Fallout 3 Review

The Apocalypse is a Pretty Big Place
by Brian

I know I'm not going to touch on a fraction of everything you can do in Fallout 3 in this review. But unless your obsessive-compulsive tendencies border on Rain Man-esque, you won't touch on a fraction of everything you can do in Fallout 3 in a single playthrough. Like Grand Theft Auto IV before it, Bethesda's latest masterpiece eschews the last-generation notion that bigger is always better in favor of focusing on density. GTA4 offers less real estate than the sprawling GTA: San Andreas, but there's a new attention to verticality and packing in activities per square inch. In San Andreas, murdering a motorcyclist, stealing his hog, and driving from Los Santos all the way across the map to San Fierro took nearly seventeen days of real-time traveling (or at least, that's what it felt like), but there wasn't much to do in the spaces between cities. GTA4 didn't offer a lot of wide open spaces and rolling hills, but it tried its best to make sure you never grew bored commuting from place to place. Fallout 3 takes the same approach to its predecessor's design. And no, I'm not talking about Fallout 2.

"Oblivion with guns." That's the Twitter-friendly tagline often used to describe the Fallout 3 experience, and it's true. The post-nuclear retro '50s wasteland, sardonic humor, and intuitive character leveling system of the original Interplay classics are all intact in Fallout 3, but the game itself feels like last Elder Scrolls game with a new skin. And speaking as a fan of Oblivion, this is a great thing. As much as I love Fallout and Fallout 2, I don't at all miss the click-heavy top-down perspective. For one thing, it just doesn't work with a console's control setup. For another, games should evolve just like the irradiated mutants you'll find roaming about the Capital Wasteland.

Fallout 3's Oblivion-esque first-person perspective and heavy emphasis on exploration makes for a more immersive experience than anything else I've played in the last year. You begin the game literally as a newborn, choosing whether the delivery room doctor tells your parents that you're a boy or a girl, then proceeding to customize your appearance by way of a computer simulation of what baby you will look like all grown up. The first half hour or so of gameplay follows you through your toddler and teen years, grounding you in the skewed reality of this world while teaching you the ins and outs of controlling your character. But when you finally step out of your underground vault and set out to find your missing father somewhere in the ruins of a bombed-out Washington D.C., nothing can really prepare you for the scope of this universe.

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Great games are built around memorable moments. Chances are, you won't come out the other side of Final Fantasy VII without remembering the death of Aeris, just like you won't finish the original Metal Gear without having "I feel asleep" branded on your brain. (Okay, so one of those is a little more powerful than the other.) Fallout 3 is chock full of these moments, both large and small, but the first for me was the bloom of light that fades as your eyes adjust to the sun-drenched outside world for the first time. When you finally escape your vault, you'll find yourself at the top of a rocky hill looking down on the ruins of a suburb below. Of course you'll be impressed by the visuals. Fallout 3 is built on a version of the Oblivion engine, but it looks even better. Sure, it's a junk-strewn wasteland, but unlike Amy Winehouse's face, this junk-strewn wasteland is still beautiful.

See what happens when you leave paint cans near the water heater?

Aside from the technical impressiveness of the graphics, though, you'll be overwhelmed by the attention to detail. Everywhere you look there are signs of decimated civilization, from rusted out shells of old cars to empty houses with the toys still resting on the kids' bedroom shelves. Every location--a ramshackle down built around an undetonated nuclear bomb, a repurposed luxury hotel, a docked aircraft carrier converted into a bustling city, the creepy remains of the Jefferson Memorial--looks hand-crafted from corrugated tin, moldy tires, and whatever people could use to build. The closer you look, the more you find.

It's this feeling of infinite discovery (as opposed to "Infinite Undiscovery", a phrase that means nothing other than "disappointing sales") is just one more reason why that first post-vault moment is so impressive. Looking out on the horizon, you can see what's left of the Washington, D.C. mall, with the Washington Monument still barely pointing skyward. Your view stretches for what looks like miles, but there's always a promise of something to explore in the distance, with a million distractions between. Again, Bethesda has embraced density over size. The map isn't as big as Oblivion's, but there's much more to find.

Fallout 3's combat system is another huge improvement over its predecessor. Fighting in the Elder Scrolls games always seemed like an exercise in button pushing, but not much more. You'd swing your sword at an enemy, but the animation would never really change, and you didn't feel any feedback other than the occasional controller rumble. Fallout 3, on the other hand, is simply visceral. There are a huge number of weapons available, and all of them work perfectly. If you want to play the game as a first person shooter, you're certainly able to. Your success with hits will be determined by your character's level and stats, but the mechanics of point and shoot will be familiar to anyone comfortable p0wning 12-year-olds in Halo. If you don't take advantage of the V.A.T.S. system, though, you're missing out on some of the best fun of the game. Short for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, V.A.T.S. basically works as an attack queue. When in range of an enemy, you can tap the V.A.T.S. button and stop time. You'll be able to target specific limbs in a series of shots using your accumulated Action Points. You'll be given a percentage chance of a successful hit for each shot, which is obviously determined by your character's stats at that point, the distance from your target, the type of weapon you're using, and whatever obstructions are between you and your enemy. With your moves queued up, you'll exit V.A.T.S. and watch a slow motion movie of the violence you've inflicted. With enough AP, it's possible to pull off fancy maneuvers like shooting the Gatling gun out of a muscle-bound Super Mutants' paws, popping a cap in his knee to keep him from running, and topping it off with a skull-exploding headshot. It's convenient, hilariously gory, and incredibly fun.

Maybe he just wants to talk.

The rest of the game mechanics primarily involve bartering and and chatting with NPCs. While making your way the only way you know how, perhaps doing a little more than the law will allow, you'll constantly be on the lookout for items you can scavenge from the wasteland and sell to merchants and traders throughout the game. When you find yourself digging through garbage bins for sellable goods, you might mistake Fallout 3 for a hobo simulator, but all the foraging really drives home the idea that in this world, you have to scrape by to survive. This feeling of desperation provides some interesting moral challenges along the way. Can you stomach nuking an entire town for the promise of some much-needed bottlecaps to buy new weapons, ammo, and armor? You'll definitely have to think about it.

The depth of NPC interactions lends another level of immersion and moral ambiguity to the game. Unlike in Oblivion, the character models don't look like porridge vomit in Fallout 3. And you won't hear the same six voice actors over and over. Through the strength of the writing and acting, nearly everyone you encounter is a fully-formed character with some motivation and a life outside providing you with quests. When you're offered the chance of destroying a town for money early in the game, you'll not only have to weigh the benefit of the cash. You'll also have to decide whether you can murder the manically friendly shopkeeper you've come to really like.

Sadly, these two Super Mutants will die before their love is known.

I only have two criticisms of Fallout 3, and they're minor. Yes, scavenging for survival adds another level of immersion, but money is perhaps a little too hard to come by--especially early in the game. Consequently, you might find yourself in a low ammo situation more often than you'd like. Depending on your choices of which quests to take on, this may or may not affect your particular game. I was desperate for shotgun shells on my first playthrough, but I never had that kind of trouble the second time around. Of course, that may have been because my second character was an evil S.O.B. willing to blow the head off of anyone for a little bit of cash. And then blow the head off whoever gave her cash. Good times...

My second gripe has to do with recycled level designs. The world of Fallout 3 is huge and open, so it's no surprise that a few corners had to be cut just to save space. Still, it tends to take you out of the game when you find yourself in identical looking locations once too often. It sort of makes sense that the sterilized retro '50s suburban houses will all have a similar floor plan, but the number of times you have to make your way from place to place via rotted out subway tunnels just drives home the fact that all of them pretty much look the same. It's not a game killer by any means, but you might find yourself fast traveling from one location to another just to avoid another slog through a subway tunnel.

The Game

You must buy Fallout 3. I don't care what system you play it on, it's the best game of 2008 and one you'll keep coming back to for years. And even then, it's unlikely you'll discover all of its secrets. I played well over forty hours before completing the main quest in my first playthrough, but in my second time around, I stumbled upon a fight between two would-be superheroes in a town I'd never even visited before. Like Christopher Walken's basement, Fallout 3 is full of horribly wonderful surprises. (9.5/10)

The Time

Fallout 3 is huge. The ability to save anywhere and anytime you like makes it entirely possible to play for small chunks at a time, but Washington, D.C. might really be a nuclear wasteland by the time you're through. (5/10)

The Verdict

Can you tell I love this game? Because I do. Buy it or the terrorists win.