Fallout 3 is an ambitiously made game. The size and scope alone of
Fallout 3 are ENORMOUS. It is a FPS with deeply customizable character
choices and other RPG elements that will make it easily stand apart from
a traditional FPS, but also simultaneously differentiate itself from a
RPG. In short, the developer Bethesda seems to know what they're doing.
When you first enter the wasteland ruins of what remains from the
post-nuclear American devastated cityscape you can really feel the
vastness of desolation and destruction man has reined down on itself in
the future. Fallout 3 does a great job of making the player feel as
though they are really thrust into this situation. Your character's
background story is pretty much what yours would be like if you were
thrown into this situation right now. You come from a sheltered life
where the horrors of post-apocalyptic life are not a reality and do not
exist. You are then expelled from that reality of safety and thrown into
a dimension parallelled to that existence only in its opposite
polarity. So, when your character doesn't know about something or
doesn't understand the specifics about the culture's details it doesn't feel awkward for asking questions that other citizens seem to think is common knowledge. Your
character's origin makes it so dialogue doesn't seem forced because your
character is almost form "another world".
Dangerous enemies surround you at every turn and nourishment is scares
and harmfully radiated to boot. The atmospheric perspective in this game
is superb. You can be looking off into the distances from a small
hilltop and see something MILES into the distance and know that if you
started running toward it eventually you'd make it there. The wastes and
ruined cityscape are a marvel to gaze at and explore.
You could probably get through the main story line in about 30 hours, or
so, if you never diverged from the main quests and routes. If you did
this you would be doing yourself a major disservice. I spent just under
100 hours on my first time through and i
found myself time and again getting distracted and adventuring
aimlessly just off the simple fact that there is SO much out there to
discover and you just kinda...go.
The main story line is roughly 10ish quests long. I know 10 quests
doesn't sound like many but most have multiple parts and most have
several different ways of completing said task. By the time I had
finished the game I had completed 26 quests, putting in roughly 97
hours, 107 locations discovered, and like 30 different guns'n explosives
that were at full lethality with my characters specific build.
Moreover, I know that I had missed many other quests and or skipped some
that I had received because of how I knew their completion would have
an influence on my Karma (The game's simple morality system). I knew it would be a negative effect to the
way I was playing through the story and didn't finish some. In the
breath-takingly immersive world of the Washington D.C. wastes you really
feel as though the way you choose to execute some quests really have a
large impact on the world that surrounds you.
At first this game does feel like an average run-of-the-mill FPS. After
getting a few character levels in and starting to tweak your character
you really start to feel the RPG. Also, choosing when to use V.A.T.S. (your time-stopping targeting system) is paramount to survival and makes
the feel of any run-of-the-mill-FPSnormality fade into the abstract.
Also, besides the ability to stop time and target, another factor that
makes it feel more RPGish is its expansively gigantic landscape terrain.
There is a lot of sub-terrain to traverse such as; subway tunnels,
subway stations, underground laboratories, factory underbellies and
bunkers or "vaults". These underground environments really give the game
a nice dungeon crawling feel.
One thing that is noticeably problematic, and shouldn't be because it
has been around in games since Mario has been searching castles to find
Peach, is jumping. This is not just me, i have talked to several of my
friends that i have let borrow the game or have played it on their own
and they all report the same thing. Sometimes the jumping in this game
just simply SUCKS and you can really feel it when it's happening. It is a
good thing though that jumping doesn't play a big part in this game,
but it is a mechanic that is so elementary in video games that it
should be mastered; especially when this simple mechanic is surrounded by such other
technical marvels.
All in all, this game is an ambitiously enormous adventuring FPS where
die-rolling comes into play to differentiate damage you will deal and
receive. Fallout 3 delivers to a wide variety of player interests and does
so nicely. This game is not a shallow mindless blandly created FPS with
no sustenance. Fallout will keep RPGers happy with many different ways
to create characters and character-build customization complexities to
bring you back for possibly multiple play throughs. It will keep FPS
fans happy with gun-pointing-face-exploding-blood splattering-gore-pasted-walls happy-fun-time action. And finally, but not least, the
adventures will be overjoyed with numerous places to be explored and to
do so in a world where you really feel like your presence is making an
impact on the environment and people around you. Fallout 3 is a game
where you have been thrown into a post-apocalyptic planet where
scavenging, scraping by, and sometimes ruthlessness are the only things
that will reward you with survival and you really feel like you are a part of it.
