Fallout 4 Far Harbor Review

After being called back to the Detective Agency through a distress signal, Fallout’s latest expansion takes you to an island filled with new people, quests and weapons. Far Harbor is a great example showing the enhanced scale that can now be reached within additional content.

The game begins after learning about a missing person. You find out that they have travelled north to Far Harbor to discover whether or not they are a Synth. After pursuing the person, you realise there is a lot more going on in Far Harbor than you anticipated as you are thrown straight into the problems on the island. Three new factions are in conflict here which offers a refreshing new choice to be made as you decide who to support. The main outcome being to secure peace throughout the island and I have to say there were some interesting decisions that had to be made to progress through the story.

Of course, alongside the story comes the side and miscellaneous quests and you wont be running out of them anytime soon I can assure you. Far Harbor is the largest landmass that Bethesda have ever included in an add-on. So as you can imagine, there’s plenty to be doing amongst the action of the main quest. Intricate characters and impactful choices are two things that make the side quests just as important as the main quest, particularly the faction based quests.

There are also a few new weapons available to use in the DLC. These range from a pole hook to a harpoon gun and each have their own defining quality. This adds a nice variety to the DLC and more importantly, helps take on the new monsters that are roaming the island. Depending on your level, some of these monsters can be quite challenging. But I thought this was a good thing. I felt that sometimes in the main game the enemies come across a little too easy and this new content allowed me to put my character to the test which made taking down enemies even more rewarding.

The storyline really doesn’t hold back on making you choose between a crazed cult worshipping radiation or the common fishing folk of Far Harbor. Decisions like these really do have a huge impact on the game and I felt genuinely thought long and hard about which faction was best to choose. The complexity and attention to detail that has gone into these factions is really noticeable, and I can only praise Bethesda on that.

However, one of the major problems that others and myself found with the DLC was the performance. The new, dark, foggy atmosphere is all very nice and ominous in principle – but it needs to work. A lot of the time it didn’t look like it had been textured in very well and once it did, the frame rate was particularly poor. At first I thought it was just me, but the problem seems to affect a lot of users. I can only hope Bethesda attempt to fix the problem but as of now, the problem is there and it affects the gameplay. And this is a shame considering pretty much the entirety of the island is covered in fog!

So this is a decent DLC. The story is there, the new location is there and the added weapons and armour are there. Fans of the franchise will enjoy experiencing more Fallout content to be played around with. The only major fault that I could really pick out was the performance issues and because that affected the entire DLC, it was quite a big issue. Otherwise the score would have been higher!

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Microsoft Xbox One code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.