Now it's out in the wild, we know. On the surface, Fallout 3 is essentially Oblivion with guns, a lot of big bombs and a not-so-lush new game world. Utilising both the story and premise of Interplay's point and click adventures Fallout 1 and 2, combined with the fine base of the aforementioned Oblivion, at a first glance Fallout 3 appears as something of a sidestep in the genre. For despite the huge expanse available to roam at will and the reams of new dialogue, every step of the way there's a striking resemblance to its spiritual predecessor. So, if you didn't connect in any way with Oblivion, you might do better looking elsewhere.
Perhaps the most comparable moment between the games is that in which the player leaves their respective start-point for the first time. In Oblivion it's the Imperial Sewers; this time around, it's Vault 101 - a hiding spot in which you have been taking refuge from the raging nuclear destruction which has been taking place for your entire life.
The two games start in a remarkably similar way. Lucky then, that even the second take is bloody brilliant.
Once you're past forging your character with the wealth of customisation options and the introductory elements of the story, you're thrust into the open - free to set off in whatever direction you please. The wasteland is a picture of flawed beauty. There are beautiful vistas in nearly all directions when traversing the plains - huge draw distances and some stunning skyboxes manage to make the decimated Washington enticing, even inviting.
The game is also supplied with some excellent audio - each gun has its own recognisable thunk, and there's some blood-curdling sounds accompanying bullets to flesh. Since Oblivion, the cast of voice actors has been expanded such that the issue of the same voices being discernible time and time again stands no longer.
With the sum of these elements, Fallout 3 is a playground for you to delve into. Even aside from the main story quests, there are dozens and dozens of areas and situations to be stumbled upon.
Wandering upon the plains with no specific direction or plans, we stumbled across a town populated by... well, cannibals. It was only after some dialogue and further investigating that we discovered so, and took it upon ourselves to rid the place of the culprits with bullets to each respective brain.
The beauty here lies in that this wasn't a proper mission, or even a designated side quest. If we wanted to, we might've left the town untouched. We might not have even stumbled across the town at all on another occasion.
Within lies the fact that essentially every player of the game will have a different experience. It would probably be impossible to find someone who has experienced the same things that you have during your time on the wastes.
Fundamentally, the base of the game is not so different from Oblivion. The same efficient control scheme has been carried over. The inventory and quest book, now fused into the Pip-Boy 3000 bound to your wrist, remain unchanged save for a few additions such as the new health status screen which allows you to heal individual parts of your character's body, since any damage inflicted is specific to different limbs.
An interesting feature of the game is the Karma system. Such systems have been popping up in RPGs for a while now, and Fallout 3 possesses one of the best we've seen. It recognises your actions as either good or bad - offering clean water (or not) to the homeless, for example - and adjusts your character's future accordingly, ultimately affecting how the game will end. From a technical standpoint, it's a masterful feat. Since practically everything, situationally, can change - such as characters dying and even towns being wiped off the map - the world is as dynamic as we've ever seen in a video game. NPCs will react differently depending on your past actions and decisions, resulting in a different experience every time you play.
Luckily, there's a saving grace here. It's called VATs, and it's essentially a pause button. Whilst in the VATs screen, you can pick individual body parts of your enemies to aim for. What makes this so well balanced with the real-time combat is that it's contextual: if you're far away your chance of hitting, as you would expect, is markably lower than if you were say, 5 feet away. And as it's of limited use, you'll be required to flick in and out of VATs, making for an extremely tactical combat system. Risk your bullets with a low hit chance, or take them on in real-time and trust your own hands? In a world where supplies and ammo are scarce, there's a lot of decisions to be made.
And it's the adventures to be found in situations such as finding that ammo in the first place that endear the Fallout 3 world to us. You could raid a supermarket, negotiate a trade or stumble across some other wanderers from whom you could steal some supplies. It's this depth in choice, the lack of structure and the sheer open-endedness of the game that draws you in, and it holds on even stronger than it grabs you. Simply, you could easily while away a hundred hours of your life in Fallout 3. The scale is colossal. If you wanted to complete everything on offer here, well... you probably couldn't. Much like a certain Bethesda game from four years ago, Fallout 3 is a title that sits comfortably amongst the most stellar of RPGs of the generation.
9/10
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