It's been a whole week since the release of "Fallout 4"--well, just a bit under; it came out at 12:01 AM Tuesday morning, so we're about a few hours premature--but having spent a week, and a weekend, with the game, I've got a much better handle on this game, and some good and bad points have emerged.

First, this is the first Fallout game where I treated power armor as a valuable tool rather than something that's worth a fortune in bottlecaps. In Fallout 3, in Fallout: New Vegas, I reveled at the idea of putting down someone in powered armor. I worked with Mister House so I could take out the Brotherhood of Steel and claim their highly valuable powered armor. I routinely shot down Enclave troops for that valuable armor. Now, however, power armor was a valuable component, and a piece of my everyday activity. It got me out of some very tight spots, and funny thing...I found myself in quite a few more of those this time around. I enjoyed the sheer variety of missions--I doubt I'm even half done--and everything from building settlements to rebuilding the Castle. I even loved the oddly-authentic fiddle music coming out of Radio Freedom.

There were some downsides. I hated refueling power armor with fusion cores; the idea that, one day, I couldn't wear my armor rankled. But there seemed to be no shortage of cores on hand, and I was routinely carrying 10 or more for quite some time. Still, they were valuable enough that finding a box with them inside was a joy. I also didn't much care for the timed element of some missions; when I'm in Fallout, I like having the ability to explore. Timed missions meant I had to forego that, even if just for a while, in a bid to accomplish whatever task apparently needed done THAT MINUTE. But this only seemed to happen for a while before the game let me go back to free roaming. Some missions even repeated seemingly without end; the missions for the Brotherhood of Steel were a big part of this, though I did build a lot of levels and a good load of caps from the endless go here / kill everything / come back / repeat that Knight Rhys had me running.

There were even some things I missed. I missed reloading my own ammo, for one. .45 ammo always seemed in oddly short supply, and it would have been nice to load it. I missed running into settlements instead of just building my own outside of Diamond City. I've only run into one other Vault so far--Vault 114--but I'm told there are at least three others afoot and I'm eagerly awaiting landing in them.

So in the end, I still love this game. I've put a good slug of time into it so far and it's not likely I'll stop any time soon. I miss some things about the old game. I enjoy some things about the new game. But in the end, this is a Fallout for the next generation, and all I can think is, man, if this is what they did with Fallout 4, what will they manage with Elder Scrolls 6?