Fallout 3 is the third game in the Fallout series (or the fifth, if you want to look at it that way), developed and published by Bethesda. It is a first-person, open-world role-playing game with heavy shooting elements. It was released on October 28, 2008, for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. This review is based on the PC version.
Other, more mechanical design decisions, need to be applauded. Following in the tradition of both Fallout and Bethesda games, Fallout 3 imposes a weight limitation on the player. The higher your strength, the more you can carry. It's a way to force players into choosing what to take, and what to leave. The genius behind the system is two fold: 1) ammo and health are weightless. Heck. Yes. Consider Frustrating CRPG Tradition #5 to be duly eliminated. Because the most essential items can be picked up en masse and at will, there's far less frustration than one would normally find in such situations. 2) the controversial Fast Travel system. Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 allows you to "warp" to any location you have already discovered - otherwise, you walk. There is a catch though. You can't warp out from within structures (with the exception of large cities). What that means is that the only way out of a cave, subway, satellite relay tower, church, office building or vault is to walk out. Why is this good? Because it prevents rampant abuse of the limited inventory system. You can't just warp back and forth, selling and picking up whatever you want. Or, at least, it'll take you much longer than you'd like.
Finally, some technical notes. The game loads very fast across all the consoles, and I clocked most of the PC load times in at about 3, maybe 5 seconds at the longest. Expect the consoles to be a little slower (and obviously, your PC too, depending on how recent it is), but rarely outside of the 10 second range. If anyone can bring to mind the atrocious console version of Oblivion's load times, this must seem like a miracle. And heck, maybe it is. Comparing the graphically fidelity of this game to that of the recent Fable II, and the load times necessary in each, Fallout 3 comes out the clear winner.
The story isn't what it should be, and the enemy variety is fairly weak. Neither the voice-acting nor the animations are up to standard either. All that said, Fallout 3 is an incredible piece of work. The sheer size of the game, the variety of the places you explore, of the sub-narrative ascribed to each locale, is astounding. It's a terrible immersive experience. And I don't mean to sound British - it really is terrible that it is so immersive.
This is a hard game to review. Even now, long past its release, I'm no way near completing the game. There's just too much to do. The main story-line is, as you've no doubt heard, very, very short - and quite disappointing too, by the end. Your father, voiced by Liam Neeson, leaves you stranded in the vault. You want to find him. A handful of twists and turns later - game over! It's not a bad story, it's just nothing special. In fact, it's so unspecial that nearly everything else in the game is more interesting.
Which is actually a positive, I think.
The Fallout 3 world - the "Capitol Wasteland" (Washington D.C.) - is huge. It's apparently smaller than the world in Oblivion, but I'm calling BS on that. There's way, way more content in Fallout 3 than there was in Bethesda's last effort. What really sells this content isn't that there so much of it, but instead the way its presented. Each "dungeon," whether it's a town, a lone cabin in the mountains, an abandoned subway, a diner, whatever, has its own little story. These stories add a tremendous amount of variety to the gameplay, and variety, kids, really is the spice of life. But about that gameplay. The shooting mechanics handle like you'd imagine, but the execution is a little different. Along with the "live-action" shooting, there is V.A.T.S mode, wherein the game pauses, and you can select a specific limb of your opponent to attack. Expect to see many decapitations. How much damage you do, and whether you hit or miss, is somewhat based on your stats. These, in turn, are increased by leveling up. Since you only get so many points (you level-up to 20) for all your stats, you won't be able to max everything you.
Beyond that, you've also got your perks, things like "Bloody Mess," which turns the already very violent game into an even more violent game. "The Mysterious Stranger" is another returning favourite too. Other more simple ones like "Thief" and "Commando" give you extra points or abilities in specific areas (sneaking and small guns, in this case). All this is fine and dandy, and makes for great "replayability," but some of your major states don't really seem to matter very much. Not only can you find collectible bobble heads to increase your stats, but certain level-up perks allow you to increase them as well. The differences you'll notice will likely only be dialogue based, where having a high ____ will allow for a special choice within a certain conversation.
Ah yes, the conversations. For the most part they're a little uninteresting. There are just too many people in the world who exists solely to tell you where the bar is. The world is already populated with nameless denizens, so why not add more? In the end it feels like Bethesda just wanted to increase the character count, and so you, dear player, will spend a lot of time having the same plain conversation over and over again. Some conversations do work well, and you are given a nice range of choices. That being said, the options are quite poorly organized. Taking a look at how Mass Effect stacked dialogue options would have done Fallout 3 some good.
What doesn't help the often stale dialogue are the uninspired characters. At hour 10, everything is fine, come hour 20, you've heard nearly every voice in the game, and seen a majority of the faces too. Somebody buy these developers one of those nifty voice-altering gizmos. Add on to that the hilariously out-dated animations, and you've got a recipe for mediocrity. Everyone in Fallout 3 moves like a robot. Sometimes they'll even get stuck on stairs or in doorways, but for the most part they'll walk in straight lines and make poor transitions from one animation to another. The enemies in the game don't fare any better, and in fact suffer from a redundancy even greater than that inflicted upon the NPCs. You will spend 80% of your time fighting raiders (of which there are a handful of types), Supermutants, and Ghouls. The first I don't mind so much. We've been killing nondescript grunts in videogames for decades, so it's really nothing new. But the Ghouls are tiresome at best. They groan. They run at you. The supermutants aren't terribly enticing either.
There is an attempt at mixing things up with the likes of radroaches, radscorpions, radmoles (or whatever they're called), Yao Guai (a bear-type enemy), dogs, ants, bees, and a few others as well. Now, here's the thing about these critters. It's great that Bethesda wanted to hold on to some of the old Fallout enemies, but these just don't work anymore. Seriously - roaches and bees? Who cares if they're a foot long, they're still boring. The scorpions meanwhile, which were something like 10 feet long in the old Fallout are now (only) five long. What worked for an isometric turn-based RPG does not work in a... FPARPG. Scorpions=not exciting. Moaning ghouls=not exciting. But the design elements aren't all bad. I've already mentioned the stellar presentation of the dungeons, but there's also the spot on "50s Forever" post-apocalyptic setting. You have to give Betheseda credit for sticking to its guns. They really, really push the "everything is decayed" style. In fact... they push it a little too far. The game looks great, no doubt about it. Graphically, it's excellent; stylistically, it's excellent. But it seems they didn't really know when to pull back on the "broken" look. The game takes place 200 years after a nuclear war. It is implied that, for these 200 years, people have continued to live on the surface and in vaults underground (that would be You). How is it then, that over a period of 200 years - many of them spent roaming, building small settlements, etc., the world still resembles End of War +1. Has no one had time to clean their washrooms in 200 years? Does no one care about the giant pieces rubble in their house? Why are all the bridges made with two planks of wood? The list (really) goes on and on and on and on. It's nitpicking, no doubt - but it's still very apparent.
Other, more mechanical design decisions, need to be applauded. Following in the tradition of both Fallout and Bethesda games, Fallout 3 imposes a weight limitation on the player. The higher your strength, the more you can carry. It's a way to force players into choosing what to take, and what to leave. The genius behind the system is two fold: 1) ammo and health are weightless. Heck. Yes. Consider Frustrating CRPG Tradition #5 to be duly eliminated. Because the most essential items can be picked up en masse and at will, there's far less frustration than one would normally find in such situations. 2) the controversial Fast Travel system. Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 allows you to "warp" to any location you have already discovered - otherwise, you walk. There is a catch though. You can't warp out from within structures (with the exception of large cities). What that means is that the only way out of a cave, subway, satellite relay tower, church, office building or vault is to walk out. Why is this good? Because it prevents rampant abuse of the limited inventory system. You can't just warp back and forth, selling and picking up whatever you want. Or, at least, it'll take you much longer than you'd like.
Finally, some technical notes. The game loads very fast across all the consoles, and I clocked most of the PC load times in at about 3, maybe 5 seconds at the longest. Expect the consoles to be a little slower (and obviously, your PC too, depending on how recent it is), but rarely outside of the 10 second range. If anyone can bring to mind the atrocious console version of Oblivion's load times, this must seem like a miracle. And heck, maybe it is. Comparing the graphically fidelity of this game to that of the recent Fable II, and the load times necessary in each, Fallout 3 comes out the clear winner.
The story isn't what it should be, and the enemy variety is fairly weak. Neither the voice-acting nor the animations are up to standard either. All that said, Fallout 3 is an incredible piece of work. The sheer size of the game, the variety of the places you explore, of the sub-narrative ascribed to each locale, is astounding. It's a terrible immersive experience. And I don't mean to sound British - it really is terrible that it is so immersive.