A game to be played forward and back. One Exception... not on the PS3. This is a review/e-maiI I sent to Bethesda.
The return of the "Very Easy/Very Hard" Slider from Oblivion is great. But it is null and void, due to the fact that if you ever find yourself restarting from your last save, it was most likely because you got stuck in a pile of rubble next to the monster, rather than the monster actually killing you. Or... if you are as lucky as I am, you'll get stuck, and then a Mirelurk will come and smash you into pieces before you manage to untangle your feet from the top shelf of a post-apocalyptic bookcase cluster-fck.
(If this has happened to you on a boat then you know what I'm talking about.)
But these are just the rarer bugs in the game.
Let's talk crashes. That is the flesh and blood of the game right there. This is why you will find yourself walking across the entire wasteland twice, without dying once. It begins as soon as your first few "fast travels" do. You may be lucky. Maybe you make it to level five or so. But, just when you start thinking, "I don't know what those stubborn Fallout traditionalist a-holes are talking about, my system must be less-crappy or something," you realize that your screen hasn't changed for five seconds, and it still says "autosaving" in the top left. "Okay, 15 seconds, it's done this before already... just don't press anything and it'll start moving again. Any second now..."
Well, you've made yourself a sandwich and checked how your black or old candidate is doing in the presidential race, it's time to go check on Patton Oswald(my character). Well, he's still in suspended animation...*sigh* So you call up your friends and tell them you're sorry for calling all their computers, 360s, and ps3s slow pieces of crap. This goes on and on, and you can't help but play again and again, hoping that the glitches won't happen. You never learn to save after you just completed killing seven super-mutants for the fifth time only to be stopped, not by the rocket this time, but by a frozen screen.
Like I just said, though, even if you do find yourself restarting after the first ten minutes (because you get stuck sitting in a classroom chair, which is supposed to trigger the next part of the main campaign), you will keep playing. You can ignore the choppy frame-rates, the pop-up issues with the background, the sporadic lack of mouth movement from NPCs, and you can ignore the dancing dead bodies. (And on the ps3, you have to ignore the HORRIBLE anti-aliasing problems[jagged edges] all throughout the game...) You can ignore them enough to enjoy the game for what it was invisioned to be. The ability to be a complete dck to anyone or anything you meet, and then to be able to replay the game a completely different way, that is what makes the game. Every obstacle you encounter will be overcome in a different way. You can help an entire town escape their infinite torment by solving an interesting puzzle, or you can throw on a mask and pick up a knife, and instead kill every last one of them, all for the amusement of a bored scientist. These moments make your inner gamer smile, no matter how badly the latest freeze messed up your game.
You ARE going to get a really good experience when you decide to explore the post-nuclear wastelands of the District of Columbia. Just don't be surprised if you find yourself asking, "Did they really finish this?"
9.0 for PC (for G.E.C.K. mods and easy patching)
8.5 for X360 (for dlc)
6.5 for PS3 (haha)
I have a ps3, and I have never thought lower of a video game developer in my life. Dispicable. No downloadable content? Just say it, Bethesda. You don't want to "waist the time on a system with such few users." Well, that's the most disrespectful thing a publisher can do to its consumers and we're not idiots. Not one of us will think of you as a quality developer until you come up with something to truly rival this horrendous marketing decision.