TL;DR: game's okay.
I wish I played this game without having heard the praise from the fans all over the world, because my high expectations weren't met by the game. It's a good game, fun even, but most of it isn't nearly as amazing as reviews and comments might entail.
The quests I managed to sequence break on accident, and the NPCs didn't know how to react to me having done the things already, being stuck in the "yeah you need to do X, good luck".
The dialogue for a character with high intelligence and high speech boils down to "you have three things to tell the other character. one of them is sensible, the other is an insult, and the third one is declaring war". That's not the nuance I expected, not going to lie. It might be that dumber character would've had different experience, but it is what it is.
The combat system is really tedious unless you break it on accident: waiting for NPCs to finish their 10 steps a turn makes one wish for a X4 speedup button. I didn't know how I'm going to handle the endgame enemies as a solo character with no outstanding gear or skills, until I learnt that Sneak skill is completely broken, and allows to walk around crowds without any perks invested. Not only that, attacking an enemy whilst sneaking leads to the combat only with that one enemy, so the endgame was cleared by me walking up to a group of enemies in sneak mode, selecting aimed shot, shooting one enemy at a time in the eyes for a crit, and maybe one more time without aiming to finish them off.
The inventory usage is frustrating at best, as in order to use a rope I had to put it into my hands and use it on the object. I'm not sure if just having lockpicks in my inventory was enough to use them, or if I needed to do something similar whilst breaking locks. Wave nullifier apparently either worked from just sitting in my inventory, or the whole mechanic didn't work on its own. The radio to work around force fields only functioned if I were to use it on the computer from a context menu, not in any other way. It is extremely difficult to tell what computers are worth the "hit it with Science skill repeatedly" and what things could be Repair'ed.
There are two quests about repairs that I have no idea how to complete, one involved finding a Fuse (?) in order to fix a pump which I couldn't locate in the surrounding area as the NPC suggested, nor in any shop. The other is about fixing equipment on the farm in the Hub, but the NPC I was pointed to never followed down the quest path.
Brotherhood of Steel never allowed me to get promoted from the Initiate or shared any useful items aside from a log from Vree, never really did anything even after I was done with the endgame, but in the slideshow they became the R&D of the Wastelands.
It's fine for what it is, but I can't find a reason to keep playing after beating it once.
