The time has come. The night of all nights has arrived, where I will dive into darkness. Evil awakens and a nightmare comes true: Dracula rules our city of New York and the lord of darkness is also the head of the local corporation for cyber-genetics, cyber-space, cyber-surgery, cyber-technology, cyber-weapons and cyber-surveillance. Appropriately, it has been a very long time since the city has seen any light; we are in an apparently endless night.
On its surface Fallout 2 looks like nothing special: Seems like yet another one of those typical RPGs from around the millennium. Which means isometric view, small characters running around, giving each other a bad time with their weapons, a health bar somewhere… hmm… but not in a cheesy ‘epic’ fantasy world? No, actually this takes place in the exact opposite: A violent apocalyptic setting. That's already setting it somewhat apart from the rest. But its real strength only becomes apparent by taking a closer look: The one thing in which Fallout 2 really excels is its high degree of freedom, hence its potential to create your very own story with your very own character that comes bundled with this. In so doing the role playing isn't simply restricted to choosing what kind of damage you want to deal, but for once you can fulfil almost any tasks in your very own way. Thus Fallout 2 is one of the few games which comes as close as it gets to a decent implementation of pen&paper role playing on a computer, as best as it’s possible without some fellow human players. The brilliant game world, created with great love for detail, ensures the icing on the cake.
Steampunk. What started as an original and not entirely unfascinating thought experiment has by now been reduced to stupid costumes primarily consisting of top hat plus welding goggles. It's hard to imagine why a new game would jump on that sad train in 2016. What is even more surprising, however, is that this game then actually doesn't use its self-proclaimed theme after all. Mysterious.
Steam Sky is probably best described as a turn-based Elite. Not that it takes place in space. The player navigates between floating air-bases. In a ship which is probably running on steam and consists of parts whose names don't give the impression that such weight could ever fly. Though that is the whole idea of steampunk, isn't it? That's it thematically, though.