Fallout 3 Review

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Every once in a great while, a game comes along that absolutely rocks my world. These exceptional games offer shockingly realistic graphics, physics and sounds, and reel me in with a story that is so engaging, so immersive, I often forget that I’m playing a game. I can count on one hand the number of such games that I’ve played: MYST (the entire series, really, but especially MYST and Riven), Quake (again, most notably the first two in the series), The Thief series, Half-Life (along with Half-Life 2), and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. After playing Fallout 3, however, I’ll either need to switch hands or grow a new finger, because this game is the balls.

If you’re the kind of person that’s looking for a quick and short review of the game, then you probably don’t need to read any further than the end of this paragraph. Let me sum it up for you: Fallout 3 is incredible. The story is gripping, the graphics are breathtaking, and the gameplay is as enjoyable as it is intricate. Go buy it. Go play it.

If you want more evidence of just why this game is so awesome or why you should spend your money on it, however, you should keep reading.

Fallout 3 is a first-person shooter/role-playing game that takes place years after nuclear war has ripped apart the United States of America. As a citizen of Vault 101 (one of several nuclear fallout shelters scattered around the Washing D.C. area) your life is comparatively sheltered – at first. You have all the food and purified water you could ask for, a super-smart dad who is constantly showering you with encouragement and affirmation, and safety from the mutated abominations that now prowl the outside world, which the survivors have come to call the “Capital Wasteland”. Your biggest concern is a bully who tries to look and dress like James Dean, but in actuality comes across as a giant douche. Oh, and you are eventually given the opportunity to kick his ass, which is a plus.


Meet Butch, the bully of Vault 101. This baseball bat ought to wipe that smirk off his face...

While residing in Vault 101, your character is introduced to many of the fundamentals of Fallout 3’s gameplay, but in such a way that the momentum of the story-telling isn’t hampered. You choose your race, sex, and physical appearance at your character’s birth, you receive your first Pip-Boy (a device that acts as your menu, journal, map, inventory, stats page, and more) at age 10, and you take your G.O.A.T. (a test that will help determine what kind of player you will be and which skills you will use most often throughout the game) at age 16. All of these aspects of Fallout 3 are strikingly similar to the character setup used in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (albeit much better done), which isn’t a surprise as both games were developed by Bethesda Softworks.


Ah, the beauty of the Capital Wasteland. Now if only I could find my pants...

The skills and perks made available to you in Fallout 3 are also very similar to those available in Oblivion. You can choose to be a stealthy player who is proficient at sneaking and picking locks; a brainy character who can hack computer terminals and provide more efficient medical care to yourself and others; a bullet-spraying, grenade-chucking commando who mows down everything in their path; or pretty much anything in-between. Also similar to its fantasy counterpart, Fallout 3 allows you to play the game as either a goody-goody, an evil-doer, or something of a neutral, based on decisions you make throughout the game. This provides for an extremely dynamic experience every time you play, as the outcomes from any given interaction could potentially take your character in several different directions.

No matter what your character looks like or how you conduct your G.O.A.T., you will eventually need to leave the Vault and brave the many dangers of the Wasteland. Up until this point, Fallout 3’s visuals are pretty decent by modern standards, although a tad boring, as the entire game thus far has taken place in the steel corridors you call home. When you first set foot in the outside world, however, the dull redundancy of the Vault fades from your memory, and your eyes are treated to the most beautiful post-apocalyptic wasteland that you’ve ever seen. The scenery is incredibly well-done, as the rich, vivid textures form a startlingly realistic landscape of decimation. Although the majority of the Capital Wasteland is made up of rolling, craggy hills, abandoned subway tunnels, and ruined buildings, these are so well-done that their aesthetic beauty keeps them from getting boring to look at. Character and object models are also superbly done, and certainly help add to the illusion that you are living in a gritty and unforgiving environment.


The first time you step foot outside of Vault 101, your eyes are treated to catastrophic beauty.


The Washington Monument has seen better days.

Although it might not be Fallout 3’s strongest point, the sound does add to the game’s repertoire of excellence. The ambient sounds you will encounter in the Wasteland are chillingly appropriate, whether you’re scouring the charred remains of a city or crawling through the darkness of a metro tunnel. Some of the weapon sounds can be a bit weak, but for the most part they’re very satisfying. The creature sounds are also appropriate, from buzzing bloat flies to snarling deathclaws (genetically engineered killing machines that are a pain in the ass to kill at first).


These vicious deathclaws are just as scary as they look. Try not to pee yourself.

I’m usually pretty picky about the voice acting in a video game, especially story-driven games like this one. Graphics and gameplay are incredibly important, but the voice acting is really the vehicle that propels the story forward, and poor acting can ruin the flow of an otherwise great story. Thankfully, Fallout 3’s voice acting is, for the most part, as excellent as everything else. Like Oblivion, several characters are voiced by the same actors, but there is still enough of a variety to keep it from getting too boring. Another plus is that the voice of your character’s father is played by the great Liam Neeson, who also provided the voice for the character Aslan in the move The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Neeson is a very talented voice actor, and his performance here is no exception. He absolutely nails the role of an intelligent, caring father, and his praises for your good deeds in the game will actually make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Flashy graphics and immersive sounds are all for naught if a video game’s gameplay sucks, but Fallout 3 doesn’t have that problem. Here again you will find Fallout 3 to be incredibly similar to Oblivion - but that’s not a bad thing. Your character will start off at “level one”, leaving them relatively weak and initially incapable of many feats that need to be performed in the game. You gain experience points, or “XP”, by killing enemies and completing objectives, and after you’ve gained a certain amount, you reach the next level. Here we see a distinction in the gameplay between Oblivion and Fallout 3: In Oblivion, you advance specific skills by using them over and over (for example, your Blade skill is increased every time you attack with a sword), but in Fallout 3, you are given a number of skill points to allocate to whichever skills you like each time you level up. This is nice in that you can increase certain skills that you don’t necessarily use very often, but need extra points in to complete a certain task (for instance, there is a point in the game where you have the option of disarming a nuclear bomb, but you need an Explosives skill of 30 or more. I hadn’t used my Explosives skill at all at that point, but once I leveled up, I could allocate enough points to Explosives so that I could complete the task). The downside to this is that you really aren’t rewarded for using these skills, so there’s seldom motivation to develop any skills but the most useful ones.


The level-up screen is easy to use, and provides an incredible level of customization for your character.

Perhaps the only thing I found to be irritating about the gameplay as the fact that your character can only reach a maximum of level 20. In Oblivion, your character can reach ridiculously high levels, allowing you to squash the toughest of foes with your little finger. In Fallout 3, unfortunately, once you’ve reached level 20, your character cannot progress any further, forcing you to hone only the skills and perks that you like best, or else start a new game to explore the other skills and perks you weren’t able to use the first time around. This was a fairly smart move for Bethesda, as it provides motivation to play the game through more than once, but personally I like attaining super-human status in an RPG, which I missed in this game.

Combat here isn’t as straightforward as most first-person shooters. At first, your character will do very little damage with whatever weapon he/she is wielding, and any projectiles you fire will be fairly inaccurate. You will get better as your character progresses and levels up, but this feature does prevent the game from being the typical run-and-gun type FPS. Another interesting feature is the incorporation of the V.A.T.S. system, a targeting system that allows you to freeze the action and target specific enemies or specific parts of an enemy’s body. The V.A.T.S. will show you the likeliness of your shot being a success, as well as the projected damage it will deal. This can be useful for lower-level players, as you are more likely to score a hit on an enemy using V.A.T.S. than if you tried on your own.


The V.A.T.S. system lets you target specific areas on your enemy's body, allowing for greater accuracy.

Another feature that makes Fallout 3 so immersive is the sheer size of the game world. The Capital Wasteland is pretty huge (although not as massive as Oblivion’s Cyrodiil), and there are plenty of nooks and crannies for you to discover, as well as full-fledged cities. Some are downright impressive (like Rivet City, a settlement made out of a beached aircraft carrier), and some are downright creepy (as a teacher, I found the town of Little Lamplight to be the most disturbing – a city run entirely by children... I had a nightmare like that once…). The downside to the size of the game world is that there aren’t any kind of vehicles available for you make the journey a bit quicker. If you need to travel to a location across the map that you’ve never been to before, it could possibly take you a LONG time to reach. Thankfully, Fallout 3 allows the use of fast travel, as does Oblivion, which lets you instantly travel to any location that you’ve already visited.


Welcome to Little Lamplight: Paradise for children like these; living hell for teachers like me.

I consider the game design and gameplay to be damn near flawless. That said, Fallout 3 does have some aggravating issues. Namely, Fallout3.exe crashes often, losing any unsaved progress up until that point. For me, the crashes became so frequent that they made the game unplayable. I scoured the internet in search of a remedy, and after trying everything I could find, I still didn’t find a solution. Unfortunately, I was forced to turn to a… less conventional means of fixing my problem, which I won’t get into here. Let’s just say it involves sharing things with my peers. I was disappointed to find such a glaring flaw in a game that is otherwise so incredibly awesome.


Unfortunately, I saw this screen a lot when I first started playing Fallout 3. Hopefully Bethesda will get their heads out of their asses and fix this problem soon.

To write an exhaustive review of a game as deep and complex as Fallout 3 would take a long time, and would probably be so long that it would bore most readers. That said, I will just tell you that there is much, much more to this game than what I’ve described here – I only wanted to share the highlights in hopes of helping you make the decision on whether or not you want to purchase the game. In summation, I highly recommend Fallout 3. The game is incredibly fun, highly customizable, and the replay value makes it worth the money.

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Fallout 3's explosions are awesome:


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