Fallout 3

"Fallout 3 - Has the potential to keep you pre-occupied up to, and through the apocolypse."

I found Fallout 3 to be an engaging, immersive and enjoyable experience - this is truly a meaty game and if you choose to really submerge yourself into Bethesda's post-apocalyptic vision, it will easily swallow up 100+ hours of your life (I realised this only upon completion, much to my chagrin).

The game environment is truly remarkable, and I genuinely loved exploring the Wastelands of D.C. - Bethesda have managed to capture a brilliant sense of realism and desperation. Roaming the wastes, fending off bands of Raiders, rogue robots and Enclave soldiers quickly became my favourite part of the game, and discovery of a new location to explore continues to give a sense of achievement well into the gaming experience.

I also enjoyed some of the role-playing elements of the game - for example, agonising over how to assign experience points and which perks to select to customise my character, this loaned a real sense of involvement and Bethesda have clearly worked hard to craft a experience that puts the gamer at the helm and allows them to carve their own path through the game how they see fit. However, I found the non-playable character interactions quite tiresome and felt that a wider range of voice actors could have been used and the scripting could have been done more carefully. I felt there was a lot of non-essential dialogue to wade through to complete essential tasks, and while I am the sort of gamer that will exhaust most dialogue "trees" with each NPC, I feel that this could have been presented optionally rather than forced upon those who wish to approach the game in a less strict role-play fashion.

I found the combat element of the game fairly well thought out, and the VATS auto-targeting system was brilliant fun once I mastered it. However, I do feel that some of the guns were distinctly under-powered and this broke the illusion of suspense - fair enough I may have sunk more ability points into "small gun" skills as opposed to "big guns" - but you'd still expect a missile to deal out more damage than a rifle shot or two!

Some other elements of the game that I felt let it down were that the game could have been more well balanced by dealing out ammunition and "caps" (currency) less readily - though you start off poor and struggling to buy necessary supplies, all too quickly you are swimming in caps and ammunition, even if you aren't big on the looting style of gameplay. This leaves you able to purchase any weapon, armour or item that you want (not that you need to because you'll probably have 10 of them stored in your locker) and the sense of desperation, thriftyness and planning with limited supplies is lost. The "repair" skill, which requires you to disassemble one or more guns/pieces of armour to repair another, although continuing to be useful, ceases to feel like an essential component of the game as you are swimming in so many caps you could buy 100 brand new rifles anyway. Thus, the immediacy and cleverness of many of the features of the game, such as repair, scavenging for supplies and materials to barter with quickly become tiresome in the same way that picking up a dropped £5 note must be tiresome to Bill Gates.

This point also leads me on to the fact that the rife materials, weaponry and food in the game world really do damage the authenticity of the experience and really did lessen my enjoyment of the game. This is meant to be set several hundred years after a massive nuclear war, which has lead to gross mutations, cannibalism, slavery and savagery - yet there are fridges in burned out, abandoned buildings still full of food (where is the electricity coming from to keep a Salisbury steak in edible condition for 200+ years anyway?!), gun racks chock full of shiny toys, boxes of ammunition spilling out of lockers, and bottle caps (money) to be found in almost every desk drawer. You will find yourself checking EVERY desk, cupboard and cranny knowing that you will very likely find some bullets or money in each one, and end up like a pack horse for your troubles. Supplies should have been much more tightly eked out to keep you on the edge and help keep that sense of relief when you DO manage to uncover that much needed box of shells for your taped-up handgun. I know that combat plays a big part in this game and I'm not suggesting ammunition should be so rare as in, say, Resident Evil - however what I can say is I enjoyed the first 5 hours of Fallout 3, before I had built up massive stockpiles of food, armour, money, medicine and ammunition, more than I did the rest of the game put together. That brings me to mention the much touted radiation and health management aspects of the game. In Fallout 3, you are shown to be a lonely wanderer who must battle against the odds to survive in the wilderness, and make difficult decisions to pull through - such as weighing up whether to eat irradiated food or drink irradiated water from a toilet bowl in order to recover much needed health, and whether to use sparse supplies to heal crippled limbs, or to pull through until you can find somewhere to rest up until you recover, thus saving vital medical gear. It is posited that you will also need to carefully weigh up the pros and cons of using vital medical equipment such as radiation-blocking or annihilating pills, healing items, in addition to drugs that affect your endurance, strength, charisma and a range of other stats at the expense of harbouring serious addictions and associated side effects. In effect, this aspect of the game falls flat as your first-aid kit will be bursting at the seams within a few hours of play, and you will be able to recover a significant amount of health by using a Stimpak because you have 50 of them, without once agonizing over the scummy water in the toilet bowl. Similarly, radiation medication is far, far too plentiful, thus rendering all but the most instantaneously lethal irradiated areas essentially harmless, and also giving you the option of supping endless quantities of mucky water and simply selling off all of your Stimpaks for an even fatter wallet (not that you will ever be worried about a lack of caps, I can assure you). Given that you can sleep in any bed if it is not owned by someone else, and this fully recovers your health and heals crippled limbs, the need for medicine at all is also dubious. Radiation can also all-too-easily be ameliorated by curing yourself in your own home which you come by - which can be "fast travelled" to from most locations throughout the game map, should things become too hairy. All to easy!!

The psychoactive meds, while a nice touch, are also too ubiquitous and can also pretty much be abused with negligible effect, thus rendering the tactical considerations of their use fairly moot. Disappointing, especially given the number of "perks" given in the character developing aspects of the game designed to bolster your abilities to deal with the ill effects of medication, poison, and crippled limbs - they just are not necessary, given the easiness of the game due to over-supply of gear. It becomes a case of just trying to avoid the really useless perks rather than crafting a highly self-sufficient, capable character, and ends up feeling very backward.

I also found the interior environments of Fallout 3 a bit tedious at times, and often found myself wishing for the freedom of the Wastelands once again, though there is technically less to find it that environment. I suppose the game's premise lends itself to the exterior sections much better - seeing the collapsed bridges, broken up highways and skeletal supports of long-collapsed buildings infinitely beats seeing the inside of another, 70's style, burned out concrete husk of an office block. I also constantly found myself wondering how PC terminals could still be switched on, monitors glowing, hundreds of years after the national grid even pumped out a single hertz - perhaps Bethesda could have accommodated this by implementing a description of how your character's low-tech Pip-boy (like a massive watch that deals with your health, stats, navigation and inventory) uplinks into the circuitry boards of the computers themselves? A small complaint but again, things like this do jar and add up to the feeling that there has been a massive mistake and the nuclear war only happened a week ago. Don't set a game over 200 years after the apocalypse if you aren't going to be committed enough to design an environment that reflects this, as it will only weaken the experience as a result!

Set-pieces and random encounters, such as battles between NPC such as Brotherhood of Steel disciples and the local flora and fauna (giant scorpions, molerats, psychotic 'bots, raiders, etc) also seem to play out beautifully in the Wasteland, but are curiously stilted and awkward inside buildings.

I have certainly focused more on the negative than the positive in this review, but only because the game is so very enjoyable and "gets it right" in so many ways that it annoys me a little that they got relatively easy-to-correct issues wrong, thus bringing down what would have otherwise been an utterly unique, unforgettable experience. It does still remain firmly within this category though - in how many games can you choose to either defuse a dormant nuclear bomb at the centre of a shanty town in the middle of the wastes, thus becoming a saviour for all it's inhabitants...or make surreptitious deals with shady men in bars to reactivate it, then personally detonate it and watch the resultant mushroom cloud from a safe distance? The moral choices in the game have quite diverse results from time to time as you can see, although the same problem remains with Fallout 3 as with many other sandbox style games which incorporate a moral element, in that the experience of playing as a good or evil character tends to remain fairly parallel outside of your own actions.

Despite the flaws I have described, Fallout 3 is a brilliant game, it has excellent graphics and animation (so long as you play it in third-person view only, unless you like to watch your character "ice-skate" across the Wastelands...), the sounds perfectly match the desolate visuals, the enemies are diverse and well realised, and the Wastelands really do need to be experienced to be believed. This game does require dedication and patience, so if you're looking for a strictly "run-and-gun" experience, this is not for you. Otherwise, enjoy!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/07/09

Game Release: Fallout 3 (EU, 10/31/08)