Definetly not game of the year material. But what an amazing game we have here.
+ Combining a sci-fi shooter and the RPG element is quite imaginitive.
+ Gameplay Variety. Not alot of it, but still variety.
+ Some of the dialouge is hilarious.
+ Being able to use the game as a 3D animated Movie editor.
+ Lets you sign in and chat on Xbox Live if you have an account.
+ Galaxy News Radio is a good channel.
+ Great Mod sites.
- Not much left to do after its finished.
- Bland looking environments.
- Storyline tries way too hard to be interesting.
Having fun with Oblivion, one of the best RPG games that Bethesda has made? What would happen if we put in a future motif? No, its not Star Wars! Its Fallout 3! Its the game that everybody has been saying good about. Well, its true that the game offers alot of new things to see, but once it's done, you've seen almost all of it. But with the game of the year edition, you also get the 5 addon packs that make it a bit more lengthy. Throwing that aside, Bethesda has constructed an addictive accomplishment, and you need to know that by taking this off the shelves and paying for it, that subsequently you and your computer are in for a treat.
Fallout 3 takes place after the events of the previous Fallout games. Its the late 23rd century and the United States just got owned by a Chinese Atomic Bomb. Leaving the landscape of Washington in total ruins, the surviving Americans sought for their own safety, naturally by migrating to underground radiation-resistant facilities called "Vaults". When the game begins, you arrive into the (un)pretty world as a baby, and the game directs you to creating your character in imaginitive ways and asserting your primary combat talents and skills until you slowly envolve into an adult. The beginning is the funniest part of the entire game, just tip-toeing on the lines of being one of the best game introductions ever. Then again, its a heavy rent from Star Wars Republic Commando...
Your one of the many residents of "Vault 101", and when your in-game father suddenly leaves the vault (a feat that nobody has ever done), everybody else is left in disrray and this sends you fleeing with an angry mob behind you and trying to find your father somewhere in the nuketorn wasteland and figure out why he left. When you do find him early in the game, he hints you to the Nation's water purifiying, hoping that the two of you can sucessfully repower it and save America from the threat of irradiated water. Sadly, that's all there is to the story. Find your old man, help him purify an ocean, and then the game ends just like that. Once you beat the game, it ends totally without leaving you to explore, thus requiring you to load a previous game and go back to feeling like you never saved the United States! Doesn't it sound so interesting? Obviously, this makes progression in the game drabbed and disapointing. So there's no reason to progress in the Main "Questline".
Fourtunetly Fallout 3 never forces you to complete any quests. Its better to just go in one direction outside and discover plenty of landmarks, or complete some of the side missions. Fallout 3 gives you alot of oppertunity and variety in freedom. Admitidly, many of the exsisting sidequests are nothing more than A-B montages that have you go to areas that portray as "dungeons" that all look the same and generally get slightly repetitive. But its a rewarding feeling that there is no right way to play. Generally, you want to be strong by building stats, questing, and picking up, say, a Power Glove or that thereov in your adventures.
The biggest problem with this is that with total freedom in the wrong direction, Fallout 3 gives you nothing to look up to. Unless you count the pip-boy, there aren't many remarkable figures in the game. While it doesn't cut too much on the core of the fun itself, the game tries way too hard on character creation and the fact that you can do anything, and ultimately fails to whip up anything interesting on its own. This is a bit of a shame if your a linear gamer. There are alot of actions that you can do that might get some people on your bad side or befriend you. Its a mechanic called Karma, something you could almost call worthwhile. When you kill or steal or do something otherwise objectible, your Karma will decrease, and you can increase it by helping others and completing good missions. But frankly, this has NO effect on the gameplay. In Oblivion, npcs would spit insults at you if you killed alot of people, or they would mutter in fear "I heard you know how to move in light armor..." when you hit higher levels. In Fallout 3, everybody treats you the same and the quests never change, so the only difference between good and bad karma is the fact that you can obtain different henchmen to follow you, a few dialogue options and no more. Slaughtering an entire town doesn't change you half as much as completing the main questline. But a quible like this aside, it is still fun to mess around with the different paths you may take.
Taking a technique from Oblivion, there are side quests to take, and you can simply start walking in one direction outside for an hour and locate dozens of new areas. An RPG game that can also be classified as a Futuristic FPS is a well respected one. In a very innovative manner, Fallout 3 has the action of an FPS and its shooting action, but the other half of it is subverted with The Elder Scrolls' concept. When your not fighting something, you'll explore ruined villages that portray as 'towns' in other RPG games, find guns that can pull off critical shots at random as well as rust and break, and explore through caves, vaults, and the rest of the wilderness with few limits. Buildings like broken-down schools portray as the game's dungeons, and when you need a resupply, you can visit several wasteland towns and pubs that strive to live through the intense radiation. But when you come across a gnasty monster like a mutated ghoul or green mutant, the gameplay swings into Call of Duty 4 mode and lets you hold a button down to aim respectively and throw up loads of your smg bullets at the other side of the shootout. Introducing a new system called "V.A.T.S.", you can freeze time and enter the V.A.T.S. screen. Here, you can select what body section of your foe to attack ahead of time. After assigning your postions and hit 'OK', a virtual dice will rally the damage. Hopefully it will go in your favor so you can observe the new red paint job. If you chose to attack the head, you might damage his perception to shoot you. If his legs are hurt, he can't really run away from you if he's near death. And you might be skilled enough to blast his entire limb clean off.
Fallout 3 is a short game, sadly. The main questline can be beaten in 2 days, and by then you might've seen everything that this amazing game has to offer. Soon enough, playing the game again after beating it becomes tedious. There's a likely chance that during your first play you'll find yourself amazed as you, say for instance, blast a green mutant away or wreck havoc on a city for your first time just to see what it's like. Sadly, the fun ends all too soon. The land offered for exploration is cut less than a fraction of the large and seamless (read: Attractive) that Oblivion had to offer. The leveling feature is still intact, but it limits to 30, which can be reached in about a month. And, of course, there is no multiplayer.
But even after you finish it, there is still some replay value available. For one, if you have a previously registered account for Xbox live, Fallout 3 lets you sign in as soon as you boot the game up. This allows you to chat with other XBL users and even earn in-game acheivments that add to your gamerscore. And while the game doesn't provide you with any modification tools right out of the box, Gamespot offers a downloadable "G.E.C.K." that lets you recreate the wasteland or design your own RPG world with its Construction Set tools. This also subsays that Fallout 3 has the best choice for mods in the RPG genre. Costume mods and weapons from the Fallout 3 Nexus website can caulk the game so much that the nature of the game's engine is limitless in modding. And with modding skills, you can manage to make alot of cool new things, but if you happen to buy a console version, you're out of luck.
The graphics are actually ok for Fallout 3. Instead of a bright colorful land of Cyrodill, Fallout 3 gives you a bland ugly and depressingly burnt landscape that is amazingly boring to look at and does nothing to show off what the engine is able to do. I can understand the lack of trees and foilage from a nuclear wasteland, but even dungeons (wartorn buildings and caves) share similar and repetitive textures and designs. Character models look okay and gun models are rusted and ugly regardless of their quality. Techically, Fallout 3 IS graphically superior and looks very realistic, but there still isn't much eyecandy. Sound, on the other hand, is Fallout 3's high note. The ocasional backround music serves the setting well, and the cheesy voice acting is laughable in a good way.
Fallout 3 is awesome but short. I can't say that its not worth buying. The point of this review was not stating that the core of the game is bad. The game is great fun and I totally recommend it. But once its finished, you've seen it all unless your a modder like me. With that, wait for the bargin bin if you're expecting this game to be like Oblivion where you can have 7 characters at level 130. Fallout 3 isn't that long or intense.