Hot take alert: Fallout 4 sucks. Maybe it doesn’t suck for everybody, but it sure as hell sucks for me. The game, which is far and away the biggest launch of the year, besting even Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, is racking up Game of the Year awards and Biggest Disappointment “accolades” at the same time, even on the same sites. I don’t speak for the iDigitalTimes games crew when I say Fallout 4 sucks—they mostly love it, heck, we just named it Game of The Year—but man. This just isn’t the game for me.

Why I’m Giving Up On Fallout 4

I was just as excited for Fallout 4 as every other hardcore Bethesda fan—which is to say, very. My enthusiasm was tempered only slightly by how much I liked The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, out of some concern that Bethesda couldn’t reach those heights. Alas, even though I was a little worried going in… I have still been sorely disappointed.

Many reviewers who have called Fallout 4 disappointing have admitted that they had lots of fun playing the game, and logged many dozens of hours, but that the title still fell short of their expectations. That’s not surprising; it had the highest expectations this side of Grand Theft Auto V or No Man’s Sky. I’m not like that. I have played about 30 hours, if that, and I can’t do anymore. I give up. I don’t enjoy Fallout 4—a game which has had more love and care poured into it than almost any title I’ve ever seen—on basically any level. It’s a game with great art design and great music, but… it just isn’t fun.

Why is Fallout 4 such a disappointment for me, so beloved and addictive for others? For me, almost everything goes wrong. The game is a huge jigsaw of interconnecting parts, mechanics and styles—everything from Minecraft to an RPG to a shooter—and all I can really say is that I like the music. It’s brutal to admit this to myself, to publicly throw in the towel on Fallout 4. And it’s strange that the game can be so utterly divisive, even among those who love Bethesda’s earlier work.

For me, my Fallout 4 disappointment is rooted in the basic structure of the game. Skyrim doesn’t hold your hand past the immediate intro, after which it ejects you into the world with a few major quests to do, but with an entire world at your fingertips. You can go to any of the game’s major cities immediately and find a whole slew of quests based in that city, and you can hear rumors of guilds, factions and questlines far away. Or you can chase the main quest. Fallout 4 isn’t like that. After Concord, the first real major quest, the game leaves you almost entirely on your own… but, unlike Skyrim, that doesn’t feel like freedom. At least not to me.

Instead, Fallout 4 feels directionless. Rather than having lots of goals, each of which open up exciting stories, I have no goals. Sure, I can head to Diamond City, fighting through hordes of raiders without having found a single merchant. Sure, I can build a settlement at Sanctuary, which is fun for a little while, but serves no real purpose. I did a few Minuteman quests, spent an excruciating six hours clearing out the Corvega plant (and then downgrading the difficulty below Survival after I finished), wandered to Diamond City, and discovered that the dialogue system was very restrictive and had little character. I discovered that the game’s quest interface, unlike Witcher 3’s, tells you nearly nothing about the quests you have. No recap, no explanation of why you need to do the quest, just a pointer to where you need to go. It’s extremely frustrating.

My biggest problem with Fallout 4 is actually vaguely similar to my biggest problem with Star Wars: The Force Awakens: It explains too little. Sometimes, that kind of a light narrative touch can be great. It can be fun to explore game mechanics on your own. But I think Fallout 4 is over the edge into being too frustrating—and the game takes a tremendous dip because of it for me. And that latches into problems with the crafting system, which are widely felt. It’s not just a matter of mechanics: The controls themselves are frustrating. Not to give the mechanics a total pass—why can’t I break this stuff down as I find it? Instead, I have to play the old inventory management game, which got old way back in the ‘90s.

And I still can’t figure out how to make Dogmeat fetch. Dammit, Fallout 4. Is something wrong with you, or is something wrong with me? I can’t even tell anymore. But I am too frustrated to press on—dozens of hours in, I’m done. I'm legitimately sad, and more disappointed than I've been in a game since maybe Civilization V. Maybe I’ll come back. But there are so many other games, and Fallout 4 is wasting my time.