Fallout 3 Review

Let me get the first thing off my chest. This review is NOT going to be constant praise, which is pretty much all I have heard about this game. If for some reason, you would defend Fallout 3 to the death, then this isn’t the review/critique for you.

Now, let’s continue.

When I first heard of Fallout 3 at E3 2008 I almost squealed. This game looked amazing, exactly what I had been looking for over the past few months of gaming becoming a dull drag rather then an enjoyable experience. A free roaming FPS with RPG elements and a whole new system for removing someone’s backside. What more could a gamer want?
Unfortunately, due to a strict University budget I was unable to purchase the game straight away, but have recently managed to get my hands on a copy. And the verdict?

It’s alright. It’s a bit better then alright, but ‘good’ might be a bit of an overstatement for many people.

The story begins with your birth. Literally. I was already worried the second I saw this, as I had heard this game was long, and I don’t know about you. But I certainly don’t have the time to hand rear a child from birth in a video game. Unfortunately, your mother dies during childbirth, but only after answering a set of questions about who I’m going to be when I’m older, what sex, hair shape and colour etc. (which is a lot to ask from a new born baby). We are propelled one year forward in time, where the mourning for your mother appears to have ended.

Slowly but surely, you make your way through the beginning stages of your childhood, confined in the underground Vault 101 to protect you from the post-apocalyptic war zone that is the Wasteland. Each stage you will develop your character a little more, and learn the mechanics of the game, such as shooting and navigating the menu.

Then, just when you are starting to get into the entire ‘learning’ phase you are drop kicked into the storyline. Your dad has left the Vault (which nobody has ever done, or is supposed to do), and everyone inside the Vault wants you dead. Even though you have been told about the dangers of the outside, you decide that you will have better luck out there, and hell, you may as well go look for your dad.

This beginning part of the game works extremely well. Just as you are getting used to your Vault lifestyle, you are booted out into open land and left to die. It’s moments like these that make me rejoice, as the storyline and game play has miraculously joined hands and are dancing together, just as they should be. But this is where the unity ends. Obviously the storyline cheated with the mistress of slow, because the two separate and the game slows down incredibly.

Of course, this is my little nit picking here, but Open games aren’t quite all they are being advertised as. Of course, I’m free to roam everywhere, but I’m still being restricted by the mediocre storyline. Every time I do go away for hours on end, helping people and killing ghouls, I have the hanging feeling over my head that I should be looking for father. A game such as The Sims would work much better in this scenario, where I am COMPLETELY free to do whatever I wish.

Of course the problems of when the game ends and exactly what to do arise, but in scenarios like this it just seems to be the only case. As the storyline seems to drag down the free roaming, or vice versa, it would appear to be better just to axe one or the other and concentrate on one. The delicate balance between the two is extremely hard to achieve, and I feel that Bethesda has not managed to achieve it.

As we are plodding through, the game doesn’t exactly know when it wants to let go of the beginning. You seem to be searching for your father for a hell of a long time, and when it finally does let go of that beginning and the story starts to change, you have almost finished the game. Because of this, the beginning few hours of your storyline seem like a drag if you don’t take up any side quests, which I strongly suggest you do.

And this is where we come back to the games strengths; there is so much to do. You can help out the townspeople, or merely blow their brains out. You can explore and find new places, or you can stick around the old until you’ve helped everyone out. You can go hunting for EXP points to level up, or you can plod along with the story. The choice really is up to you, and there’s nothing stopping you from dropping absolutely everything, and going to the west side of your map, simply because you haven’t been there before.

A little tip would be to start saving often, the auto save feature is nice, and does save when you enter new areas and at other various point, but when travelling across the Wasteland, especially when trying to locate a new place only available by walking for 2 hours, it’s the worse feeling EVER to be killed by something you didn’t see coming as have to walk the entire journey again.

The FPS mode is quite handy when you run out of AP points to use the V.A.T.S system, but in all honesty I don’t know why you would want to play this game in a FPS manner, especially when the beauty of the V.A.T.S is there for you to use whenever you want. It’s like buying a mobile phone but refusing to use it to make or receive calls.

As well as that, when I first used the V.A.T.S, I remember smirking to myself with delightful glee and thinking ‘I bet this gets old quickly’. Throughout the rest of the game, I dared the system to feel monotonous or get boring, but it didn’t. Every time I watched my enemies head fly off into the distance Team Rocket style, I felt as if I was the bee’s knees. Every time.

The graphics, while not the current best, are nothing to be ashamed of. You will be easily drawn into the world of the Wasteland before you know it, and wandering around the disturbingly scenic areas, metro stations and buildings doesn’t get old. And having personal locations such Washington really makes you feel immersed.

But every game has it’s bad parts. Fallout 3 has them too, and they are more evident than one might first realise.

While things like crippling limbs and drug addiction are nice little additions, they seem to be wasted, especially when time could have been developed making the storyline better, making the landscape bigger (Yes, I think it could have been bigger, put some more landmarks in there or something), or even making the karma system worth something.

The karma system is something that I find extremely annoying in games like these, especially the free roamers, where karma seems extremely important. A reputation is one of the key ingredients to make an open game work, but Fallout 3 seems to miss this. While the karma changes lets you get different wanderers to join you, it doesn’t seem to do enough. I had almost perfect good karma, yet when walking into Paradise Falls for the first time, a camp known for evil slavery, they happily let me in, as long as I grab a slave or two first. Similarly, after turning extremely evil, the residents of Megaton accepted me with open arms, which left me thinking if a Karma system was needed at all.

Of course you have the standard weapon and armour uses, and along with it comes breakages, a realistic but highly annoying aspect that I hate to love. But repairing becomes a nonsense when money, or should I say, Caps, are extremely hard to come by.

When beginning the game, I had to run around with the bare minimum of money in my hand, whilst everything else went to ammo or health packs. Then, out of nowhere, I was loaded and could buy all the guns I wanted, twice over. Then suddenly I’m a pauper again, and having to stick to a budget plan.

The difficulty curve doesn’t seem to want to make its mind up, and I guess that’s what you get with a free roamer, depending on where you go, you are either going to be amazingly epic, or running away with your hands over your head begging for mercy. Maybe it was me playing it wrong, but I feel the way Oblivion worked really well when the game levelled up with you, but at the same time posed a threat.

I guess that a lot of my points can be withered down to nit picking, but it’s the small things that build up to end product. If you were to build a house, but half of your bricks were crap, it shows, and Fallout 3 certainly does have a few crap bricks. Even though Bethesda has painted over them with pretty paint, they are still obvious.

And they have promised us DLC, but many games do these days. It’s as if most developers see the DLC features a reason to release a half assed game and work on it again later, which is not what makes a good game in my books. The game should be amazing on release, with DLC being an added extra, not the other way around.

It’s like when starting Fallout 3, the team was offered the entire array of ingredients that make a perfect game, yet Bethesda were picky and only chose a few of them, instead of picking up the entire lot and running with it. Everything is THERE, but it doesn’t all work properly, which is a shame because it could of been the most epic game of all time.

I guess Fallout 3 does get its ‘good’ rating, rather reluctantly though. I did enjoy playing it, but it wasn't as good as the pre-game hype made it out to be, and there are so many things it could do to become double the greatness it is at the moment. We’ll have to wait and see if Bethesda does work on it.

7/10 - B - Good