell you where it is in the game. I understand that Fallout 4 doesn't exactly present a great main story. The joy of Fallout 4 is roaming the wasteland and finding and discovering the individual quests, not necessarily your own. The world is pretty cool. Apparently Prima thought similarly. The guide only takes twenty pages or so to cover the main quest. This is because each quest is only given a handful of paragraphs dedicated to it. Sometimes those paragraphs are used to tell you absolutely nothing. Near the beginning of the game when going through Sanctuary, for instance, the guide tells me to explore, but at no point helps point me in the direction of potentially useful items or prepares me for some the hazards I might face. At times the guide MIGHT mention enemies you might encounter and at other times it doesn't say anything. The hazards is a far worse, though. Certainly it's important to explore without really knowing what's coming. But if I'm going to spend a good deal of money on a strategy guide (whether for a collector's item or not) then it's not unfair to expect the guide to give me as much detail as it possibly can. At no point has this guide made me feel secure in what it is I'm doing. There's usually an enemy it doesn't mention. A hazard it doesn't talk about. It rarely points items out in the walkthrough. There are more quests the guide covers beyond the main stuff, but it's mostly the same. A lot of paragraphs that usually describe the quest but don't guide you through it, while explaining to you what the game is already telling you. There are hardly any real details on what to do. Usually it's something basic like... "Explore this area." Each quest usually has a list of objectives and places to explore listed as well. This is great, but going beyond this the guide doesn't feel it needs to tell you HOW to obtain those objectives or what's worth exploring. The guide will usually point you to somewhere in the middle to look for a map. We'll come back to this as well. The point is that the walkthrough and quest guide don't feel complete. They are peppered with good looking screenshots, but again, it's that you don't get enough details about these quests. And sometimes inbetween main quest missions it doesn't tell you what to do inbetween. Things you need to be doing inbetween quests the guide isn't always telling you about. Going from one main quest to another, for example, might actually require you to go through other areas. But since it's not a "quest" the guide just simply opts not to mention anything about it. It's SOMEWHERE in the walkthrough, but because it's not a "main" quest it's not going to be found in that section. It might show up in one of the other quest sections, but you're going to have to basically flip through the guide to find it. The walkthrough also has lots of helpful tips from Vault Boy... but often it's just repeating a lot of things the game itself is actually telling you. They're not so much helpful as they are redundant. And the entire walkthrough is sometimes written in this manner. The game will tell you something and you'll often read the walkthrough to find it describing what an NPC just told you and not necessarily how to go about it. There's so much fluff in the guide at times that it was usually better to go online to figure out what I was looking for. To spend this much money on a guide to ultimately need to go online for information is pretty bad. In this day and age, a strategy guide is a supplement and not a necessity. Often they are collector's items. That isn't a good reason for a poorly constructed walkthrough, however. The Fallout 4 guide either holds back on a lot of detail or it just simply gives you the most basic of basic information. It's the difference between someone backseat gaming and someone playing the game with you. After the walkthrough and quest guide we come to the workshop chapter. As with the rest of the guide it tells you a lot ABOUT the workshops but isn't going to help you utilize them. At times the Fallout 4 guide feels less like a strategy guide and more like a bloated instruction manual. After the workshops we then come to the maps. The maps section is the biggest section of the guide by far. Taking up HALF the guide itself. Sure enough most of these maps are good. It shows you a huge map before going region by region. In each region it'll then go through all the primary locations where it actually shows you the area itself. The guide is less interested in showing you all the wilderness in between these primary locations. Each section in the walkthrough usually will send you to the map if you want a good idea of what the location looks like. While some of those items are shown in the walkthrough, they're definitely shown on the maps. You get an optimal route to get through an area and then they point out a few items. There are even small snippets of information here that even tell you some things you might want to do in these areas. I'm not sure why those things weren't included in the walkthrough. Sometimes it's even more precise in fewer words. At times it made more sense to just flip to this section of the guide than it was to use the actual walkthrough. At first it seemed odd that the maps weren't in the walkthrough itself, but after utilzing the guide for a bit, I'm glad they weren't. The walkthrough would be far more hazardous to use. It made using the walkthrough a lot easier. The maps section also shows all the secondary locations. There aren't maps for these, but they're usually places on the over world map with a small bit to tell you about it. It's actually not a bad section. The only major nitpick here is that the legend only appears on the first page or so of the section. There are a lot of symbols to memorize. You might have to flip back to it from time to time. The biggest problem with the guide isn't necessarily it's lackluster walkthrough. The bigger problem is definitely navigating the guide itself. Useful techniques, that even Prima used in the past, aren't used here. Most guides have a decent "tab" system. This is where you can get an idea where you should flip by looking at the tabs usually in the margin of the page. Each section has a tab at a different spot. A tab system helps players get an idea of what section starts where and how large it is. When flipping through you'll know if you've gone too far because the tabs have changed. I'm not sure why Prima didn't use a good tab system. Especially when they've used one in previous guides. Worse than a tab system, however, is the lack of an index. This guide is huge. Being able to pinpoint a quest (in more than just a list) would've been nice. There were times when I wanted to know WHERE a quest was and I had to flip through the guide endlessly to find it. An index would've easily solved these issues. Not just that, but for those who purchased the collector's edition guide... ribbon bookmarks would've been a nice addition. It would've helped with the page flipping. Strategy guides are not really a necessity anymore. Guides are often supplements or collector's items now. Sometimes strategy guides can enhance the experience of the game. Prima's Fallout 4 guide doesn't really do anything. It doesn't supplement the game or enhance the experience. The extras included with the collector's edition guide are hardly enough to make up for how much information the guide just doesn't have. Prima's Fallout 3 guide felt complete. It was huge, but justifiably huge. Here the guide feels incomplete. Were it not for the maps it'd likely just be an overblown instruction manual. A walkthrough needs to do more than tell me what the game is telling me. It needs to actually guide. It needs to actually dive. For collector's the guide will certainly looks nice on a shelf. It's pretty and has some decent maps. But the problems with the walkthrough and the absurd amount of page flipping you'll need to do to find all the information you want don't make the guide a good companion.