Fallout 3 Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on December 2nd, 2008

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Maybe it's the voice acting of Liam Neesen, Ron Perlman or Malcom McDowell. Maybe it's the vastness, variety and realism of the world the game plants you in. Whatever it is, Fallout 3 is a game that you want to play again, right after you get started. There are so many different ways to play the game and to handle every situation, that it's hard to recall a game in recent memory that creates the kind of replayability that Fallout 3 does.

In the looks department Fallout 3 manages to make good use of Oblivions engine while sprucing it up a bit. There's also far more detail in Fallout than was to be found in Oblivion. Characters still look terribly unrealistic though, and when seen up close, they have a tendency to ice skate around the Capital Wastelands. Other than the characters, the graphics are amazing to behold with almost no load times other than those between areas. The day / night cycle is beautifully done with the sight of the rising sun as you travel through a destroyed and ravaged Washington DC being one of the outstanding moments in the game.

Obviously, this is a fair bit different from the previous Fallout games, which took place on the West Coast and in a very different third person isometric perspective. Fallout 3 moves the action over a few thousand miles and into a first person perspective. While both of these changes seem like they'd be a risk, they both actually work out very well. The detail given to the graphics, while they definitely take liberty as to what would actually still be standing after a nuclear war, is astounding; and the first person view actually makes everything seem almost too realistic in its destruction. While I still feel that Fallout can work as a good third person game, the first person view does work well for how Bethesda wanted to show the world.

The character leveling system in this game is very similar to that seen in past Bethesda games. Attributes are easy enough to track as a character's level increases, consisting of the usual RPG fare of Strength, Charisma, Agility, and so on. The skills assignment, though, lacks a perceivable system. It is just a listing of character improvements that provide permanent boosts to various root skills, defensive abilities or targeting additional damage to specific enemies. Unfortunately, the list lacks any type of organization. As your character levels, new skills open to you, and so the list just gets longer. Organizing it into sections such as Defensive, Offensive, Survival Skills and Attribute Boosts would have gone a long way toward making it easier to use. Skills and attributes are also increased through the use of various forms of clothing and medications, many of which are addictive. The obvious drawback of continual use of medications is withdrawal, which is counter-productive, as it takes away from your character stats.

So we've made the jump into the third dimension. The role-playing is there, the combat is... sort of there, and the setting is still as depressing and barren as ever. But is it Fallout? That's a toughie. The Brotherhood of Steel and The Enclave are still duking it out, drugs are still all over The Wasteland, and there's enough 50's iconography for an episode of Leave It To Beaver. However, the mood of the game has definitely changed. While the first two games were littered with black humor and pop culture references, Fallout 3 feels a little more solemn. As far as atmosphere goes, it's closer to Bioshock than say, The Road Warrior and its gung-ho attitude towards the apocalypse.

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