Review: Fallout 3

I’ve been hearing how great of a game Fallout 3 was. I also heard how huge it was. I knew this when I was renting it and knew I probably wouldn’t get very far in the game but I decided to give it a whirl anyways. Besides, it’s nice to play some long games – ones that would actually merit a purchase instead of a weekend rental. I’m looking at YOU, Quantum of Solace, Mirror’s Edge and Uncharted.

The storyline is one that’s actually pretty cool … I hope it doesn’t happen in my or my son’s lifetime but it’s a world set in a post-apocalyptic world near Washington D.C. It is a pretty cool thing to see the White House and the Washington Memorial in shambles. Or seeing D.C. on the horizon and what you see is a destroyed city.

And the cover image, the man in armor, is pretty damn freaky. Infact, until I learned that those were actually good guys I had found the image quite haunting. But are graphics the only good quality that Fallout 3 has to offer? Or is it another MMRPG without the online part?

As I stated before the jump, it’s a post-apocalyptic world. You are actually born in an underground vault. Your mother dies due to childbirth complications so your father raises you in the “Vault.” It’s here that you learn the basics of what you have to do. (If you’ve played Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the introduction follows the same suit as that game). As you grow up you get an idea of what traits you’ll have. Then, out of nowhere you will be accused for a crime you didn’t commit and escape the vault. After some combat, you make your way out into the world for the first time. It’s then after your eyes adjust to the light are you introduced to the barren wastelands of outer-D.C. At this point, you’re given a quest to find your dad who had left earlier, and this is where the game branches out.

An idea of what post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. would look like.

I’ll probably sound like a hypocrite when I say this, but I don’t really like how big the game is. Now all of you probably know I used to play World of Warcraft, so I look like a hypocrite when saying that the game’s world is too big when I experienced both Azeroth and Outlands. The difference is the direction and the fact that you’re technically alone in the game. In WoW, you are guided to Point A, then do quests in Point A, but then you’re directed to Point B once you’re pretty much done in Point A. Fallout 3 doesn’t offer that. If you’re looking for quests or side-quests, you have to pretty much go out of your way to find it instead of it kind of finding you. More realistic? Yes, but it runs into problems later on.

I got really interested in the game when I was hired to detonate an atomic bomb from far away, incinerating the town surrounding it. After I had gotten what I wanted from the town, I figured I’d go with the evil path and just blow it up. Once I did, I was awarded with my own permanent room to store my stuff and rest without worry. At this point, I was really into the game because I felt like it was starting to branch out – now I could actually become the evil bastard I intended to … and what was better was that I was awarded for my evil deed of incinerating a town – chock full of kids, adults, animals and elderly people – with a permanent room where I could rest and store as much stuff as I wanted to.

So, I tried to steal from the people in this town and they all turned on me and tried to kill me. So, really, that's why I detonated the bomb.

Later you’re given a task by the people in the building to kill the ghouls nearby – which are people who survived the bombs but were terribly disfigured afterwards. You’re dealt with the choice to kill them or sympathize with them. But, trying to continue in my evil ways – I kill them because I don’t want to chance losing my safe haven in an area where you’re never really safe.

After that, I made my way to another city where a kid was all alone in a city full of fire scorpions. At this point I played along with the game and helped him to gain experience. It was after this that I found myself continuously doing good deeds in order to gain experience. Five levels later and still doing good deeds I got a bit bored with it all. For a game that offers an open environment, there aren’t many terrible things to do. If the game progression followed WoW, then after killing the ghouls I would have been directed elsewhere to do my next evil deed. Maybe I just didn’t find the right people.

Doing research, Fallout 3′s Wikipedia page notes the benefits of having a high karma but nothing specific of having a low karma which leads me to believe there aren’t that many ways to become evil outside of stealing and killing innocents.

While the VATS system gave you the ability to shoot at the body, limbs and weapon ... I just found it easier to aim for the head and kill them that way.

The controls were also a bit weird. Just like in Quantum of Solace, the left analog button was used quite frequently. In this game it let you crouch and gain accuracy and sneak. But, in the heat of battle you my unconsciously hit it and then wonder why in the hell you’re going so slowly. Other than that, they were only a bit awkward for the first hour or so. A really neat feature put into the game is V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) which temporarily pauses the game while you plan on your attack. Your character has a specific number of Attack Points (AP) that are used up when using VATS. In this mode, you choose who you want to attack and which body part to hit. For example, I had my character built to be great with small firearms with perks that gave me increased accuracy in VATS. I also gave myself points in sneaking so I could get a 100% critical strike on enemies who couldn’t see me. So, I would sneak up on them, go into VATS mode, target their head and fire. The camera then switches to an angle so it follows my bullet as it plummets into their head, making it explode into red goo.

Then I loot their corpse.

All in all, a very neat feature. I hope to see stuff like that in the future.

Behold, the Pip-Boy 3000 a.k.a. Your Sub-Screen.

So when it’s time to repair weapons, see your map, check your status, regain some health or see what quests you are on you’d go to the Pip-Boy 3000 a.k.a. the subscreen. To me, the subscreen was very sloppy. I would often times accidentally switch to another section when I meant to switch to another option. Even after playing the game for hours I’d still make the mistake. Sure, a small thing but it gets annoying after awhile. It also, again, doesn’t help that I have a smaller TV screen so everything was a little more difficult to read.

Sound and music really wasn’t something I can write about because it wasn’t anything great. Liam Neeson plays the voice of your father, which I didn’t figure out until looking at the Wikipage … but I had always thought the father’s voice sounded familiar. Other than that, the only thing I can comment on is that when you’re in VATS and you shoot your gun, it’s incredibly loud – even on a low volume. It became annoying for my wife and kid to hear the constant sound of my gun going off. I have no clue why they made it that way … maybe for increased dramatic effect but when people are trying to sleep it’s just a disturbance.

I should also note that the game has crashed on me twice, both in the same place. This leads me to believe that it’s not a system problem but a game problem. Additionally, they were hard crashes that required me to restart my system completely. And when there’s a hard drive being written to, system crashes can cause corruption in the data – so system crashes are a real problem with me and will directly influence the overall rating of this game.

It may sound like I’m saying a lot of bad things about Fallout – but I guess my experience with the game didn’t match up to the hype that it was given. The beginning was terribly frustrating until I got to the part where I blew up the town then it got real fun for me, but later I found myself forced into a storyline that involved helping people out when I just wanted to play a jackass just looking to help myself out. It also didn’t help that the game had crashed twice for me.

But then again, I wasn’t big into the whole Elder Scroll series either and this game is run off the same engine and made by the same people so it only makes sense that I may have not been to terribly fond of this game if I didn’t like the other games that ran the same way. There’s just something about the game that rubs me the wrong way – I’m not sure what it is.

Update: I will point out three things. First, know that this review was written about a week before it was published. For the most part, that’s how I do all of my reviews – I write them up, finish them, let them sit for a few days and then read them again. Giving it a few days will give me a refreshed mind when proofing it. During that time I realized that there is a lot of stuff in Fallout 3 and that I barely scratched the surface. That being said, there may have been a lot of chances to be the prick that I wanted my character to be. However, those options weren’t readily available to me. Third is that I am now aware that Bethesda Studios are working on patching it on all three systems. While I’m glad that they are fixing it – if it’s on all three consoles and its problem spans from graphic glitches and system freezes (which is what I experienced) to people not even being able to play it, I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t hold of on releasing it until it got fixed. You’re telling me that all the game testers didn’t suffer through the problems that countless people are experiencing?

And on that note, let’s wrap up the review.

Graphics (10 pts.)
Again, pretty damn polished. I really liked seeing the remains of Washington D.C. The facial expressions in the game were pretty monotone. Telling a little kid that they’re on their own in the world gave the same facial expression they’d give if you told them you had found a home for them. The graphics also had a tendency to be glitchy and when you ran into an enemy you saw lots of clipping issues. 8/10.

Music & Sound Effects (10 pts.)
Nothing memorable but nothing terribly annoying. No real background music, but that adds to the effect of the game. Sound effects were too loud when in the V.A.T.S. system. 4/10.

Gameplay & Controls (25 pts.)
Controls took a bit of getting used to, and the sub-screen could have been done better in my opinion. Maybe they could have used the control pad to switch between sections and use the analog stick to switch between your options in that section. Gameflow was pretty nice. You always had something to do and were never stuck wondering where to go. Unfortunately, the openness that the game seemed to boast didn’t appear to be there for me. I was an evil bastard near the beginning, blowing up a city for money but shortly afterwords I found myself finding a home for a kid. What else could I do to gain experience? Not much, unfortunately. 15/25.

Story and Presentation (20 pts.)
The story revolves around a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. The presentation was done really well. Ruined cars and buildings were everywhere, stubble all over the place, not a tree in sight and you rarely found people who were sitting in a nice comfortable spot. You also rarely found food that didn’t have some form of radiation in it. Everywhere around you could see people were struggling with their lives. When I stopped playing, the story involved me helping my father find a way to purify the water so it wasn’t irradiated. 18/20.

Fun Factor (25 pts.)
The game was very frustrating when I started. Maybe it was just a steep learning curve for me. When I finally had some choice of whether to do the good thing or the bad thing I got really interested. After that, I stopped having as much fun when I felt like the only way I could advance my character was by doing good deeds and gaining experience that way. I was never really offered an option to do an evil deed after incinerating the town. By the time I stopped playing I had hit the spot that many people hit with MMORPGs – you just feel like you’re doing the same thing over again. 15/25.

Replayability (10 pts.)
I definitely see a good amount of replayability. One character you can play as a sniper type person and another character you can play someone who likes to use fists to fight. One game you can try to be as evil as you can be, killing everyone without thinking about it, another game you can be the nicest guy in the world. And with the length and options that the game offers, I can see people playing this game over and over again. 9/10

This game receives an instant invader subtraction because of two game freezes that happened while playing the game. It happened in a specific area so I’m led to believe that this is not a system issue but an issue with the game data.

Total Score is 69, normally giving this game 3/5 invaders. System crashes immediately dock one invader, so this game receives 2/5 invaders.