Fallout 3

"What do you mean there's no McDonald's???"

Well, I finally get to this review after having the game for about three months now. Good job, me *punches self in face*. I'll start off by saying that I played Bethesda's previous game Oblivion, and all I can say is…I didn't like it. I didn't like the setting, I didn't like the story (well, the main story), and most of all I didn't like the combat. It went back to Blockbuster after 10 hours of play. However, when Bethesda announced their next project, Fallout 3, I was intrigued. Here we have what is basically the same RPG setup as Oblivion, but now in a future apocalyptic wasteland and, more importantly, with guns. Guns, dammit! Everything is better with guns! So I decided to give it a shot. Good decision? We'll see.

Also, I've never played the first two Fallouts. So…yeah.

RAD STORY

The overall backround of the Fallout universe goes like this: After World War II, technology greatly advances, while everything keeps a 1950s mentality. However, dwindling energy supplies cause great tension among the superpowers of the world. All this tension comes to a head in the year 2077, in an event called the “Great War”. Basically, the US and China declare war on each other and PWN Earth with nuclear weapons, turning it into a radiated wasteland. Yippee. Thankfully, years earlier, the US gov'ment built underground shelters know as “Vaults” all over the country, where selected citizens could survive in the threat of an Earth PWNing. The vaults were also designed with other “research related” things in mind, but I'm sure you'll find out what that means as you go through the game.

Fallout 3 takes place 200 years after the war in the year 2277, and you play as a citizen of Vault 101, which is situated just outside what use to be Washington D.C. Raised solely by your father after your mother dies in child birth, you live a normal life, or what could be considered a normal life living in an underground shelter while untold terrors take place on the surface. That all changes one day, when you find out your father has actually escaped vault 101, and that you're in deep crap with the overseer, the vaults leader. You've got no choice now but to finally step out of the vault and into what's left of the world, in a search for your father and for answers. That is, if you can survive the wasteland…

It's hard to have an opinion on Fallout 3's story, since being an open world-RPG with many side quests and many different characters, the game has many different stories to tell. Sure, the main quest's story is pretty decent with some good twists, although it does end pretty abruptly. However, with so many tales to tell, it will be up to the player to decide how involved they get in the lives of the people of the wasteland. I will say though that the quests I did had their moments, and a lot of the dialogue in the game is sharply written. The dark humor that the Fallout games are know for is also present, leading to some very funny dialogue choices and scenes.

RAD GAMEPLAY

You start off Fallout 3 being born…literally. It's here that your able to create and name your own character, either male or female. You can customize facial features, eye and skin color, and hair. It's a fairly robust system, although I probably would have liked more hairstyles, as a lot of the ones that are available look butt-ugly. You also can't customize anything about your characters body, so if you were planning on making a girl with a 36DDD sized chest, your out of luck. After this, the RPG elements start up and your able to allocate your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skills, your seven primary attributes. The acronym stands for strength (effecting melee attacks and the amount of thing you can carry), perception (explosive, lockpicking, and energy weapon skills), endurance (health and heavy weapons), charisma (barter and speech skills), intelligence (science, repair, and medicine skills), agility (small weapons, sneaking, and V.A.T.S. skill points) and luck (raises every skill a little bit and improves chances of critical hits). You get a limited number of points to allocate to these skills initially, so you have to really think about what direction you want to take your character. It is a good idea to have a good agility skill, however, as small weapons are very plentiful and you'll probably be using V.A.T.S. a lot. Each level you gain by earning experience will allow you to add more points to the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skill and allow you to choose a perk for your character. These perks can range from very useful (raising skills, doing extra damage, increasing accuracy for weapons, etc.) to comical (enemies explode in a bloody mess when you kill them) to…just plain odd (a dude in a trench coat appears out of nowhere to help you kill enemies, mutated animals help you out in combat). As you can see, you can pretty much fully customize your character and your Fallout 3 experience, and that's only a good thing. And hey, you can fully customize your controls as well…PRAISE JEEBUS!!

Like most RPGs, Fallout 3 is divided into two styles of play: exploration and combat. After finally exiting Vault 101 and put out into the wasteland, your basically free to go and do whatever you want. You can play the game in a first or third person view, although the first person view is highly preferable. In the bottom-left corner of the screen is your health and compass, with will point you towards objectives in whatever quest is currently active. It will also point you in the direction of attacking enemies. On the bottom right of the screen will be the bars that represent your V.A.T.S. action points and the current condition of your equipped weapon, it will also show you your ammo count for your weapon. Of course, your most important tool during the game will be the Pip-Boy 3000. You bring it up with the circle button, and it basically serves as your menu system, showing you all the items and weapons you have in your possession, your stats and perks, notes you've gained during your adventure, and your map where you can set a marker or the quest you want to be active. You'll be looking at the map a lot too, as the Capitol Wasteland is a HUGE place, covering 16 square miles according to the developers. The place is also highly interactive, as pretty much anything lying around can be moved or picked up. As you wander the greatly designed wasteland, you'll run into Mad Max-like raiders, super mutants, mutated animals, and various other nasties that want to kill you. You'll also run into various encampments, desolated buildings, and Washington DC's ghoul-infested subway system. All this exploring is essential to your journey, as it's the main way to scrounge up supplies without having to buy them. Of course, the main points of interest are the cities built by the wasteland inhabitants, including Megaton, a city built around an un-exploded atomic bomb, and Rivet City, which is located on a huge, abandoned aircraft carrier. There is also a city that's inhabited by nothing but children! Like any RPG (again), it is in these towns where you'll talk to NPCs, shop for various items using bottlecaps, the game's form of currency, and various other activities when you want to take a break from wandering around the wasteland. If you complete a side quest early on called “Power of The Atom”, you'll even earn your own house or room where you can get a good night's sleep for free and store away any extra items. It even comes with your own joke-dispensing robot servant! Talking to NPCs that actually have names (instead of “Megaton settler“, for example) will always bring up various dialogue choices for you to take. These choices help keep the conversation going along and can even help you get information for your quests. Certain perks will even cause some unique choices to appear when talking to certain people.

So now we come to the combat…the bloody, bloody combat. If you so choose, you can play the entire game like a traditional FPS, by taking aim or running-and-gunning. However, doing this exclusively is ill-advised, seeing as how this is an RPG first and foremost, enemies have a hit point health system. FPS enthusiasts may become pretty frustrated when headshots don't instantly kill their targets. Throw in the fact that straight-up melee combat is as lame as it was in Oblivion, and so far you've got a clunky, un-precise system on your hands. But never fear, V.A.T.S. is here! Activate the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System when you're in combat, and time will freeze and the screen will zoom in on your enemies. You can then target any part of your enemy's body (or even their weapon), and the game will show on each part a percentage that represents the probability of hitting that body part. The percentages change depending on the weapon you're using and how far away your opponent is. Then, depending on your weapon and available action points, you can lock in your targets by pressing the VATS button. After locking in your targets and pressing the X button, you will then be treated to a cinematic, bullet time presentation of you unleashing hell on your enemies. Very cool, and it never gets old. Of course, Fallout 3 gives you plenty of ways to unleash hell, allowing you to use weapons like bats, sledgehammers, pistols, assault rifles, hunting rifles, grenades, shotguns, mini-guns, missile launchers, and many more. There are even futuristic energy weapons you can use that look like they are from a 50s sci-fi comic! Furthermore, you can find and buy certain schematics for custom weapons, like a launcher that can be loaded with pretty much anything you can find lying around, and a dart gun that excels in crippling an enemy's legs. All these weapons combined with VATS makes combat in Fallout 3 an absolute joy.

Tying everything together in Fallout 3 is the karma system. Your choices and actions throughout the game will affect an invisible number that represents your karma. You can be a goody two-shoes and help out people whenever you can, or you can be evil incarnate and murder and steal everyone and anything you see. You could also be a little good and evil, basically becoming a neutral party to the people of the wasteland. Many side quests in the game feature a variety of different ways of completing them that could affect your karma. There are also certain quests that cater to people who choose a specific path to follow, like the one where you agree to catch slaves for the slavers at Paradise Falls that will obviously raise your scumbag level. Your karma level will affect dialogue, weather or not you can go to certain areas in the wasteland, and if certain parties send hit squads after you. Most importantly, your karma will affect the ending you'll receive when you finally beat the game. It's up to the player to choose which path to take, but I will say that generally you'll have an easier time if you choose to be good…but you may have more fun if your bad :)

I've pretty much been talking about this game without telling you how I actually feel about it. Believe me, this game offers so much to do and see that this review would be 20 pages long if I talked about it all. That's basically what I love about Fallout 3: the complete freedom to shape your experience. It's one of the things I do commend Oblivion for, it's just here with Fallout 3 that I have a more interesting game world to explore and a better combat system to utilize. Are there any problems with the gameplay, sure. Besides the clumsiness of melee and run-n-gun combat, the enemy AI can be hit-or-miss when it comes to challenging opponents, as VATS and a good weapon can take out almost anyone without hassle. Weapons are kept in check though by having them degrade over time with use, forcing you to have them repaired by specialists or by yourself if you have an high enough repair skill. It can also get kinda boring wandering the wasteland for hours. Yep, even in an apocalyptic wasteland, there are times when nothing interesting happens. Thankfully, there is a fast travel option to instantly go to places you've already visited, so you don't always have to walk miles and miles. However, what's the fun of exploring when you don't…explore!

RAD TECH

Fallout 3's world is an achievement in fantastic art direction and design. The Capitol Wasteland is a very realistic representation of a post-apocalyptic future, a desolate place where morality no longer exists. Dilapidated and destroyed building are everywhere, raiders and mutants roam the wasteland, and the water is radiated. While somewhat good people have built towns and have tried to make a living, the places you'll find in the wasteland have dead bodies strung from the walls and are usually full of hostiles. The horror-infested subway system isn't all that different. You'll also awe in the accurately designed (and now Super Mutant infested) Washington DC, where such landmarks like the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building have been reduced to ruins. The game world may not be alive as, say, Liberty City from GTA4, but the wasteland is definitely a more interesting place to spend hours in, and when a game accomplishes that you know it's something special. All of this is wrapped up in a cool, 50s style retro feel that is reminiscent of Bioshock.

However, as with most open-world games, Fallout 3 has it's share of problems. For one, the framerate can stutter pretty badly at times. Weirdly, it happens most of the time just wandering the Wasteland with no enemies in sight. Also, while character models and facial feature are very good and pretty detailed, their animations are very robotic and look un-natural. It's one of the main reasons the game is best played in first-person view, so you don't have to stare at your character's awkward running animation. The game could have also used more anti-aliasing in some areas. Then we come to the various bugs and glitches that seemingly plague this game. I myself didn't run into anything too terrible, the worst one being the GOAT glitch at the beginning of the game. However, just a quick look at all the videos posted on Youtube featuring the glitches of this game will tell you that some extra polish was needed, even if it didn't solve every problem. Finally, and this is probably not a problem for most of you, the game is one of the most violent and goriest I've ever played. Yes, it even beats out Dead Space. Limbs are torn off, bodies are eviscerated in a sea of blood and flesh, and the way heads explode is one of the most detailed acts of violence in a video game I've ever seen. To say this game isn't for the squeamish would be an understatement. So while Fallout 3 may not be the best looking game out there, it is the most beautiful…in it's own sick sort of way.

Fallout 3 features very good sound design as well, as it proves that ambient sounds and music can make a Wasteland seem like an even lonelier and desolate place. Nothing brings that point home more than the sound of wind picking up dust and blowing through buildings or dead trees. The game also has a lot of licensed period music that plays mostly in the towns, bringing up further (positive) comparisons to Bioshock. The voice acting is also very good, although there are instances of hammy-ness and flat delivery. Voice talent includes such heavy hitters as Liam Neeson, Malcolm McDowell, and Ron Perlman. Other sound effects for weapons, flesh being torn off a persons body, etc. is also good (and pretty disturbing). A surround system is a good idea if you want to fully immerse yourself in the world.

RADICAL, DUDE! *PUKES UP LUNGS*

On my first playthrough, I messed around and explored a little, but basically just stuck to the main quest, which took about 25 hours to beat. However, if you didn't already figure it out, there is no “set” amount of time Fallout 3 will keep you in it's grasp. I will say that seeing absolutely everything that the game has to offer will take no less that 100 hours. A recent patch for the PS3 version also added trophies and some bug fixes. Suffice to say, you'll be getting your money's worth. It's just too bad that PS3 owners won't be getting the DLC, at least not anytime soon. Despite this, I can't wait for my second playthrough.

So the game does have it's problems, but Bethesda has finally got on my good side. Fallout 3 is a fantastic and enthralling RPG that is fun enough to get lost in for hours at a time. If your looking for a game that let's you choose your own destiny and will last you quite a while, then the Capitol Wasteland awaits. War may never change, but your frown sure will! Meaning that it will turn upside-down…and…yeah…

KEWL
+Many of the stories in the game are quite interesting
+A completely customizable experience everytime you play!
+VATS combat is fun as hell!
+The Capitol Wasteland is a huge and fantastic place to explore
+Fully customizable controls!
+Gory, gory, gory!
+Great sound and voice acting featuring tons of dialogue
+Will last you a very, very long time

LAME
-Real-time combat is pretty clunky
-Character animations are robotic
-Enemy AI can be hit or miss
-Some framerate problems and various bug and glitches

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/26/09

Game Release: Fallout 3 (US, 10/28/08)