In Fallout, you take on one of several roles from the video games, you might be a Ghoul or a Super Mutant or someone from a Vault or someone who explores the wasteland for a living. You, and the fellow players are racing to be the best wanderer of the wasteland, completing objectives, fighting monsters, and exploring new locations and ruins. By completing various objectives and fights, you can gain experience points to become better at surviving the wasteland. On your turn, you can move, explore, interact with quests or fight, but when you interact with a quest or search a location, those are where the game really takes off, because you get story read to you. Fallout as a branching story deck that allows you put in or take out cards from the story and advance quests an the main plotline, and depending on what you do, that determines where the story and scenario go. And that’s also how you can get victory points, and the first person to nine points wins.

Let’s start out by talking about theme, the people who I played with talked about how it pulled in quests and side quests from the video game, and that thematically it felt right for that. As someone who wasn’t familiar with the game, I thought that the theme worked well, and I enjoy a good dystopian/post-apocalyptic theme. I’m sure if I was more familiar with the IP (intellectual property) I’d pick up on more of the specific Fallout theme, the theme didn’t differentiate itself a ton from other dystopian/post-apocalyptic settings. That said, it wasn’t completely generic either and even without playing the games, just from being familiar with them in concept, things like Nuka-Cola are nods to the video games that I recognized.

The theme isn’t where the game suffers a bit for me. The game is pretty stingy in handing out points. So getting to nine victory points, which are on quest or objective cards, is slow. And you basically always get them through completing parts of the story quest. You can fight monsters, but unless they are harassing you, it’s not that great a strategy, and while leveling up can be helpful, the randomness of how leveling up works can work out extremely well for some people and very poorly for others. I like the concept of leveling up and how it works, but it felt a bit too random. And leveling up doesn’t give you anymore scoring and isn’t always that helpful for allowing you to get more of the main quest done.

But, to counter some of what I said here, the story parts are the best part of the game. The combat, challenges, exploring, movement, all of those things are pretty standard fair. The story, on the other hand, how it’s created is well done. You can branch out in different directions as to who you help or how you help them. That will then lead you into a new section of the story, depending on which one you did, and it continues to branch and add things to locations that you can explore as well as to the main story. And since that’s the best way to get victory points, it really encourages you to find ways to solve the main quest items as they come up. And that means that there is more story that is read. And sometimes the main story is contingent on the locations that you are searching, so separately you all search at similar locations until you find what you need.

There is one notable other downside for me, this is not a short game. Getting to nine victory points, because it mainly comes through quests that you can then get more points because of completing objectives, the game can last a long time. Our three player game lasted probably near 2.5 to 3 hours, and while the story is good, that means that you’re taking a lot of turns where you are either getting generic story or no story at all. And, if you don’t get lucky on some dice rolls at times, you can find what you need to get more story, but then the story is taken away from you. If this was a fast game with turns taking a few seconds (which they generally don’t take long) and you get points for killing tough monsters or other ways, the game would work better. Instead, the game overstayed it’s welcome. I think I’d find it more interesting if you could try and move forward the story faster every turn, or that the choices were a bit more choose your own adventure style or, in Dungeons and Dragons terms, failing forward, where even when you don’t succeed on the main story, that causes it to move forward somehow, as that would make the game move faster. For what we were doing in the game I think that 1.5 hours would have been a good upper time limit, not nearly twice that long, and the game can be played with four people, which is going to make the game last even longer.

But overall it’s not a bad game. I think that fans of the Fallout video games who like board games are going to enjoy this game way more than I did. And, I think, with the expectation of how long the game takes set from the very beginning that might help better set expectations for the game. I knew, generally, how long it was, but the game still seemed a bit long to me. I do think that the theming is pretty strong and especially that case for fans of the video games.

Overall Grade: C-
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade: D
Fan of Fallout Grade & Board Games: B-

This is the far flung future after humanity has blown itself up and screwed up the world. There are mobile houses that people travel around in where they can mine, and make a living. There are also bigger predator cities that chew up these smaller buildings for fuel. We meet our main character, Hester Shaw as the small vehicles that is getting chased down by a predator city. On the city we have Tom who is a researcher who has noticed that things on the city are going missing, things that could be used for a weapon.

In some way the story just sounds too predictable YA Dystopia. And I think that is some of the issue. The story leans into tropes, but leans into them too much, you want the familiar, but you also don’t want it to feel like it hits upon every trope. The movie packs in too many tropes this way and also because it tries to hit on so many things, you end up with a very disjointed story. You get a predictable bad guy with an anticlimactic end. We get a few other deaths that are supposed to feel like they mean something to the audience, but we’re not connected with the characters. It feels rushed, but also feels like it doesn’t have the action that it should. And when it does have action sequences, they aren’t anything all that interesting, and the main character who is fighting is just a poorly done character.

The characters are also an issue in this movie. Hester has an interesting backstory, and I think that Hera Hilmar does a solid job, but she isn’t given much to work with. We really don’t get to see her shine as a character either, and there is some with her look if you think about it doesn’t make a ton of sense. With Tom, played by Robert Sheehan, he’s a pretty flat character, where he was great as Klaus in Umbrella Academy and playing an eccentric character, here he is a pretty thin character. Then you have Anna Fang. Talk about a great looking character but a very disappointing character. Kristen put it this way, she’s kind of supposed to be a Han Solo type character, but they don’t give her great lines to work with, and she does less than anything with them. She looks cool, maybe a little bit out of place, but that could be set-up with some better character development and story development, but that wasn’t there, and Jihae does nothing with it.

Now, not all the characters are bad. Hugo Weaving as the villain is amazing. His motivations aren’t fully developed, nor is his character, but he does a very good job with what he’s given. The real shame with his character is it’s death. It’s a cheap and not impactful death. I think you could argue that the point of it is to keep blood off of the main characters hands, but we already know that really isn’t something she’s worried about. So it feels weak and more like they hoped they could do another movie, but didn’t think that they’d be able to get Hugo Weaving again. Leila George has a smaller role in the film, but her part was interesting and she portrayed it well. I wish that we’d see more of her Katherine Valentine and Ronan Raftery who plays Bevis Pod with her. They were interesting characters that have the distinction of being the secondary characters who are more interesting than the main characters, which is too common is YA.

I’ve bashed this movie pretty hard. I think even with the characters who have some good development or are better acted, they aren’t given what they should have to work with in this film. I do want to knock one more thing, and that’s the weapon that is used in the movie. There are certain angles where that thing feels like a horrible mid 90’s green screen effect, not nearly as cool and polished as the rest of the world. That’s all I’m going to say about it, because I do want to jump into the visuals of the rest of the world which are amazing. The different vehicles all make sense as something that would be in the world. And while the Shanara Chronicles also do the future earth after something has happened, I think that the world of Mortal Engines is a whole lot cooler. The flying ships, the wall, and the general aesthetic of the world are cool, but the predator city is amazing, and the smaller vehicles are all slightly unique and you can see how they fit into the world. There’s are a level of dinginess in the world as well that works really well, and while you do get some Hunger Games vibes in the movie, they don’t lean into it too much.

There’s so much to explore visually and storywise in this world if someone were to do a good job of creating something cool, that it’s a shame this is the movie we got. And the movie did poorly in theaters, so we’re not going to get another one. Maybe fifteen years from now if the books have done well for Mortal Engines, we’ll get another crack at a move which will do better. There’s so much potential of the world that I want to see more of it. I don’t care that it seems to borrow from Shanara Chronicles, Hunger Games, Gurren Lagann, and Howl’s Moving Castle, and a lot more. There’s a chance for it to be unique, and I’d even read the books after having seen the movie in hopes that they are better and that I’ll get the story that I really want.

Overall Grade: C-
Critical Grade: B+ (Visuals), D (Story)
Fan Grade: C

Have you seen Mortal Engines, if so, what are your thoughts on it? Is it a movie you want to see if you haven’t seen it?

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