Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is a tough game for me to grade.  At times I was blown away and immersed in the world, and at times I was frustrated with the shooting mechanics, and item management.  Likewise, at times the world was exciting and immersive, wandering into an abandoned, post-apocalyptic supermarket, or stumbling upon something interesting, but often I was bored with the drab, destroyed environments.  After searching through my 20th destroyed building, I started wishing for some environments that were not destroyed.

Another strength of the game is the VATS system, which essentially allows you to pause the action and take aim at and shoot specific body parts on your enemies and have a higher degree of accuracy.  However, the shooting outside of VATS is horrid.  Really horrid.  It's completely unsatisfying to shoot at your enemies and have your bullets go flying around them when your reticule is aimed directly at their head.  Another flaw with the shooting mechanic is that the further away you are, the less likely you are to hit your enemy.  That makes logical sense, but it also makes for a frustrating and unsatisfying game.  I found that I had to run up close to my enemies (because you constantly run out of bullets, so wasting them is a bad idea) meanwhile they would cut me to shreds as I got close enough to ensure that I'd actually hit them when I shot them. 

So I guess you could say the game left me disappointed. I enjoyed the world, did not enjoy the combat, enjoyed exploring, but got bored with the lack of variety in the environments, liked VATS, did not like the shooting outside of VATS etc...

Technically this game is also a mess.  Far too often there is screen tearing, including a ton at the very end of the game in a closed in, unimpressive space, where I could see no reason why there'd be tearing because again nothing impressive graphically was going on.  Everything looks decent most of the time, but there are a lot of low res textures, clipping, texture pop in, and bugs.  For instance at the end of the game I entered a room, and immediately it triggered a conversation with another person, only I couldn't see them because one of my party members was standing in the same spot as me, so I was looking at the inside of his shoulder for the whole conversation.  Again, that was one of the very last conversations of the game, and I was stuck staring at the unfinished inside of one of my party members.  Lame.

I still played through the whole game because I enjoyed the story and the side stories, as well as exploring the world.  I did find it tedious at times though, and I set the game aside for a week here and there when I would hit a wall.  Still, the scope of the world, and the ambitious game are worth checking out.  Just be warned that it's not a perfect experience.  An example of a better way to handle shooting in an RPG where you get better and more accurate over time is Mass Effect.  At the beginning the combat in Mass Effect is equally frustrating because your bullets miss constantly, but eventually you level up enough where you can shoot people from a decent distance away.  In Fallout 3, that never happens, and that ultimately makes the main shooting mechanic feel frustrating and not fun.  Not accurate = not fun.

Reading through this, it sounds like I'm complaining a lot, and I am, but that's because I did enjoy the game, I just felt it could have been so much better with a little polish, and a more satisfying shooting mechanic.  It's still fun, and there's a MOUNTAIN of content here, so you get a tremendous value for you dollar.  If the game sounds interesting to you, you should give it a try.