Welcome to the Tropical Wasteland of Ghouls and Super Mutants!
Fallout 3 is one of those games that, at first, it seems pretty bad. You’re thrown out of a vagina and you begin life in the vault. Now, you don’t really get the “full-experience” of life in the vault because you go from around age 1 or 2 to age 10, then 16, and finally 18. You’re waked up to find your dad has escaped from the vault and you have to go find him! This is when you’re introduced to arguably Fallout’s greatest pro, the Wasteland.
It is actually quite intimidating knowing that this possibly could’ve happened to Washington D.C. The environment looks nice but you can run into a quite a few gritty, undetailed looking textures but most are minor like rocks but I have saw the outside walls of Megaton glitch up on me. Now at this point in the game (1 and a half playthroughs in) I’ve yet to see a Super Mutant resembling Abe Lincoln—not for sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing.
One thing you can tell Bethesda really worked on is the Good/Bad Karma choices in the game. And it clearly shows. All of them are detailed and have their own perks and disadvantages. Growing through the game purely evil may be funner but if you’re like me, you want to go through making choices you’d make in real life—granted at the end of my play-through I was “Very-Evil,” it was totally unintentional I swear! Before I close this part out, I just want to say Project Purity.
The writing is excellent and I love how they kind of give you hints at what it really is throughout the game. I’m not too fond of going around yelling at people saying “Yo, you seen my Daddy?” (Although that’s my part-time job) this actually pulls it off, I don’t know how but it did.
There’s quite a few bit of skills to be upgraded. I do have a gripe about some of them, though. Some of them are pretty much pointless. I mean, when I completed the game my Barter was 22 and I’m half-way through the game and its 20, I’m sorry to all the hardcore Barter leetest’s (or should I say: 1337) out there but that skill really isn’t needed at all. Now there’s quite a few perks like that also but I spent enough time yelling about bad skills and c’mon Fallout 3 has the Bloody Mess perk, obviously the perks are amazing!
The game-play sadly just doesn’t make it (Kind of like how Tokyochicken doesn’t make it) having to wonder through the wasteland to a certain spot then re-do that and go to some other spot isn’t fun. The combat isn’t too spicy either. The V.A.T.S. system is great and can make for some fun Mole Rat head deaths but when you’re fighting out of that, it feels like garbage. And really, if there was no V.A.T.S this game would almost be unplayable because of the combat.
Fallout 3 achieves what it’s supposed to but doesn’t do more than that. That’s not to say this game isn’t a success, it clearly is, combining great storytelling, a wonderful wasteland, and tons of re-play value makes Fallout 3 one of those games you just have to try out.
