Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

Fallout 3 is the long awaited next installation in the Fallout series (which was itself the spiritual successor to Wasteland). A long time in coming, many diehard fans of the Fallout series were nervous as to how Bethesda would handle the franchise. Fortunately for them and all of us, Bethesda mostly delivers a great and worthy successor.

Set in a futuristic post apocalypitc United States, the Fallout series deals with mankind's attempt at survival and rebirth. Fallout 3 shifts the action from the west coast, to the Washington, DC area. True to past form, you take the role of a vault dweller entering the wasteland. Prior to the nukes flying in WW3, several underground safehavens, known as vaults, were built to ensure mankind's survival. Events quickly transpire in the vault that force your character out into the nuclear charred wasteland of Washington, DC.

Unlike the past versions, Fallout 3 plays from a first person perspective - though you can shift into a pseudo third person view. However, unlike most FPS, Fallout 3 has strong rpg elements. Using a fun tutorial interface at the beginning of the game, you determine what level your character's baseline attributes are: Strength, Intelligence, Agility, Endurance, Perception, Charisma, and Luck. Each of these attributes affects various aspects of gameplay. For instance, strength determines how much weight you can carry and how much damage you do in melee, endurance determines how much health and how much radiation resistance you have, and so forth. These values do not change with levelling up - so choose wisely. However, there are a few items and perks in the game that can increase these scores.

Your character also has many skills that help determine how well he/she performs at various tasks. Categories include small guns, big guns (rocket launchers, flame thrower, etc.), energy weapons, lockpicking, speech, barter, sneak, science, repair, melee, unarmed, explosives etc. These skills are all influenced by your attributes, but you can also add points to them as you level up or as you discover certain items or books. The higher your score, the more proficient you are with the corresponding task. You won't have enough points to max out all the skills, so the player will have to determine which route they'd like. You can play as a stealth character, an upclose brawler, etc. Certain skills such as speech or high repair/lockpick can help you avoid brawls altogether.

Finally, at each level, you are granted a set of perks from which to choose from. Each perk grants your character a special ability or a boost to one or more of their skills or attributes. The incredible amount of variety in this system will allow the player to play through the game multiple times with very different styles.

Combat comes in 2 distinct flavors. You can play the more traditional FPS style - real time combat. Move, dodge, and attack. Or you can use the VATS system. It's a throwback to the original turn based combat system. It pauses the games and allows you to specifically target different parts of your enemy's body - depending on the weapon you select. Depending on your agility, skills, and some perks, you have a certain amount of action points. These are spent in selecting attacks and other actions during VATS. Once you have used up all your action points, you hit the start button and go. A slow motion, pseudo real time, sequence then follows. It makes for some cool scenery depending on the type of weapon you use and what enemy you are facing. Body parts and other things often explode or go flying across the room. Although not as slick as some of the current FPS, the combat system gets the job done. It is an action rpg, after all. . . .

Like most Bethesda products, the game world is both incredibly large and incredibly open ended. You can play any style you want - as a ruthless cuthtroat mercenary or as a saint of the wasteland. The characters you encounter will often react to you based on your past behavior. The main storyline is actually quite good given the free ranging style, but somewhat short. However, you would be doing yourself a serious injustice if you just played the main storyline. The world of Fallout 3 is enormous and you could spend over 100 hours exploring each little area of it. There are literally tons of sidequests, easter eggs, unique encounters, etc. to keep you entertained. True to Bethesda form, there's also more than one way to accomplish your task. Depending on your preference, many situations will let you go in guns blazing or find another, less confrontational solution to the problem.

Now to the bad stuff - bugs. To be fair, any game with this kind of size, complexity, and open endedness is bound to have some bugs. Fallout 3 certainly does. Most of them are not that bad, but there are a few that can be game killers. I experienced several bugs during my first play through - enough where I deciced to check out Fallout's official forums for help. Apparently, I am not alone. Many people had noted similar problems and frustrations. The type of platform did not matter - they were common on the PC, the 360, and the PS3. Some of the issues had to do with performance, but that usually could be fixed by cleaning out your cache. Other bugs dealt with specific quests or NPCs. Usually reloading from an earlier save or autosave would fix those. For instance, sometimes certain dialogue did not happen, certain items were not given, etc.

Most of those bugs were annoying but not deal breakers. The freezing issue was a little different. From what I experienced, freezes were not random, they were specific. There were some specific areas on the map I just could not enter. If I went into a certain area, my game would freeze and I would have to turn the console off. No matter what way I approached the area, the game would freeze. This was constant and 100% repeatable. Fortunately for me, the area did not involve any elements from the main storyline so I could complete the game. I was unable to do 2 sidequests, however, as they contained elements in that area. These freeze areas seemed to vary per person and possibly per game. Some people were not able to finish there game because the freeze zone was in an essential area. Not everyone experiences the freezing bug, but it seemed to be a fairly common occurrence for many people on the forums.

In a game of this size and scale, some bugs are inevitable. Hopefully Bethesda comes up with a fix/patch for the freezing issue and also some of the more annoying bugs in the game. I hate to criticize them, but this issue certainly could ruin someone's game. It would be awful to sink over 40+ hours into the game only to find that you can not complete it due to a bug.

Overall, this game was a great experience. It certainly kept me glued to my couch for many hours and I'm sure that most rpg fans will have a blast. However, Bethesda certainly needs to fix the major glitches in this game before I can give my full hearted recommendation of this game.