Fallout 3

The Good
Ok. Its massive. Its huge. Its just bigger than any other game I’ve ever played. You can easily beat the game without encountering two thirds of the stuff that Bethesda has created for this game. Unusual NPCs, Bizarre and breathtaking scenery, and challenging enemies are all here.

I like the fact that the designers mixed it up a bit with different factions and alliances too.

The graphics come very close to being photorealistic, especially when looking at the outdoors, with broken roads and burnt up buildings. I freak out when I see how the inside of the buildings are torn apart and crumbing. The rusted sheet metal of the Megatown buildings gives a real post war atmosphere to the game. There are so many little touches that you’d miss if you weren’t looking, like the various phases of the moon at night. The character models are very detailed and articulated. The don’t just stand around. They wander throughout the world, ready to interact with you and others.

You can play as a straight FPS, or use the VATS, which usually ends with a spectacular if not blurry death of your foes. You can size up your weapons and decide which one will be the most useful against your enemies.

There is an assortment of moral choices with long reaching implications, which is refreshing in a game. You can also make choices and add perks. The perks can really change some of the game play, making some fights and quests a great deal easier. Bethesda does know how to balance gameplay. You can play as any kind of character as you want, as long as you learn how to play with the character’s weaknesses and strengths.

I loved the collection of old time songs, and really wish they had more. I really liked how many of the songs had themes that matched with the game. The environmental music was ok, and pleasant at times but a tiny bit repetitive. The voiceovers of Malcolm McDowell as President Eaton were well done. Liam Nelson was almost unnecessary. Good job on the sound effects and foley effects.

Major Kudos to whomever designed the Dunwich Building. The Temple made my skin crawl.

The Bad
I miss the “everything but the Kitchen Sink” approach to design that Black Isle was famous for. Bethesda touches on it, but don’t go all out. The black humor that was characteristic of the first 2 Fallout games is missing or at least muted.

By their very nature, RPGs tend to be buggy. Fallout 3 had a couple bugs, but nothing too bad in comparison to others. The character models were a bit repetitive, but not excessive.

Now on to the stuff that REALLY bothered me.

A hard limit of 20? You have to upgrade to Broken Steel to get to 30? Ugh… The 3 voice actors were used repeatedly for all the same characters. Some of the quests were breakable by bugs. I had an experience where an explosion occurred on the west side of the map and when I fast traveled to the east, the NPCs acted like they heard the explosion.


The Bottom Line
Its great! It will take a while to get through. But it may also make you boot up your old copy of Fallout for nostalgia reasons.

The Good
Full 3D world, good graphics.

Very entertaining when playing without questioning things.

The Bad
Bugs and crashes.Lots of them.

Failed to establish the same atmosphere from the predecessors.

The Bottom Line
Being an old school player, I had the privilege of being able to play the series back in the day. They were something completely new then, and still are, since there is a lack of successors. However fallout 3, which caused me much anxiety, was something different.

When I first got the game, I had problems trying to run it, every time I clicked in new game, the game closed. After just a few hours of useless patching (yes, it took hours), I discovered that I was not the only one with this problem and just gave up, gave the dvd to a friend of mime, just to find later that he had no problems to run it, except for recurring crashes, that look like everybody else had.

The game extinguished the isometric theme of the series, adding a new 3D world, which is a very good thing, but apparently the attention to the graphics are not reflected in the rest of the game: the optional missions are varied, but with tenuous motivation. The VATS system seems to be a murdering tool, implemented to disguise the FPS nature of the game, instead of a remake of the old system of post-apocalyptic atmosphere combat. The atmosphere did not save the game to resemble "Oblivion with guns", an unhappily true cliche by now. There are many small illogical details, as the fact that you cannot sleep in a bed you don't own. All this leads me to believe that this is not only an unreliable sequence of fallout, but even not a pure RPG (consider the fact that the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system has only a fraction of the game effect from the previous), just a commercial exploit with the name of the series and most of their elements.

Nevertheless, the title is interesting as a FPS dressed up like a RPG. If seen this way, it offers a good deal of action (since gun blazing it's the way to go, unlike the previous two games when you could beat the game killing only the final boss, not necessarily fighting) and the bonus of good music and a bit (or a lot,if you like) of wandering mixed with a different background of most contemporary action games, which are settled almost exclusively in WWII and modern warfare environments. Therefore, it's recommended for a large audience, and should earn a higher score if it wasn't the bugs and crashes.

The Good
It improves on Oblivion in some ways. The environments are more interesting and varied (but most feel more artificial than Morrowind). The faces look normal again (still miles away from e.g. Mass Effect or Crysis). Level scaling seems to be mostly absent. The PIPBoy interface is well done. Physics is improved, and by improved I mean that cups are now bolted to tables and so on.

The Bad
Fallout 3 is really an action-adventure title and not a RPG. The stats are mostly meaningless.

The set pieces vary from decent to abysmal and do not from a coherent whole. The nature of presentation in previous Fallout games left a lot to the imagination and you could fill the details yourself and pretend it made sense. In F3 everything is available in very graphic detail and it does not come together well.

Radiant AI is still crap. The results are either hilarious or frustrating, depending on your mood.

There's some swearing, prostitution, and tons of gore, but it doesn't feel like it's part of the world, but rather it that it was just tacked on to make the game edgy and mature. This is a rather dubious addition to a game which mostly feels like a Disney production.

They tried hard to include "Fallout features" like being able to put explosives onto people but apparently it didn't occur to them that some were a design flaw in the first place and while it was cute in a 2D isometric RPG game in 1998 it's kind of stupid in a modern fully 3D first-person game.

The Bottom Line
It's Oblivion with guns. It's very far from an ideal "Fallout 3", but depending on what you are expecting it might still be enjoyable. Playing it I can't help but feel that the target audience for Fallout 3 is ten years younger than for the previous Fallout games.