“Fallout 4” is the fifth installment in the open world action role-playing video game series “Fallout” and the best game in the series so far. With new mechanics, guns and things to discover, “Fallout 4” is the biggest “Fallout” game to date.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287, 210 years after a devastating nuclear war, in which the player character emerges from an underground bunker.

“The story is fantastic. I enjoyed it. It feels more thought through than ‘Fallout 3’ and ‘Fallout: New Vegas,’ ” Noah Gooch, senior, said.

The game takes place in Boston and some parts of New England known as The Commonwealth. The player is allowed to freely roam the world and go anywhere he wants to.

“The amount of freedom given is amazing. You can do anything anytime you want,” Logan Hards, junior, said.

“Fallout 4” adds new mechanics to the formula while also improving some older ones.

“I like how you don’t have to go into a menu when you open a chest or loot a corpse anymore. It improves the flow of the game,” Gooch said.

However, some mechanics from the older games that added to the overall experience of the game have been removed.

“I wasn’t too much of a fan of getting rid of the trait and repair system,” Hayden Godsey, senior, said. “The repair system added another level of difficulty, and the trait system added replay value to the game, making you curious to see how events would play out with different traits.”

Although the map size is not larger than previous installments, the map is more densely packed with enemies and things to find.

“I did not like how the map isn’t bigger and the game uses the same old engine as Skyrim. It’s the same size as ‘Fallout 3,’ but there is more stuff to do, which is good,” Hards said.

Even though the map might not be bigger than the one in previous games, the game makes up for it with content. The game, however, doesn’t have any kind of multiplayer function.

“If I could change anything about the game, I would add a two-person co-op option to the story,” Godsey said. “There is a lot of controversy on how having more than one player would ruin the game, but I feel that the story of two people surviving together would be a good expansion of the game.”

The game does have some problems, though; both the PC and console version of the game have frame rate issues.

“If I could change something about the game, I would make it more accessible. It’s very difficult to run if you’re playing on a computer. You could run ‘Fallout 3’ and ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ in a toaster with a screen attached to it,” Gooch said.

Despite its flaws, ‘Fallout 4’ is better than its predecessors and an improvement on the series.

“I have played every game since ‘Fallout: Tactics.’ Every installment gets better and better. ‘Fallout 4’ combined the best aspects of both ‘Fallout 3’ and ‘Fallout: New Vegas’—dramatic environments, vast amounts of content and stuff to do, insane character creation and even the small easter eggs that provide comic relief,” Godsey said.