Fallout 3 Review

Every once in a while a game comes along that is simply jaw-dropping in its scale and magnitude. The first for me was probably Grand Theft Auto 3; I remember cruising the city streets and thinking Wow! I can go anywhere! I can complete missions in any order I want! This is awesome! Then a few years ago I was blown away by Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which successfully combined the genres of first-person action and RPG, and essentially gave players the power to create any kind of character, and go do whatever they wanted. And now there's Fallout 3. Made by the same team as Oblivion, Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3 takes things a step further, dropping you into a 16-mile patch of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. which can be explored at your leisure, with everything from pocket knives to nuclear missiles to play around with. And play you shall; speaking for myself, I couldn't put this game down for a solid three weeks, to the point of taking extra days off from work and staying up far later than was wise. And now that I'm done, after 79 hours of play, I've started a new game. Fallout 3 isn't perfect. But it is excellent, and is one of the most fun, engaging games I've played in years.

Fallout 3 is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that was once Washington D.C., about 200 years after the big war that apparently wiped out most of the world. The game is initially set in Vault 101, an underground fallout shelter/city where citizens are kept safe from the dangerous outside world. The game literally starts with your character being born. This is a clever way for you to choose your character's name and sex and customize his or her appearance. You are then flashed forward to infancy, where you find a baby book that lets you determine your attributes (Strength, Charisma, Intelligence, etc.) to establish either a strong warrior-type character, a "smart" character with more of an affinity for fixing and hacking things, or a balanced character that's a little of both. You are then flashed forward to your 10^th birthday party, where you get a little shooting lesson and learn to use your "Pip-Boy 3000" which serves as the game's data and inventory management system. Then, at age 16, you take a school exam, which aims to determine your skill proficiencies such as small guns, lock picking, medicine, etc. Just when you feel like you're getting settled into life at Vault 101, you are awakened one night to find that your father has fled the vault, and security is gunning for you in search of answers. You have no choice but to leave the vault to look for your father. It's an awesome moment when you emerge from the vault and see the sun for the first time, with a vast landscape stretching out before you.

This is probably the coolest part of the game: the world is wide open, and you can go to every location that you can see, at your own pace. Imagine the world of Half-Life 2. Now imagine how cool it would have been to wander around as you pleased, rather than being led by the hand through a linear series of areas. Fallout 3 is like that. There are an astounding number of locations to discover on the map. And they're all fairly unique; while the ruined subway tunnels and office buildings do get monotonous after a while, they're nowhere near as bad as the cookie-cutter caves that littered the landscape in Oblivion. I found myself eager to explore every nook and cranny of the wasteland as every location, down to the small, abandoned shacks, holds the promise of something interesting within.

Players who would prefer to be led by the hand can just stick to the main quest, which involves finding your father and helping to realize his lifelong dream of purifying the world's irradiated water supply. I was surprised - and frankly a little disappointed - at just how linear the main quest is. The major events are pretty much all scripted; the game doesn't really give you an opportunity to change things, or choose sides, or make many major decisions. The main quest is also relatively short; a speed demon could probably blow through it in less than ten hours. The length of the main quest can be shortened even more simply by exploring "too much." Just by walking around fighting and sightseeing, I inadvertently completed main quest objectives that I hadn't even known about, thus bypassing a couple of hours or so of gameplay and skipping small parts of the story.

Happily, Fallout 3 features a multitude of side quests, which offer the player far more freedom. These are initiated by talking to certain NPC characters, and they generally involve killing or protecting something, or retrieving some item. Some of these quests present major moral dilemmas. There is a town built around an undetonated nuclear bomb. You can disarm the bomb and become a local hero, or you can make money by rigging it to explode at the behest of an unethical businessman. Or you can simply walk away without doing either. It's up to you. Good and evil actions are reflected by gains or losses of "Karma." Karma doesn't really affect the main quest, it just serves as a gauge of how good or bad your character is, and determines whether certain NPC characters are friendly or hostile towards you. There were certain decisions I made that I actually felt so guilty about that I had to reload from a previous save to change the outcome. This, folks, is why video games have the power to top movies as works of storytelling and (dare I say) art.

Fallout 3 is played from a first-person perspective by default, though the view can be switched to third-person with a click of the 360's shoulder button. The controls work well, as does the Pip-Boy 3000 menu. Entering into this gives access to your stats, inventory management, and collected data, including maps and active quest objectives. The only hiccup I ran into with the Pip-Boy was that I sometimes couldn't get into the menu quickly enough to heal myself during firefights because the game insisted on finishing my character's reloading animation before bringing it up. The game can be played like a traditional first-person shooter, where you aim with a targeting reticle, and fire (or swing a melee weapon, or toss a grenade) with a button. However combat can also take on a surreal - and fun - edge by using the V.A.T.S. targeting system. Pressing the V.A.T.S. button in the presence of an enemy causes time to freeze while you select which enemy to aim for, and which body part to aim at. A display shows the probability of any given hit. After making your selection, you are treated to a slow-motion view of your character firing. This will often result in an epically gory, yet undeniably cool and cinematic view of an enemy's head exploding, or body tumbling away. There is a V.A.T.S. meter which decreases with each use and gradually replenishes. This limits the number of times you can use V.A.T.S. in one encounter, and forces you to use a combination of V.A.T.S. combat and traditional run 'n gun gameplay, which makes for an excellent balance.

It's worth mentioning that Fallout 3 lets you travel with an NPC "companion" character to help out in fights. These range from a dog to an irradiated "Super Mutant" with a laser Gatling gun. There are five companions altogether, though you can only "hire" one at a time. They may join you upon completion of certain quests, depending on your Karma level. They can be killed in firefights, but they are pretty tough, and seem to be able to carry an unlimited amount of loot. While this adds an interesting angle to the game, I preferred to go it alone for the sake of atmosphere.

The gameplay in Fallout 3 is so fluid and action-packed, it's easy to forget that it's still an RPG. But it is, so you get experience points for killing enemies, and level up after gaining a certain number of experience points. Upon leveling up, you are given the opportunity to distribute a varying number of points to your skills, and you can select a "perk." These perks grant you special abilities that may give you a slight edge in the game. Some grant offensive damage bonuses, or defensive damage immunities. There are perks that cause you to find more ammo or money while scrounging around, or enable you to carry more weight. Some perks are just kind of "out there", like "Cannibal," which lets you regain health by eating dead bodies (with a loss of Karma), and "Bloody Mess," which gives a 5% damage bonus, while regularly making enemies explode into custard when you connect with a shot. This is all good fun until you hit level 20 - this is actually the level "cap" in the game, meaning you can't go any higher, and will stop getting experience points after that. This made me kind of sad, since I hit that cap less than 50 hours in, and still had many hours of gameplay ahead of me. In a way, this made the game feel kind of unfinished, or broken, and made fighting in some of the more enemy-congested areas pretty unrewarding. Cinematic exploding headshots or no, it's kind of tedious to endure constant "level grinding" type battles when you're no longer gaining levels.

Fallout 3 is among the best looking games I've played on the 360. I can't say it's "beautiful," as the dead wasteland, with it's ramshackle structures and rusted hulks of vehicles, isn't really a beautiful place. But that doesn't make the game's visual attention to detail any less spectacular. While traversing the wasteland, you can see far into the distance in any direction. Many of the enemy characters look truly frightening. I'll nitpick a little regarding the human character models: They aren't much improved from Oblivion. The faces could be a little more expressive, and, disturbingly, even elderly characters have the body of a 20-year-old beneath their clothes - maybe it's something in the irradiated water. Every area in the game is littered with hundreds of unique, recognizable items that can be picked up and interacted with. And somehow, the game is able to keep track of all of them. If you return to an indoor location 70 hours after visiting it, the enemies you killed will still be lying in the same position you left them. Fallout 3 is a great looking game, which seems to push the system to its limits.

Just an aside on the subject of the game keeping track of things: There are some reported glitches involving items disappearing from storage boxes, even in your character's own house. This isn't the only glitch in the game. Certain NPC characters will "disappear" because of faulty A.I. They will either fall to their death, or simply wander away from where they're supposed to be. Additionally, the game froze up on me twice, and I became helplessly stuck on a random spot on the ground twice.

The sound in Fallout 3 is good, though not breathtaking. While there are battle themes and themes that play while wandering through the wasteland, it's pretty much relegated to background music. The music written for the game lacks the haunting beauty of Jeremy Soule's soundtracks for Morrowind and Oblivion. There is a radio built in to your Pip-Boy, and radios scattered around the wasteland that mostly play a quirky but frankly puzzling assortment of oldies - really old oldies, from the 1940s or so. The sound effects are all perfectly adequate. The voice acting is OK, but it seems like Bethesda selected a small pool of voice actors and recycled them throughout the game so that each one voices a ton of NPC characters. And I think some of these voice actors are the same ones they used in Oblivion. There are a few celebrity voices, most notably Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell. They do a fine job, but the characters they voice don't have much dialogue. At least it's more than the few minutes given to Patrick Stewart in Oblivion.

While I feel like a tool for constantly comparing Fallout 3 to Oblivion, I'm doing it for a reason; in addition to being developed by the same company, the two games share the same "engine," as well as a number of gameplay mechanics. Anyone who has played Oblivion will feel right at home playing Fallout 3. The games share the concept of an expansive world that is mapped out as you discover new locations. The inventory structure is similar; you can only carry so much weight, and your weapons and armor degrade over time. There are an unbelievable number of items, which you can stash in dressers, cupboards, and boxes for later retrieval. You can "loot" corpses, and leave them stripped down to their underwear. Interestingly, Fallout 3 takes it a step further by letting you hack bodies to pieces, and arrange the parts to your liking if you're so inclined. You can steal things and slaughter innocents if you like, but the game simply won't let you sleep in a bed that belongs to someone else - I guess Bethesda has a strange, longstanding moral objection with the practice. You can own a house in Fallout 3, as with Oblivion, and the mercantile and conversation systems are similar, though they've thankfully dropped the little mini-game of trying to coerce NPCs. Fallout 3 is the first Bethesda game I've played to feature NPC children, and the developers decided to make them invincible, which seems an odd blow to the game's otherwise gritty sense of realism. Both games have their own real-time day/night cycles. And in both games, I found myself wishing my character could run just a little bit faster. Many fans of the original Fallout games seem unimpressed with Fallout 3, stating that it is essentially a re-skinned Oblivion with guns. I disagree; while the two games are structured similarly, Fallout 3 successfully creates its own world with its own unique feel. Besides, if one were looking for a game to use as a basis, one could do far worse than Oblivion.

As I mentioned earlier, Fallout 3 isn't perfect. There are some random glitches. The main quest is kind of short and linear, compared to the open-ended nature of the rest of the game. The ending is abrupt and anti-climactic, hardly worthy of a game this massive. But all such quibbles are easily forgiven for one simple reason: Fallout 3 is completely, insanely FUN TO PLAY, and is so addictive it should have a warning label. Fallout 3 creates its own immersive world which may, if you let it, become more inviting than the mundane world around you. Few other games can boast this much gameplay and this much incentive to play again when you finish. The game turns you loose in a huge world with tons of atmosphere and lets you have a good time. The story has some emotional twists, and throws you some genuinely tough ethical dilemmas. And if you look around enough, you'll realize that the game contains some really unique humor, and many clever nods to everything from H.P. Lovecraft to Konami's cult hit Snatcher. Everything about the game screams high production values, down to the campy cartoon art used on the status screens and in-game advertisements. Fallout 3 is a hell of a game. And with at least three confirmed downloadable expansions on the way, I'm not going to be done with it for a while. I highly recommend this title - I'm glad to see an eagerly-anticipated game actually live up to its hype.