Fallout 3

Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland is a cruel and inhospitable place, fraught with danger. A nuclear armageddon has eradicated all but the most basic signs that this was once the capital of the USA. You might see some rubble that was once a house, now inhabited only by relics that were once a person's belongings,charred and rusted. A school building, its notice board still partly intact, serves as a home to a group of raiders. It's a terrible, dreary place where no one in their right mind would want to be. Yet I found myself drawn to that place, soaking up every ugly detail.

You first set sight on this wasteland when you leave the relatively safe confines of Vault 101, an underground shelter where people attempt to lead normal lives and uphold the values of a society that died along with most of Washington's population when the nuclear holocaust hit. Your father just left without telling you anything, and you set out to find him. It's hard not to be impressed when you trade the claustrophobic Vault for the sprawling wasteland, spreading in every direction. You're temporarily blinded by the sun, never having felt its light, and then there is naught but wasteland as far as the eye can see (which is far indeed in Fallout 3). And so begins your quest. Look for your father, wherever he may be.

Anyone who's played Oblivion, Bethesda's previous game, will tell you that that game was all about the side quests, and so too is Fallout 3. The main story takes you past some of the wasteland's highlights but skips many of them. You can play through the entire game without even stopping by the ruins of the White House, or Abe Lincoln's memorial, as I did. Fallout 3 is a game that gives back proportionally to what you put in it. The game is all about your interactions with the world and its inhabitants and the impact you choose to make on their lives, be it positive or negative. Some quests have very visual payoffs, others are much more subtle in nature. It may take the form of the devastation of an entire settlement, or a report by a radio disc jockey about how you found a new home for a young boy who lost his parents. While the main quest involves you going a lot of places and shooting a lot of people and creatures, the side quests often have more creative solutions, ending in several possible ways. Being a violent jerk, a greedy mercenary or a good samaritan is all viable, as you can shoot or talk your way out of quests in several ways. You can even outright lie to some NPCs about your mission progress and bypass some quests entirely, though the success of this may depend on your speech skill.

Fallout 3 being a role-playing game, it wouldn't be complete without character stats. A lot of it is similar to Oblivion. You pick some primary skills which get a small boost at the start of the game, and every time you level up you can distribute some more skill points across all categories, like Sneaking, Small Guns, Lockpicking and the like. I intended to make a sneaky character relying on melee, but I found out that sneaking is almost entirely useless and melee isn't the best option when you have to charge some raiders with guns standing 30 feet away from you, so the game is a little bit more limiting in the combat department than you might think. Fortunately, within a few levels I had compensated for this combat deficiency and I could fire a rifle with the best of them, so regardless of your starting skill set, you can still adapt your play style as you go.

The game looks like a first-person shooter, but the accuracy of your weapons is determined by your skills, so while player skill is still a factor, it is not really feasible to rely on your twitch gaming skills throughout the game, but this is where VATS comes in. In VATS mode, time freezes and you can select different body parts of your enemy to fire at, and the actions you selected then play out in slow motion. It looks really gratifying blowing a Super Mutant's head off in slow-mo. You only have a limited number of action points to spend in VATS though, but these regenerate fairly quickly, so using VATS, finding some cover or retreating for a while before popping VATS back on is perfectly viable. Your chance to hit a specific body part still relies on weapon skill, distance and line of sight though. I found combat to be satisfying when in VATS, but not so much when shooting enemies in real time. The gory death animations definitely make the weapons feel powerful and the action visceral.

Where Fallout 3 shines is its quest design and the general aesthetic of the Wasteland. As I said, it's an ugly, inhospitable place, but it's crafted with so much attention to detail it's almost unsettling. All around the wasteland you'll find places that were once everyday venues, like a diner, only to find corpses nailed to beds or human meat in refrigerators. I found an audio diary recorded by a woman who was, at that time, watching the nukes explode in the distance, acted out eerily well. It made my skin crawl and actually made me slightly emotional. It's one of the most immersive, well-realized settings I have experienced in a game. It feels, for lack of a better word, human.

Unfortunately, the game is not without its flaws. For better or worse, it's inherited a few of Oblivion's flaws, the most noticeable of which is the haphazard AI, especially for friendly NPC's. They can behave... erratic, at times. For instance, you might find everyone running around felling in terror for no discernable reason, but then you go and walk up to someone and they might face you and say "good morning" like nothing is going on. As it stands, this is pretty much the only thing holding the game back from total immersion, and it's a shame, as I found every other part of the game to be expertly crafted.

I can't speak for the console versions, but the PC version seems very well optimized. Playing on a Q6600 quad core, 2 GB of RAM and a Geforce 8800GT, I played with the settings on Very High and it ran mostly without a hitch, except on some very rare occasions in specific spots where the framerate would chug a little, and this was usually outside of combat. It also supports Live so you can just log in with your Live account and earn the achievements as on the XBOX 360.

Fallout 3 is a beautiful game. To use a cliché, more than the sum of its parts. Any of the disparate gameplay parts have been done elsewhere, and arguably better, but it's all bound together by the setting, the Wasteland, which is the real star of the show here, and its oppresive atmosphere will almost certainly grab you by the throat.