Fallout 3 Review

A lot to do translates to a lot of ambivalence.

The Capital Wasteland. There is a lot more where this came from.

Most recently, I browsed all those games I bought on sale around the holidays, and I chose to play Fallout 3, a rather well-acclaimed game that a number of my friends had wholeheartedly recommended to me. Right before that, though, I had played The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, so this provided an almost jarring foray into older territory. Fallout 3 promised me a rich landscape of exploration and unconventional role-playing game fun, and while I will admit I got a lot of the former, the fun was questionable.

The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland located in the Metro area in and around Washington DC. However, it becomes immediately obvious that this world is not our own; the 50's aesthetic behind the "World of Tomorrow" rings through all the technology and product advertising despite literally taking place in the future. The land is ravaged by a nuclear attack brought on by the Chinese 200 years before, and the "lucky" citizens were shielded from it by hiding in Vault-Tec brand underground vaults. You are born in one of these vaults, and the game uses your childhood as an innovative way to introduce character customization. Sadly, even at birth, things look grim when the character model designer can only yield a high percentage of ridiculous-looking human beings. I managed to scrape the barrel and make The Lone Wanderer look passable, but those looking to rummage through The Capital Wasteland with their eyes extending to wild proportions will find no trouble realizing those dreams. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the landscape, especially around sunrise and sundown, has some awe-inspiring visuals to complement your experience.

Trust me. He is about to hug you.

A series of events cause you to leave your Vault, and from there the game opens up its entire world to you. To its credit and its downfall, Fallout 3 allows you to travel unfettered across the landscape limited only by your ability to fight off the enemies you encounter. I don't believe I have encountered any other open-world game that was this accessible from the get-go, allowing the player to abandon the main storyline in pursuit of all the gameplay he or she could desire. This may be a dissenting opinion, but the fact that the game does not encourage you to return to the story about why you left the vault is a little disappointing, especially because the events that unfold are reasonably well-written. In fact, they culminate in two memorable final quests, which make all the sidequests offered by the game seem way bland in comparison.

Delving into the emptiness of the wasteland will certainly net you some intriguing meetings with peculiar characters. Every person who manages to survive in the irradiated land is completely odd, but in their eccentricities, the writers of the game convey many relatable themes by pushing wild human archetypes. What quickly becomes apparent, though, is that every character has a foil, and the game's karma system is laid out for you – nearly every quest you finish can be completed with a good or evil action. Each path has its own rewards (and achievements), but it is apparent that these choices you make could have been so much more given that life is not so binary.

The VATS mechanic at work. Or a super mutant with questionable accessories. You choose.

The mechanics that ultimately put you face-to-face with these people and situations are a satisfying mix of unique and status quo. The game plays like a first-person shooter in many regards, though the result of any gunshot is still a statistics game.Weapons come in multiple classes – small guns, big guns, melee, unarmed, and energy – and you have the ability to increase your proclivity with your favorite weapon type each time you level up. The game's most useful battle feature, to me, ended up being the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which will pause the action and let you attempt to shoot specific body parts on enemies of your choosing. Fueled by a modicum of action points, the VATS definitely helps the lesser players to level the playing field, and perks you receive at each level up your chances of making successful shots and even recharging your action points after a kill. If you're into firefights, though, don't expect to rely on VATS beyond an occasional open window to take a clear shot.

Alongside the weapons and targeting system are two approaches to doing your dirty work. The game sets up scenarios for and rewards both aggressive and sneaky tactics, of which I chose the latter. There are ways to improve how well you do with both, and if you poke around and level enough, many of your encounters will become a breeze. I will note, though, that sneaking around takes a significantly larger amount of time, but the payoff is saving tons of ammo and headache. The difference between attacking an enemy when you're hidden and when you've been detected is equivalent to the difference between smashing an egg or a rock with your bare hand. In order to manage your inventory, the game forgoes a typical menu interface for the PIP-Boy 3000, a wrist-worn computer system given to all vault citizens. It serves the same purpose, but it is hard to complain about adding gravitas to your inventory and quest-tracking system, something few games bother to make sense of.

The game itself is not so linear.

Despite all these refreshing systems and interfaces, the fact is that straying from the main path yields the player an uneven level of reward. Yes, you will find money (Nuka-Cola bottle caps), loot, and weapons a plenty, and you will level rather quickly in the process, but these itemized rewards do not drive the player to persist like a game with more focus or encouragement. For every unique person you'll meet or hamlet you'll save/destroy, there are five other locations on the map, be them buildings or Metro stations, where you'll kill everything and gain nothing fulfilling from the experience. Although the slow-motion portrayal of an enemy's head exploding with a well-placed gunshot never got old, the amount of them I performed to inevitably meet no one and accomplish nothing wore heavily on my will. I ended up focusing on the main storyline when I could not find it in me any more to explore the wasteland. Even the awe from seeing the war-torn famous US landmarks was diminished as soon as I had to explore them. If the game craftily compelled you to return to the story on occasion and offered a handful more scripted events, I think the game would have felt more rewarding and captivating throughout.

Marring an already shoddy presentation are Bethesda Software's all-too-famous glitches. You will witness it all – people and enemies slipping below the ground, enemies walking endlessly into each other without realizing it, invisible objects and NPCs, fallen enemies that just bounce around ad infinitum, models collapsing in on themselves, and even an irritating glitch that prevents you from obtaining a storyline achievement if you walked into the wrong building beforehand. The games also froze on me many times, but admittedly, it is not optimized for Windows 7, my current OS. Although many of these glitches are almost comically characteristic of a Bethesda game, they prevent total immersion. You will always be aware that you are playing with software, and the borders of your monitor never dissolve.

I'm sure someone in the bride's party can explain why she is holding a butcher knife.

The question of whether Fallout 3 is equivalent to the sum of its parts depends on the mathematician. Although the game gives you so much to do, it is tantamount to eating an entire box of cookies. It is a bloated experience, and doing so much over the course of it lessens its sweetness. If you are in it for the killing and the loot, you will ultimately love Fallout 3. If you'd like the writers of a game to reward your time with significantly more unique situations, characters, events, and environments, you are better off looking elsewhere.

Note: Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition is currently on sale for $14.99 on Steam until August 6th.

Fallout 3 images taken from Steam's store page and my own screenshots taken through Steam.