Yet while the clutter hinders the fun, it doesn't demolish it. Quests are extremely well written, so while most of them are kill-this, collect-that tropes, they give superb context to your actions. You'll meet a grieving husband who has created a family of pitiable human shells in trying to clone his dead wife. Rival gangs play off each other as they vie for regional dominance. Fungal blights threaten the precious few crops sustaining the nearby town. Mission dialogue is mature but not gratuitously so, and the circumstances they describe seem authentic given the cruelties of the postapocalypse. Quest-giver Carrie Pennington sends you on a simple mission to kill humpbacked monstrosities, but when she tells you the town has taken up a collection to pay for your services, her desperation rings true. With each mission you take, this horrific vision of the future takes on added poignancy, and once you reach a high enough level to choose a faction (and reap faction-specific mission rewards), the tension mounts as you discover the ideological differences that divide them.
Well-written dialogue makes killing this boss extra-sweet.
Of course, you won't always be alone when you tackle these missions. You'll need to grab a few buddies for the team-oriented missions like infiltrating a decrepit prison or exterminating a giant scorpion, though you can spend most of your time as a lone ranger. Unfortunately, Fallen Earth doesn't offer any of the helpful grouping tools you might take for granted in other recent MMOGs. You can't search for open groups or sort through different clans that might be recruiting. Instead, you'll need to do things the old-fashioned way: By seeking help in the regional chat channel and hoping for the best. You'll definitely want to be in a supportive clan or have the help of friends if you want to hazard the game's free-for-all player-versus-player areas: The resources you'll find there are valuable, but even in these hushed badlands, you can't always play the solitary hero.
But alone or with a friend, Fallen Earth's missions do a good job of sending you across the entire map to take on new quests and learn new crafting disciplines. You'll spend a lot of time traveling, so you should obtain a horse or ATV at your earliest opportunity. Travel can take you across lands fertile with resources, from cacti to lead nodes, which is a good thing considering your reliance on crafting supplies. Other times, the landscape is striking in its emptiness, barren of both creatures to fight and trash reserves to search. The stark environs add a lot to the atmosphere, but boredom can set in when you spend 10 minutes galloping to your destination. The occasional tedium is compounded once you've collected large numbers of raw materials and your crafting plans are in full swing. Inventory space is limited and cannot be expanded. Thus, you either make too-frequent (and often lengthy) trips back to the city to stuff excess necessities in a vault and sell the chaff or sort out the loot to salvage what is most helpful and leave the rest behind.
This prison has really gone to the dogs.
The lonely treks would be easier to embrace if the world were easier to look at, but Fallen Earth is not an attractive game. There are notable sights: hovering overpasses, a small village dotted with multicolored umbrellas, and an abandoned amusement park. But the technology doesn't do these visual touches justice. Textures are bland, lighting is weak, and graphical glitches (such as limbs disappearing from character models) are common. Without textural detail or slick animations to compensate, the fascinating world eventually turns into a humdrum sea of brown and bronze. One aspect of the production stands out, however: the excellent soundtrack. The strums of a guitar give one town a decidedly Wild West feel, while discordant strings raise tension levels in another. The music is both atmospheric and unobtrusive, sometimes enhancing the bleakness while at other times easing the solitude.
Fallen Earth has its pleasures, particularly once you reach its second major region and discover the wealth of content factional missions provide. Taking long trips across the wastes, scavenging for valuable resources, and enduring the slow pace of early leveling, however, makes it so that it will take a while before you see Fallen Earth at its most enjoyable. Even then, it's hard to escape the clumsy combat, notable bugs, and general user unfriendliness. Obviously, this is not a virtual world for everyone. But if you're willing to endure the flaws and occasional heartaches, you might become attached to Fallen Earth in spite of it all. There is a bright gem in here, but all the debris makes it tough to see the glow.
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