Fallout 3 Review
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Surprisingly, Fallout 3 has far fewer quests than Oblivion, but it compensates for this deficit by making its locations far more interesting to explore. If you played Oblivion, then you might remember that it included a bunch of oblivion gates and elven ruins that were all about the same. Fallout 3, meanwhile, has monuments, museums, libraries, metro stations, and more to explore, and not only are they all a little bit different, they also often have story elements involved. For example, early in the game you can visit a school where raiders are hiding out. The raiders figured that they could dig from the basement of the school to reach a nearby vault, but in the process they disturbed some giant ants. So when you get to the school you have to fight raiders and giant ants, and you can see the start of the tunnel. The quests themselves are sometimes fun and sometimes not. Most of the quests involve going somewhere and killing anything that gets in your way, and that gets old after a while, especially when the trip involves going through a bunch of metro stations, but other quests are more original. For example, at one point you meet a lady who has a huge Nuka-Cola collection, and she asks you to help her complete it. At another point you meet a shopkeeper who is putting together a wasteland survival guide, and she asks you to experience things (such as getting severe radiation poisoning) so she can write about them. Finally, a historian asks you to scavenge the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives, and in the process you also find the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Bethesda made good use of the D.C. area, and I'm guessing the city is even more fun to explore if (unlike me) you actually know something about it.
Another nice thing about the quests is that you're always given multiple ways to solve them. Usually, there are (good) ways versus (evil) ways to wrap things up, such as when you visit the town of Megaton and discover that it was built around a live nuclear warhead. The people of the town obviously want you to disarm the bomb, but some outside interests would rather see it detonated. So which option do you choose? There are also sometimes stealthy or diplomatic ways to deal with issues, and every so often you have to make a karma-neutral choice, such as with the lady with the Nuka-Cola collection. For that quest you can turn in the items directly to the lady for one reward, or you can give them to her boyfriend (so he looks better in her eyes) and get a different reward.
If Fallout 3's gameplay has a problem, it's with repetition. There are only about 50 types of weapons available in the game, and a whole slew of them are lame melee weapons like tire irons and lead pipes. There also aren't many types of enemies. There are four types of supermutants, three types of ghouls, one type of raider, six types of robots, and so forth, which might sound like a lot if you add them all up, but you encounter most of them well before the halfway point in the game, and after that it's just a matter of killing the same things over and over again with the same weapons. Plus, since Fallout 3 features very little level scaling, these repetitive battles get easier as the game goes on, making them even more boring than they would be otherwise (though, for what it's worth, no level scaling also means that there aren't several different variations of each major item like in Oblivion). For Fallout 3 to stay entertaining for a full 100 hours (which is how much time I estimate you could spend exploring all of the locations), Bethesda really needed to double or triple the number of unique enemies, especially the higher level opponents.
Sound
I'm not much of a judge of music, so I won't comment on Fallout 3's soundtrack here. What I'll talk about instead is the voice acting. Bethesda had a lot of problems with the voice acting in Oblivion, starting with having about three guys do all of the random peasant voices, and ending with advertising that they had Patrick Stewart in the cast, and then killing off his character in the first five minutes. Fallout 3 doesn't have these problems. Bethesda must have doubled or tripled the number of actors in the cast, so you hardly ever notice different people with the same voice, and the big name actors they recruited, Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell, actually play a role for the majority of the campaign. Plus, Ron Perlman is back as the voice of the narrator (he gets to say (war never changes) about five times), and the other actors do a competent job, making Fallout 3 much more pleasant to listen to than Oblivion.
