Played on:
Windows
Xbox 360
Somewhere around the time I got to the National Mall, that area in Washington, D.C. between the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and found it to be a war zone, I realized that Fallout 3 is the best game Bethesda Softworks has ever made. Unlike their past RPGs, this one takes a while to really get into. After the better part of two days, I can emerge from my own personal vault - one which I seem to have made my living room out of - and say that Fallout 3 is brilliant.
It's not just the unique post-apocalyptic setting or the unsurpassed bleakness of tone that is always hovering but never crushing your will to play. Nor is it the wonderful slow-motion beheadings and gore that the game's unique V.A.T.S. system delivers. It's not the large number of weapons or armor, or skills or interesting perks, or fully first person shooter-style combat. It's the way you can get lost in this game and suddenly realize it got dark outside while you weren't noticing, or for me, also got light outside as well. Only the very best games can turn off my internal clock, make me ignore the stuff I need to do around the house, and just suck me in, but that's exactly what Fallout 3 has done.
Striking out on its own
Fallout 3 is made by the team that had just finished creating Oblivion, an RPG that does have a lot in common with their latest game. But what is shared between the two games is not damaging to the atmosphere, fun, or action in Fallout 3, nor does it diminish the qualities that made the original games so fun: making drastic choices that affect the landscape as well as the people of the Capital Wasteland, as the game's outskirts of Washington D.C. are called. Many of these choices are limited by your character's abilities, so choose wisely when you start the game and don't be afraid to tinker with every stat, skill, and perk. Be aware of your surroundings, as the attention to detail in Fallout 3 must be matched by your own meticulousness if you really want to get the best out of it. You might not want to open up every filing cabinet in the D.C. area after several hours of play, but do hazard a look at that nearby safe or computer to see if there's something interesting, and make sure to explore every room in a building to see if you missed anything.
Either way, this is not a perfect mimicry of the first two games' style; the move to first/third person view and real-time combat are the proof that this can't possibly be a "perfect sequel" to the first two games, but just because Super Mario Bros. 3 was great, doesn't mean that it had to stay 2D forever. Same thing here. Of course, the question of whether this game is 100% accurate to its past is largely irrelevant, since most people who are picking up a copy of Fallout 3 haven't even seen the first two games. They'll judge the game on today's standards where people care a bit less about the depth of dialog trees and a bit more about the voice acting and graphics. And in that light, it's a shining success.
From the womb to the wasteland
Fallout 3 revolves around finding and helping your character's father who raised you in the safety of Vault 101. It starts with what I think is possibly the only first-person birth I've ever seen in a game; mom dies shortly afterwards, leaving James to raise you through a few whirlwind sequences of childhood that serve a bit as the game's introduction and tutorial. When he leaves all of a sudden after your 19th birthday and you are forced to follow him, the door opens and you find yourself staring out at the bleakest landscape seen in a video game in years.
It's an interesting contrast: Oblivion started in a dank dungeon that players were glad to get out of, and a picturesque and serene world of bright colors and swaying grass and trees unfolded before them. Here, you step out of one small piece of civilization to look upon a kind of destruction that you may find yourself uneasy exploring for a good many hours before you become accustomed to it. That's what it was like for me, and maybe my acclimation to the wasteland, which took hours, was when I stopped avoiding the open spaces and started really exploring on my own. And once you get into doing that, it turns out it's not as tough as it looked - while you can't fast-travel to any location without walking there on foot first, the ability to quickly move between locations once you've visited them the first time makes travel convenient but doesn't hold your hand.
Your travels through the Wastes are often much more stressful than the wandering of green pastures in Oblivion. The pockets of humanity here will just as soon shoot you dead over a few careless words as they would give you a quest, and you must always keep in mind the question: "What if I just shot this idiot in the face?" Without a true law system in Fallout 3, removing the head of some trader just because you want the stuff that he's got in stock is much more of a viable choice than most RPGs allow. No, you can't just get into a gunfight with someone in the shantytown of Megaton without some retaliation by the residents, but you can get away with murder very often, especially out in the wastes, and not break any of the game's quests or your progress towards the inevitable end.
Exploding heads and flying body parts
It's not just the atmosphere of trashed suburbs and busted domes of Capitol buildings that makes this game great: it's the fighting, too. Everything plays out like a first- or third-person shooter, but the twist is V.A.T.S., a system where you can pop into a paused mode and pick out your enemy's body parts with enhanced precision to shoot. Smaller guns get more shots off with your limited number of V.A.T.S. action points, and the points will regenerate once you've used them and gone back into real-time combat. It's not a replacement for first-person action, but it is a wonderful complement to it, and the excellent action cameras often resemble games like Max Payne or even movies like The Matrix. That's not to say you fight in slow motion, but once you've picked your move in V.A.T.S., the action then automatically plays out just like it and you're back to real-time fighting when you're done.
