Billed as a Spiritual Successor to the original Fallout, it is set in the deserts of post-apocalyptic America, and follows the customisable Commander in their quest for vengeance, after their village was burned down and his/her sister kidnapped. Unable to pursue the villains on their own, Commander enlists with the law enforcement of New Government and is given a revolver and five people to command. The long journey in the dying world awaits you!
Has no relation to the 2014 Side View Adventure Game The Fall (2014), and neither of them are related to the 1956 Albert Camus novel or the 2006 Tarsem Singh film.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Apocalypse How: In this case, there wasn't a nuclear war: instead terraformers meant to transform Mars for human habitation had fallen all over the Earth after the rocket launch was sabotaged by terrorists. The seas have dried up as the result, and so while the planet is still technically habitable, most of it is now desert.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: There is a maximum of six people in your party.
- Artificial Stupidity: The enemy AI generally doesn’t do much besides standing still and firing its weapons at you. The only exception is if their morale is broken, in which case they end up fleeing from your group.
- Artistic License – Gun Safety: Attaching a laser pointer to weapons with duct tape is possible in Real Life, but the barrel’s heat will compromise the glue on tape after prolonged use, while in the game it lasts forever. However, there’s no way you can duck-tape a sawn-off shotgun to AK and expect to a) hit something; b) not get injured by recoil.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: Averted. Enemies, especially animals, will flee under certain conditions. Characters with Influencing Animals Survival skill can force them to fight to the death, however. However, the aggressive animals will not attack first at all if the skill is equipped.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Using heavy military vehicles like wheel tanks. Sure, you get mounted weapons to support your group in combat and can always just run someone over, but they also consume plenty of petrol, which is both rare and used to make more practically useful Molotov Cocktails and Petrol Bombs.
- The chainsaw weapon is also like this. Does the greatest melee damage in the game, but is also the heaviest weapon and takes the longest time (4.5s) to swing, and so loses out to Katana.
- Fully averted with rail guns. They are inherently awesome to use, yet are also the most powerful sniper weapons, making the entire class worth taking.
- Batter Up!: A baseball bat is one of the starter melee weapons. It can be made more lethal by driving spikes into it.
- Bling-Bling-BANG!: The gold-plated Calico M900 assault rifle and Calico M950 submachine gun. They are reasonably effective, but nothing special.
- Boom, Headshot!: Obviously functions as an Insta-kill. Normally unattainable, but there’s a skill that gives 2% headshot chance with every hit for light weapons, and a 20% chance for sniper weapons.
- Boring, but Practical: Assault rifles are powerful, plentiful, and use common enough ammo that they can see your party through to the final area of the game.
- Burn the Witch!: One segment of the game has The Commander encounter a small town where the folk are about to burn two women accused of being witches to death. It’s up to you to intervene to save them… or not.
- Chainsaw Good: Chainsaws can be used as melee weapons. They do a ton of damage, but also weigh a lot in your inventory and take a long time to swing.
- Child Soldiers: The redheaded woman player character is incredibly tiny compared to other characters and, given the PC's close age to their sister, it's implied she's supposed to still be a teenager.
- Combat Medic: One of the possible skill specialisations. They use the med-packs more effectively, can use herbs for healing (and prepare them into powerful ointments), heal minor injuries without any items, revive fallen characters (assuming that they died within five real-time minutes) and can perform powerful buffs on other characters with their knowledge of psychology. In short, you’ll definitely want one of these in your party.
- Concussion Frags: Averted. Frag Grenades and High Explosive Grenades are two distinct types.
- Crate Expectations: Bright orange crates are often encountered, and can usually be looted for ammo and other nice things.
- Critical Hit: A skill gives 10% chance of critical hits, which inflict double amount of normal damage.
- Crouch and Prone: Firing accuracy is increased when firing kneeling as opposed to standing, and increased even further when lying down. Snipers can also have a “Camouflage” skill that makes them invisible to enemies at a certain distance when they’re lying down.
- Damsel in Distress: The Commander’s sister, kidnapped in the prologue by one of the villains.
- Dialogue Tree: They’re used to both accept and reject quests, in general conversations, as well as make storyline choices. A common type of dilemma is whether to spare or execute one of the captured antagonists.
- Diegetic Interface: Your New Government passport acts as a stat selection screen. Then, the map is actually held in the player’s hands.
- Doomed Hometown: The Commander’s village, which ends up brilliantly burnt down in the prologue.
- Dual Wielding: Downplayed. Neither melee weapons nor firearms can be wielded together, but there’s a skill that allows for throwing of two knives or two shurikens at once.
- Dump Stat: Driving, as the maps are not large enough to make it essential, and all the vehicles consume hard-to-find fuel.
- Energy Weapon: Laser pistols appear near the end of the game.
- Gameplay Automation: There's a reasonably good auto-battle function.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: The launch of terraformers into space in the backstory. It was supposed to create a new home for humanity on Mars, but ended up wrecking our current home instead after the terraformers were brought down by the terrorists.
- Grid Inventory: Used for all of the items.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: A Broken Bottle is one of the basic melee weapons.
- Gun Accessories: Most weapons can have either silencers or laser sights attached to them with duct tape. Notably, all modifications can also be dissembled at wish. There’s also a choice of either subsonic or dum-dum ammunition in addition to the regular bullets.
- Healing Potion: Subverted. There three kinds of medi-packs, and three kinds of medicinal herbs (aloe vera, burnet and wood garlic.), which are weaker but do the same job, although only medics can use them effectively. Medics can also turn these herbs into more powerful oinments by combining them with beeswax and an ointment jar.
- Hollywood Silencer: Can be attached to any pistol, and a few heavier weapons, such as the Calico 900 assault rifle.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating various foods will heal characters a bit, though not as much as proper medicaments. Interestingly, water is far more efficient at healing and can directly compete with some medicaments.
- Impossible Thief: A skill allows for a Thief to increase the spoils from pick-pocketing by stealing from the victims’ inside pockets.
- Item Crafting: A lot of items can be combined with others to enhance them: see Gun Accessories and Healing Potion above. Other examples include combining an apple with a valium pill to covertly sedate patrolling guards, creating Molotov cocktails, adding nails to C4 charges, fracturing bullets with a rasp to turn them into dum-dum ammo, decorating strings with carnivores’ teeth to make them into necklaces or turning these strings into backpack straps, etc. Note that many of those can only be done with a character possessing a certain skill.
- It's Personal: The player character has a vendetta against the Ratskulls gang and their leader for destroying his hometown and murdering his father.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight, as while they have relatively long delay of 2.5 seconds, it offset by the second highest accuracy after the Manslayer and the second highest damage after chainsaw, which is still double or triple that of most weapons.
- Magikarp Power: Sniper weapon skill is like this, because most sniper rifles are significantly weaker than other available weapons due to marginally higher bullet damage and low rate of fire. Cue the end of the game, where only high-level snipers are allowed to use the really powerful rail guns.
- McNinja: Implied by the Ninja talent, which gives significant bonuses on using shurikens.
- Mundane Utility: Machete, Big Knife and Long Axe can be used for disembowelling strangers in your way… or for cutting slabs of meat down to size. This is actually quite useful if your inventory is nearly full and you can’t afford to take the entire chunk of life-restoring meat.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: President Hayes and the NGO who want to take control of the wasteland by force and exterminate the mutants. Their uniforms even look vaguely like that of the SS and Wehrmacht.
- Optional Stealth: It is possible to bypass enemies by sneaking or crawling past them, which makes progressively less noise at the expense of speed. Made somewhat ridiculous with the Fast Sneak and Fast Crawl skils that allow for sneaking at the running speed and crawling at sneaking speed, respectively.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: Male and female companions are identical in terms of stats.
- Real-Time with Pause: The game’s combat system. You stop the time, give companions further orders, and restore time to watch them execute the actions.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Averted. 38. Special revolvers are the worst ranged weapons in the game.
- Sawn-Off Shotgun: You can turn the regular shotguns into these by using a hacksaw. These shotguns can also be attached to assault rifles with duct tape.
- Secondary Fire: The Fall allows weapons like assault rifles to be fired in a single-shot, burst-fire or automated mode, when other games usually restrict them to one of the last two.
- Set Bonus: Seven armour sets in total. Five of them are traditional defence-increasing ones, one, consisting of Low Shoes and an Overall, increasing Your Stealth and pickpocketing skills, and a set of rat fur clothing gives a slight charisma bonus.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Averted with regular shotguns, which remain quite lethal at distances of upwards 10 metres. Sawn-off shotguns are obviously a different matter.
- Shout-Out: The DT21 armor set looks exactly like MJOLNIR armor.
- Take Your Time: In some secondary missions you’ll be warned to hurry up, yet there would be no real time restrictions. Note the word “some”.
- Timed Mission: Some secondary missions really do mean it when warning to hurry up. Generally, if they mention a certain date or number of hours, they will definitely be failed if incomplete by that time.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Happens to a few characters.
- You All Look Familiar: Out of eight merchants in the game, five share the exact same old man face portrait.
