"One of the best games of this generation"
Fallout 3 is the latest game in a series brought back from the dead by Bethesda Softworks, developers of the acclaimed Elder Scrolls series. It takes place in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world, and more specifically on the desecrated west coast of America in and around Washington D.C. As it is developed by Bethesda, you can expect a huge open sandbox, go anywhere you want and do what you want type adventure to throw yourself into. Fallout 3 doesn't disappoint.
The game begins about as early as any game can, with you being extracted from your mother's womb by your father and some doctors. You choose a name and then play through various phases of your childhood, choosing your stats and areas of expertise along the way. You grow up in an underground complex called a Vault, it is a grey and depressing place so naturally you will be pleased when everything goes wrong after you turn nineteen. Your father leaves for unexplained reasons and all hell breaks lose and you decide to escape and follow him. You step outside the vault and from there the game stops holding your hand pretty much, you finalise your character and erase any childhood decisions that you didn't like and then you are free to do whatever you wish, search for your father or explore the wasteland and undertake sidequests from the nearby settlement of Megaton.
The fact that Fallout 3 is developed by Bethesda is undoubtedly going to be a bone of contention among hardcore fans of the original two Fallout games. They have a strong cult following and the fact that Bethesda have stamped their mark firmly on the series is going to anger many Fallout purists. I never played the originals so I could play Fallout 3 without prejudice, but it is so clearly a Bethesda game and possesses so many traits of the Elder Scrolls games that I can easily see that the formula will have changed, and some are not going to like it.
It has moved from an isometric 2D view to a 3D first person view, very similar to Elder Scrolls. It isn't, despite what you may have initially thought looking at screenshots, an FPS game. It is an RPG, not another Halo clone. Essentially you travel around a huge open world searching underground caves and tunnels and finding various locations and doing battle with various Super Mutants and other creatures affected by the radiation. The world is hugely engrossing, and you can easily burn through several hours just exploring and adventuring across the Capital Wasteland, as the area around Washington D.C is called. It looks utterly fantastic as well, they have upgraded the Oblivion engine a great deal, everything is rendered with exceptional finesse and detail from derelict husks of buildings to the shrubbery and dead trees struggling on the desolate hillsides.
The only problem with the graphics is the relentless, post-apocalyptic greyness. The whole game is one endless mix of greys and browns and it does start to look a little drab at times, but overall, the graphics are fantastic and one of the highest points of the game. However some of the faults from using the Oblivion engine have transferred to Fallout 3. Just like in ESIV, there is a pointless third person mode to appease those who dislike the idea of playing an RPG in first person presumably. But it is so clunky and poorly animated that there is no reason to bother playing in this mode unless you want to admire your character. He drifts bizarrely across the ground and his movement looks really unnatural, it doesn't look as though he is walking on the ground at all and when he jumps his legs are the only thing that moves, your characters body stays perfectly motionless. I don't see why they included this mode at all since it is so poorly done, also, combat is difficult as well and firing from the hip is near impossible in third person.
Another flaw carried over from Oblivion are the character animations, particularly during conversations. They have a very deadpan, emotionless quality to them and they never break eye-contact and never move anything other than their lips. This is very bizarre and unrealistic and makes them feel fake and wooden. Also, add in some really, really bad voice acting and dialogue and you will start to think that Bethesda should really should take notes from Lionhead about injecting personality and character, as well as good dialogue. I spoke to one woman in Rivet City and I made her cry in response to one of my questions, I asked a slightly unrelated question and she instantly resumed her deadpan, monotonous voice without showing a trace of the aforementioned emotion.
You will also hear repeated dialogue among NPCs as they try to have conversations among themselves in an attempt to make the game seem more natural. In the saloon in Megaton, a man named Jericho has the SAME flirtatious conversation with a prostitute every single day! It as if their whole lives are on a loop, this is just laziness from Bethesda. This is a small complaint compared to the overall polish of the game, but it does begin to grate a little bit.
You might be wondering how a game in which you wield guns in first person mode isn't an FPS. Well, the combat is essentially completely driven by numbers. In an ordinary FPS there is tactical combat strategy such as ducking and diving, strafing repeatedly round an opponent and filling them with lead and they react realistically to the bullets. A headshot is an instant kill in an ordinary FPS. However, the damage you dish out in Fallout 3 is dependant on stats, for example your accuracy and chance of hitting an opponent may be dictated by your Small Guns stat and your Perception rather than your actual direct aiming. Obviously, not aiming at all at an enemy is going to miss every time, but you will sometimes miss the head of an opponent despite the crosshair being centered on it. Also, while shots to the head generally do more damage, a headshot isn't always an instant kill, you may require multiple shots to bring a foe down.
This seems very strange and unnatural when you first begin playing Fallout 3, and you will crave normal FPS combat, but you will soon become accustomed to it. In attempt to shoehorn in some strategy to battles, Bethesda have implemented the V.A.T.S (an acronym for something lengthy and pointless) targeting system. This slows down time and allows you to aim at specific parts of your enemy's anatomy, such as the head, weapon, limbs etc. At the expense of action points. You can dish out far more damage in V.A.T.S mode and you can strategically cripple enemies. For example if you encounter a Super Mutant wielding a mini-gun that is carving you up, you can target the gun and put it out of action. There are downsides to V.A.T.S however, as it leaves you vulnerable to attack and there seems to be a delay before you can move again once you come out of V.A.T.S mode. The coolest thing about V.A.T.S is the close up action shots of your opponent as they are killed. You get to see their heads and limbs explode and fly off in all directions in a shower of blood and gore. It really is exceptionally cool! Especially when you can see the flight of the bullet as it thuds into their skull. An ability to skip these sequences would be useful later in the game however, as they begin to get a little tiresome after the ten thousandth head goes spinning through the air in a shower of blood.
The combat in Fallout 3, while serviceable and fun, could have been better. In all honesty, the strategical elements are not particularly well implemented and V.A.T.S makes it a walkover later in the game as you can just pulverise an enemies skull. I rarely found myself targeting anything other than the head and I suspect that the strategy of V.A.T.S only really comes into play in the harder difficulty settings. This isn't to say the combat isn't enjoyable though, which is fortunate since you will be spending an awful lot of time in various degrees of peril throughout your adventure.
You will find a plethora of weapons and armour to find lying around, via purchase or from looting dead bodies. All of it comes in various conditions, some are in very poor condition and this hinders their effectiveness. In order to maximise the potential of your armour, you must repair them, this can be done either by visiting a merchant who repairs weapons and armour or by doing it yourself. This isn't as simple as in Elder Scrolls, where you use hammers. In Fallout 3 you use spare parts gleaned from other weapons or armour of the same kind. It is kind of like combining two pistols of poor condition into one pistol of slightly better condition. This is a good system overall, but the main problem is having the resources to repair your own equipment early in the game, it also costs a fortune to get it repaired by a specialist. Here is a tip for free, pour a lot of stat points into Repair, you'll thank me for it.
In addition to the condition and underlying quality of your clothing and weapons, your statistics dictate your effectiveness in combat and survival in general out in the wastelands. There are base stats, such as Strength, Perception and Intelligence that you can assign booster points to at the start. These in turn govern your skills, of which there are many such as Melee weapons, explosives, energy weapons, lockpicking, science, speech, small guns, big guns, the list goes on. It is these that help to make your character unique and enable you to survive in the wasteland and defeat your enemies. You will have the option to "tag" three of these skills to choose your specialty, for example, with my character I specialised in Medicine, Small Guns and Repair. I wanted a character who was a skilled shooter, could fix his own gear and could heal himself more efficiently.
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