The type of game that when you recommend it, you have to clarify they need to play a few hours before they'll understand.
To me, many JRPGs have this problem. Xenoblade, Final Fantasy (14 especially), Tales, Kiseki, etc all take forever to get interesting.
I'm not a huge fan of Fallout 2 in the first place, but the Temple of Trials is an objectively bad tutorial that punishes you for not picking the certain skills and noticeably bad design compared to the rest of the game.
The first game puts you in a cave with rats but at least you'll have a gun and a knife so you can deal with them depending on skills. If you decided to pick Guns in 2 then you're fucked in the tutorial.
Yeah, my first time in Fallout 2, I picked as my tag skills Science, Repair, and Energy Weapons. I don't think I could've picked a worse set of early-game skills if I'd tried.