Fallout 3

The Good
There is a lot of creative ideas in the game, and it has its moments : like the Tenpenny Tower, which has a good surprise if you finish the quest with the "good" side.

Special award for the musics. No no, not the musics composed for the game by Inon Zur, which are as boring as the landscapes of the game. But the selection of jazzy tracks were quiet well chosen, and fun to adapt with Fallout's world.

I guess this is it. It is not that I hated all the rest of the game, I warn you right now. But... there are a lot of complaints.

The Bad
Much.
First of all, the environment. I love Morrowind and I like Oblivion despise its flaws, so do not think I don't like open-worlds game. But Fallout 3's world just feel empty. It is logical, after a nuclear war, but in a game, it just doesn't serve anything except bore the player to death. As much as I didn't like instant travels in Oblivion, in Fallout 3, I would have thrown my computer through the window without them.

Then, since we are in a role-playing-game (well, sometimes, I wonder if we really are...), the most important characteristics would be :

A) Character Development. As in all Bethesda's games, whatever you chose your character to be, they all finish to do the same. Bethesda tried the way of "choices & consequences", something they have not done in their TES series, and at the end we just have the classic good/evil differences. I may overrate Fallout 2, the only one I have played so far, but I found it to go beyond these clichés, and, in a way, no one was truly good. In Fallout 3, you have Paladins (the dissident branch of The Brotherhood of Steel), you have a secret society which kills evil men (you can loot fingers on those "evil men" and give them to the society as a proof, and earn a reward...).. All of this just fell flat and killed the little sense of credibility you could expect from the world.

B) Scenario & Dialogs. Once again, here, there is good & less-good, & even worse than bad. The scenario itself is not bad, but is poorly executed. Same applies to dialogs & characters, with some of them being good ideas (like the Android quest) and some which fell completely flat (destruction of the garbage-city, someone asks you to do it, but do not give you a real reason).

C) The World It is obvious that Bethesda wanted to do their own thing with the Fallout license. While we should applause them for trying to do something new with it, the illusion of novelty fades quite quickly : you are playing Oblivion in the Fallout universe. Yes, the mutants could be Orcs, these members of the Brotherhood of Steel are Paladins who protects the weak. Heck, there are even Vampires & Druids (& now Samurai, as I heard, with the latest DLC). As much as I love these components for a TES game, it is not what I expect to see in a Fallout one.

Final thing (I may forgot a lot of others, but this one cracks me up) : the world is not that open. Yes, there are places you can't go, because of artificial walls. You want to climb this pile of debris to get inside Washington DC ? Guess what ? You can't. There is only one way : take the subway, and go out at the exact place the game wants you to be, otherwise, how could the script work ? Well, open-world & obvious linearity does not go well...

The Bottom Line
Honestly, there are two types of gamers, which won't see the game the same way :
- Fallout fans. You will hate it. Stay away, try it when it will be cheap if you really want to know what has happen to your beloved universe, but you won't like it.
- Bethesda fans : you should like it. Well, you should, because it mostly feels like Oblivion in a different universe. You won't if the "liberty" of the Elder Scrolls is what you like the most. The little additions Bethesda tried to its style are welcomed though : different paths (good/evil), even if they are this simplistic, are still better than only one forced way.

The Good
True enough, it offers almost limitless freedom of actions, perhaps more than Oblivion ever did. You explore huge devastated city, with no chance to ruin something for yourself if you get there ahead of time. Nice implementation of VATS - they found use for those old turn based action points, to placate old fallout fans no doubt. Amazing soundtracks and 2008 graphic at its best. Voicing isn't bad either, at least much better than Oblivion is.

The Bad
None so far, beside little accidental crashes, but happens VERY rare. Some small items a little bit easy to miss, but I guess it's part of realism.

The Bottom Line
98% of people will love it, as its unmistakably best mix of RPG and FPS yet, but then again, those 2% who like the pure genre (skipping through talking, or finding it to be too much of an action game) will absolutely hate it. Oh and don't let anyone say it's short, there is no way one can skip through it in 7 hours unless maybe they sit with a guide in their lap and skip all conversations in mindless effort to pass it in record time (and even then I doubt it possible without cheating). Absolutely worth time spent - hopefully they will release add-ons, it seems to be build pretty much like Oblivion, with .esm files loading at start.

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.