While the threat of atomic annihilation disappeared during the Reagan Era, Fallout 3 rekindles that fear by inserting gamers into a post-nuclear war version of Washington, DC. Your life begins in Vault 101, a massive nuclear fallout shelter where inhabitants have lived for 200 years, and it's a place "where no one ever enters and no one ever leaves." When your father suddenly disappears from the underground bunker, the Vault's overseer commands the security forces to take you down. Under duress, you escape the Vault and find a new life outside as well as a mission to find your father.
Thus begins the open world role-playing adventure into the Capitol Wasteland. A treacherous place peppered with the life that continues to survive as humans, ghouls, mutants and mutated versions of former animals and insects like moles, scorpions and roaches. Early on in the game, learning V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Tactical System) becomes an essential tool as it serves as a way to target specific body parts, monitor damage and calculate how likely you are to hit the target (of course, head shots still rule the roost).
Fallout 3 wasn't created as a firstperson shooter so V.A.T.S. is a balanced way to solve the game's lack of shooting accuracy. Most of the time, it's a great tool for eliminating threats but shooter fans may find the lack of accuracy frustrating at times -- especially when your character misses near point blank shots. V.A.T.S. also has an issue with your player is near corners or if there's an obstruction between you and the target -- when it indicates that you're likely to hit it, your character pops up and wastes ammo by shooting a rock, wall or other item. The other problem with V.A.T.S. is that weapon damage is listed as number values during combat; your target's health is represented by a list of red numberless lines. Unfortunately, with a limited amount of creatures in the Wasteland, the only real challenges are found when Super Mutants sport better weapons or several mole rats attack at once.
Weapons here follow some basic stereotypes with shotguns, pistols rifles, laser guns, riffles, machine guns, semi-automatics, a missile launcher for the big baddie during the annex of the GNR radio station and a flamethrower (which has an awesome fire effect). Grenades and mines are also available to help frag more than one enemy. Despite having long-range weapons, there's no zoom mode.
Apart from fighting, your character works on building connections with humans, your character builds skills through exploring areas, picking locks with bobbypins (done by using one analog stick to move the bobbypin while the other moves the keyhole around), hacking security systems and performing various good karma tasks like fixing leak pipes.
Fallout 3 gallery
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 1 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 2 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 3 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 4 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 5 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 6 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 7 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 8 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 9 of 59)
Vault-Tec engineers have worked around the clock on an interactive reproduction of Wasteland life for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own vault. Included in Fallout 3 is an expansive world, unique combat, shockingly realistic visuals, tons of player choice, and an incredible cast of dynamic characters. Every minute is a fight for survival against the terrors of the outside world-radiation, super mutants, and hostile mutated creatures. (Screenshot 10 of 59)
Visually, Fallout 3 presents a stark and desolate world that lets players can wander freely in order to complete quests. Most players will first wander into the town of Megaton, a small Mad Max style shantytown built around a live nuclear bomb.. The detail of the walls, created from airplane scraps, including an airplane engine above the entrance, looks absolutely amazing and provide an interesting contrast to the nearly vegetation free world.
Reader Comments (13)
Well, Helix2345, I never respond to articles either, but some of the things you said made me decide to. The problem with your post is you have this unfortunate idea that because a lot of people say the same thing, that the combined voices make their opinion the "right" one. Alas, in this world there is no such thing as a right or wrong opinion. Look up the word. In fact, I'm unsatisfied by the reviews you mention and comments like yours particularly because they all say the same thing. I was refreshed to hear a review that wasn't just a glowing treatise on the story and setting and how good the character customi.. ah..... blah blah... blah blah. I was happy to hear that somebody had a different opinion. It was actually interesting and unlike other reviews, it sounds like he was the only one who actually played the whole game. The only wrong opinion in this world is one without any facts to back it up and guess what, he has them. He might even have saved some poor shmuck $65 who was hoping to get Fallout 3 for his PS3 and didn't know about the myriad problems its with port to the PS3. Yeah, just pipe down buddy. Go read the same reviews 50 times and don't challenge yourself anymore, sounds like you can't handle it.
I think its important to note that everything I have seen indicates that the gameplay is very similar to Oblivion, with the exception of VATS. This isn't a problem, of course, because Oblivion was a great game. However, I am a little worried about the one thing I hated, and that was the system that caused all of the NPC encounters to match your level. While this allowed you to explore the whole map fairly easily, it also made encounters rather boring after awhile. What's worse is that if you managed to prevent yourself from leveling, you could improve your skills to a point where you would annihilate any challenge in front of you. It turned out that skills in Oblivion mattered 10x more than your level, except that you got cooler armor off of NPCs at higher level, but that didn't matter because all of the NPCs immediately upgraded to your armor and weapons as well. I have heard that they are handling it differently in Fallout, and I sincerely hope so. That feature had promise, but ultimately I couldn't play through more than two characters without being bored. It would be annoying to get Power Armor and a Plasma Rifle and be faced with common random encounter brigands with Power Armor and Chain Guns.
What a whiny article. You complained about the most menial things. You didn't discuss some of the finer things that most every other outlet has praised it for: the conversations and moralistic decisions the game presents; the incredible amount of character customization that encourages unique choice and replayability; how much fun the combat is (I have played a few hours so far and it is fantastic); the sheer amount of things to do, and the diversity in the execution of how you do those things, among a lot of other content. You really complained far too much about a game that has a lot more going for it than a few combat system gripes; and by the way, I find no issue in hitting targets -- just because you aren't good at aiming doesn't make the system broken. I rarely respond to things like this, but you just straight up wrote a poor article and hardly reviewed the game. It was almost like listening to a pessimistic child who had pre-determined that they were going to hate playing it. Terrible, ill-informed and flat out wrong review. Every other media outlet agrees with me too.