Fallout 3

I'm now on my second playthrough of Bethesda's marvelous Fallout 3. The first go took around 40 hours to complete the storyline, and it was at this point that I looked at the huge map of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that my adventures had taken me through and realised that I'd barely scratched the surface of things to see and do. So I loaded in my most recent auto-save and went exploring again, and having just finished a mammoth 5 hour session exploring just one building (and getting seriously spooked in the process) I thought I'd take a break and share my love for the game by reviewing it.

I've never played the previous Fallout titles but was familiar with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, the phrase 'Oblvion with guns' in a few previews got me interested, and just by reading the comprehensive 40-page manual that ships with the 360 version that's pretty much the impression you'll get if you've played Oblivion.

Your character is born in Vault 101, located in the environs of ex-Washington DC. Ex- because the world has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Your first few interractions are basic - set your initial gender, looks, stats and get to know the controls during a brilliant tutorial featuring your father (voiced by Liam Neeson). You'll go from baby to toddler to ten-year old to 16 year old and eventually progress into the main storyline - your father has left the Vault and everyone's after him, so you'll have to escape to try and track him down to find out what's going on.

Fallout 3's scenario is quite unique, although the year is 2277 the setting is an America that never moved on from the cultural norms of the 50s, right up until the nukes hit 200 years ago, 2077. So expect to see lots of beehive hairdos, art deco and get used to the greatest hits of the 1940s.

Exiting the vault is a glorious experience (enhanced by the fact that you can press Back on the controller to enter 'wait' mode), if you wait until 9am in the morning and then step outside you'll get the best impact of entering the Wasteland for the first time. From this moment on, just as with Oblivion, you can do whatever you wish. Play goodie or baddie or inbetween, follow the main quest diligently or just wander off in a random direction to find what's out there.

To survive you'll mostly have to fight, although if you boost your charisma, science, lockpicking or sneak skills there are usually alternative paths through every situation. Note that Fallout 3 isn't a true FPS, you won't last long lining up targets in your crosshairs and pulling the trigger because every shot takes into account distance, weapon condition, your own stats and of course lady luck. It's much easier to take advantage of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targetting System (VATS) which, if you have the Ability Points available, allows you to freeze the action, select a bodypart on your target and calculate your chances of success.

When VATS is active everything is slowed down - you can watch your bullets, missiles, nukes, frags and so on slam into your target and critical headshots will remove a head completely replete with all associated gore (the main reason Fallout 3 has an 18 rating, the other would be the frequent swearing, keep an eye out for the potty mouthed Mayor MacCready).

Enemies are varied, ranging from easy (Radroaches) to medium (Raiders) to all-out terrifying (Deathclaws). Inbetween you'll be up against feral ghouls, Mirelurkers, vicious dogs, various robotic types, anyone you manage to upset enough and of course the two main factions in the game (The Enclave, led by Malcolm MacDowell, and The Brotherhood), both of whom have some nice Power Armor variants that you'll be itching to use. (You need specialist training to use it though).

Your methods for dealing with enemies are more varied, choose from melee (sledgehammers, combat knives, tyre irons, knuckles, barehanded and so on), small arms using ballistic, plasma, dart and laser pistols, rifles, snipers, right up to the heavy weapons including the wonderful FatBoy which fires tactical nukes, handy for those moments when you come up against the most deadly Super Mutants.

Basic gameplay for explorer types consists of leaving your house (once you've earned one, which you can decorate, kit out with specialist labs, healing stations, use for storage, make your own weapons using any schematics found, display your collection of bobblehead toys collected or just pfaff around with your robotic butler), picking a direction and heading out.

Your arm-mounted Pip Boy keeps track of your quests, your map and locations, your health, your radiation levels, inventory, even allows you to pick up any broadcasting radio stations, some of which lead to further quests.

Health is managed by the application of various drugs either directly to a crippled body part or to the entire body. Radiation is managed by either keeping clear of it and only using clean food sources or catching a dose and using Rad-aways, visiting a local medic or popping back to your house which can have its own infirmary installed.

Your weapons and armor will degrade over time, but as you build up your repair ability you can repair them yourself on the go by combining similar types of gear which brings their damage/damage reduction back up to scratch, or you can get someone else to repair them for you, but that'll cost Bottlecaps, the ingame currency.

For quest fiends if you want to just blast through the main storyline (which involves purification on a number of different levels) you can do so, but note that the ending is absoloute, there's no more exploring afterwards. Fortunately you can load up your last autosave and step back outside before the main quest finishes if you want to be more completist.

For achievement fiends you're probably looking at 200 hours or so to get 1000/1000, although if you're following a guide meticulously and know your way around you'd probably be able to do it in 50 hours and one playthrough, but this would take a lot of karma micromanagement (you can be good, neutral or evil and there are achievements for all 3, and you can adjust your state using specific dialogue options, NPC turn-ins and actions).

For RPG fans, if you like your open world games then Fallout 3 is setting new standards. Locations (and you can use an Oblivion-esque 'fast travel' system to nip between them as long as there are no enemies nearby and you're not overencumbered) range from finding a few picnic tables, a shack or two (if they have a bed you can rest and heal up) to the underground system, multi-storeyed buildings replete with their own basements which lead to tunnels and caves which can also hook up with other areas. You'll be exploring factories, military bases, abandoned malls, the infamous Super Duper Mart (you'll get an aggressive welcome in most of these areas), raider camps, slaver towns, the fantastically huge Rivet City, you'll be tip-toeing through minefields, avoiding trip-wires, sniper fire, dodging missiles and keeping a wary eye out at all times for feral ghouls who are just after your flesh and are relentless in their pursuit.

In all these areas you'll find handy items, you can loot desks, toolboxes, filing cabinets, bodies, find recorded transcripts which you can play back through your Pip Boy, keys (one of the best lockpicking mini-games ever means you'll usually prefer to pick locks), and you can use a 'process of elimination' code-cracking system to hack terminals which can turn off deadly turrets or let you reprogram them, open safes, open up new areas for exploring and so on.

Everything from dented tin cans to medical items, motorcycle parts to engineering equipment, weapons, ammo, quest items, search high and low for items to use or sell to traders and you'll never find it all, there's just so much stuff.

Possibly the best thing to find are skillbooks. Everytime you gain a level you can increase stats in a choice of your areas. You have 7 'primary attributes' and 13 'secondary attributes'. Skillbooks boost these secondaries further by either 1 or 2 points depending on your perks, up to a maximum value of 100, as do Bobblehead toys (20 to collect which increase primary attributes by 1 and secondaries by 10, gotta catch 'em all!). There's a real challenge here to try and max out all your stats by the time you hit the level 20 cap, I'm not sure if it's possible but I'm scrambling about for those skillbooks and balancing my points distribution like crazy to see if it can be done.

Everytime you gain 2 levels you get to choose a Perk. Perks allow you to do things like increase a particular stat, raise your combat effectiveness in certain areas, make more skillpoints available each time you level up, and at end-game you get many interesting abilities - a deadly Mysterious Stranger can turn up during VATS to help you out, or you can get the Explorer perk that reveals all primary locations on your map in one go. There are so many perks to choose from that you can never get all of them at once on one character, which leads to replayability and experimentation.

As with Oblivion, Bethesda just can't seem to nail third person, it's handy for looking at the new armor or weapon you just equipped, but for the most part you'll be playing in first person. This isn't really a bad thing, it tends to add a great deal of immersion when you're exploring the cramped tunnels and ruined cities, or opening doors when you're not entirely sure what's on the other side of them, or dropping down through a hole in the floor into what you think is a cleared area but in fact you got your map slightly wrong and fall into a pit of ghouls, first person few can be incredibly spooky for these kinds of activities. Read more ›

Combine the forbidding dystopian atmosphere of Bioshock with the huge open-ended world of Oblivion and you have Fallout 3, one of the most satisfying games I have ever played.

Right from the beginning you will be amazed at the unique story telling aspects featuring you playing through the protagonist's childhood from baby to late-teens to stepping out of Vault 101, a place where no-one ever enters, and no-one ever leaves. Graphically, the game is stunning. Take one step outside the vault to see a vast, destroyed landscape of Washington D.C. in 2277 and you will appreciate the time and effort that went into making this game unusually beautiful for a post-apocalyptic theme. I have run into very few graphical glitches (the most serious of which was a car whose texture just would not render, no matter how many times I walked past it) which is a rare treat for modern day games. Guns and weaponry look fantastic and move fluently with each shot or swing. Baseball bats in particular look nice, showing off the grainy wooden texture impressively.

Gameplay is just unreal. You can do anything. Either follow the main quest, or don't. It's inevitably up to you whether you whether the protagonist kills a person for bottle caps (the currency of the game) or saves them for fewer caps yet possibly get help later in a quest. The world feels smaller than that of Oblivion, yet still large enough to be able give players near unlimited freedom.

The inclusion of the VATS system is very welcome, allowing you to pause the action for a bit and target an enemy's body part, shooting accurately at a Raider's head, for instance. Whether or not you hit the enemy's head is utterly dependent on your skills with the weapon you're using, your distance from the enemy, the accuracy of the weapon and your Luck rating. The overall success rate is indicated by a percent making VATS incredibly easy to use at the touch of a button. It's limited to Action Points (AP) which I find good, otherwise VATS would be too powerful and would make the game too easy.

Combat is very open ended. They have included pretty much every weapon that could come into your head. From a bog-standard 10mm pistol to a Chinese assault rifle, passing through a sawn off shotgun and ending with flamethrowers, miniguns and a mini nuke launcher, you'll find it hard to choose which one to take with you on a quest (as, like Oblivion, you're limited as to how much you can carry/loot) and that's just firearms. Melee weapons (if you're a more close quarters combatant) are varied in such a way it almost feels like Condemned. You can pick up baseball bats, lead pipes, knives, 2x4 with nails, tyre irons and the list goes on, each having its own personal statistic in terms of strength and condition (yes, your weapons wear out and break over time, including your guns).

The audio is powerful, supported by a very strong voice cast (you'll recognise a fair few voice actors from Oblivion), solid gun-shot audio and satisfying bullet-to-flesh sound. Music is also present, utilising you PIP-BOY 3000 (a device on your arm that tracks everything you need to know - and more) to pick up radio broadcasts from 2 radio stations (I personally whish the selection was larger), Enclave Radio, a never ending loop of presidential speeches with patriotic American marching band music, to a News Station hosted by Three Dog, a DJ who plays records that sound like they were from the 40's 50's, maybe earlier. Both fit incredibly well with the combat and overall theme, and so I applaud that.

Overall, this is a stunning game. I personally have been waiting for years for a game like this, and it's better than I dared imagine. 10/10, without a doubt, and VERY highly recommended.

This year has seen the release of many highly anticipated titles such as Gears of War 2, Fable 2, Battlefield: Bad Company, GTA 4, Dead Space and of course; Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2077, but not as you'd expect. Fallout 3 is set in a parallel universe where things are the same up until about the 1950's, which is where it all changed. In the Fallout universe, nuclear war broke out between the east and west and left the earth devastated.

In this post-apocalyptic universe you find yourself in an underground vault shielded from the radiation and key events in your childhood play out before you until your character becomes 16, when your father mysteriously leaves the vault (Vault 101) and you follow after him. This part of the game only lasts about half an hour and serves as a nice tutorial.

Upon exiting Vault 101 Fallout 3 certainly has the "WOW" factor. The plains of a post-nuclear Washington DC are set before you. You will find yourself looking around the local landscape a bit (which is very detailed and fun to explore) and then proceeding the the main quest (to find/save your father) or one of the many deep side quests.

The world in Fallout 3 is an "open-world", this means you can go anywhere and aren't restricted to pathways etc. (except for when in the capital of Washington -which is about 1/10 of the game world- where you are restricted a bit as many streets are blocked by rubble). As far as gameplay is concerned Fallout 3 is amazing, with the option of first or third person viewpoints and the ability to either play it like any other first person shooter or as a combination of first person shooting and use of the VATS system.

The VATS system is hard to explain, but lets say it involves limb-targeting and gory close-ups. Gore in general is not something that Fallout 3 is a stranger to.

To sum up:
Graphics: 9/10 Overall incredible, some minor glitches.
Gameplay: 8/10 Very good in general, lets you use a variety of tactics.
Presentation: 10/10 Whilst bleak, the Fallout Universe is lightened with plenty of dark humour
Lasting Appeal: 9/10 Whilst there is no online play, the single player could last you forever.