Taking place many years after the original Fallout, Fallout II places you in the gecko gut-stained boots of your own descendant. For your withering tribal village, you seek a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, a miraculous and fabled gizmo issued to the Vaults (surprise, surprise), intended to miraculously terraform the Earth and recreate civilization. You, who automatically earned the status of Chosen One due to your lineage, get to take a spear and the treasured Vault 13 jumpsuit, and go find it.
My dry description aside, I haven't played any RPG that had the same strange appeal and lasting quality. Fallout redefined RPGs with its post-apocalyptic gunslinging gameplay, now Fallout II takes the redefinition and makes a whole lot of fun of it.
Though it retains the ragtag, gritty backdrop of Fallout, the sequel takes itself *far* less seriously and keeps an attitude of upbeat, perky cynicism combined with silliness throughout. Movie quotes and inside jokes abound, from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Austin Powers," from Macbeth to Mike Tyson. Everywhere you go, somebody's got a snide comment that is a reference to something, somewhere. I've learned more movie lines from Fallout II than from movies themselves. It's a cross-section of American pop culture, to be sure.
The graphics have changed little from the original Fallout, but it's hard to mind, because nothing was really wrong with them in the first place. The music is unobtrusive and always appropriate, it truly evokes the wandering-the-dusty-wastelands feel the Fallout universe has always intended to have. Sound effects are roughly the same but effective as always, lots of very nice, appetite-inducing sounds of gunfire and its effects. The voice-acted characters are enjoyable as ever, and your choices for responses in dialogue are sometimes so side-splitting that you'll have just one more reason to save your game before talking to *anybody*. ("Hey! I worked hard to earn the 9 Perception and Intelligence required to reach this dialogue node! Who are you calling a moron?!")
Despite the fact that there are almost no changes in the interface, Fallout II has enough adventure, storyline, and lung-destroying humor to keep both fans of the original game and newcomers playing, and almost certainly multiple times, because there are many things you will miss on the first go-round. To fully appreciate everything Fallout II has to offer, you'll have to go through it a few times with different characters - which, by the end, will feel like a very, very good idea, because Fallout II is every bit as good as the original, with a delightful new pretension towards cynical humor to boot.
