Fallout 3 Review
No, toxic water isn't fantasy demonic lava colored a greeny blue.
A Review - By Matt Kelly
It's not surprising that Fallout 3 copped it's unofficial tag line 'Oblivion with guns' quite early in development. If you took a casual glance at Oblivion and Fallout running side by side and walking through the outdoor environment, you could say that Fallout looks like some bizzaro new DLC content for Oblivion. You could also be quite thick.
It's a big world out there, anything can happen, and while Betheseda's games do certainly have a lot in common, Fallout is definitely the more ambitious of the two. If anything, Oblivion and Fallout share the same basic frame work, but beyond that be ready for something wholly original.
As a quick crash course on the world of Fallout, the game takes place in the future tense, following an alternative time line where the 50s appears to have never quite died and the 'future' looks closer to an episode of Lost in Space rather than something from Star Trek's Next Generation era. Fusion powered cars and robots litter the landscape built on vacuum tube technology, and the American Dream of having the perfect home with mom, dad and two kids is still very much alive. Got that? Cool! Now, fast forward about 200 years again after the onslaught of a nuclear hellfire. This is the world of Fallout. Taking place in the Capital Wastelands, the area surrounding the burnt out remains of Washington D.C, you play as a resident of Vault 101, one of the many underground bunkers, built to protect the elite few, in case of a nuclear apocalypse. However, it is apparent not all is well in the Vault, with an Overseer who seems far more interested in making people stay inside, rather than what's best for the residents. Add gang activity, a slowly dwindling population, and the endless monotony that is the duty to make sure the Vault survives, and it becomes apparent that Vault 101 is really not the place for creature comfort. As if this wasnt enough, all hell will break loose when your Father, James (played by Qui Gon Jin, who is in turn played by Liam Neeson), defies the Overseer and escapes the Vault. With the Overseer in total confidence that you were involved somehow, it's either hang around for what could potentially be quite a painful death, or follow in your Father's footsteps and leave the Vault, searching of him and his lack of reason for leaving. From there it's you against the hellish wastelands.
Once you step out into the wastelands after fast forwarding through your childhood (read: best character creation ever), it's already apparent Fallout is far more ambitious than Oblivion ever was (yes, get ready for a lot of Oblivion bashing). Surveying the wasteland, it's already easy to see that the world is denser, with far more unique designs and a much more varied landscape. And when Bethesda destroys a major U.S. state, they really destroy it. Take Springvale, the destroyed town you're most likely to encounter first. Broken housing frames and shattered wood litters the place. Burnt out husks of cars sit in the streets, with garbage lying all around. Take your time scavenging, you might find find something useful in the wreckage, either to use or sell. The world of Fallout, destroyed or otherwise, easily competes and even excels in detail with the vast majority of games coming out (non free-roaming included). If you're the sort that loves to destroy the atmosphere of your game, upon some inspecting you'll find that Bethesda has employed a lot of visual tricks to make the world pop with more 3D than it actually has. Assuming you're not the complete cad who does that, get ready to explore one of the most unique and varied worlds you'll ever visit with your thumbs.
Oblivion was a massive victim of template design. Pretty much all the ruins, dungeons and towns shared some very similar designs. While it made sense within the games fiction, it really wasn't all that exciting to explore. This is one of the first places Fallout really excels over Oblivion. While you'll still find the generic ruins from time to time, the number of truly unique locations has been increased. Megaton, a populated town built out of the ruins of air crafts around an unexploded nuclear bomb is almost a vertical city with gangways running between the different levels. Each building has it's own unique exterior design, built from slanting scrap metal, the whole place looks like it's ready to fall over. This is in contrast to say, Underworld, city of ghouls, built in the remains of the Museum of American History, making use of the existing building. Pretty much all of the key quest locations have received their own unique design on one level or another, overflowing with its own personality.
You'll also find yourself with a real sense of what's transpired in the Capital Wasteland before you came along. Whether it be something you can draw your own conclusions from, such as a skeleton collapsed in front of the bomb shelter door, or something far more direct like audio logs, the history of the waste is quite rich. While older Fallout fan boys may not quite have their fiction thirst quenched for what's going on in the grand scheme, there are enough little stories to keep the world a step above mundane dungeon crawls.
And speaking of dungeons, that's pretty much what Washington D.C. is, which will either disappoint, or amaze you, but it's still fun regardless. Instead of true free roam city of ruin, D.C. is an interconnected series of city areas traversed via subway train lines. Most of the city is fairly combat intensive with small pockets of friendly areas. You'll find a lot of ruins to explore in amongst the vast number of prop buildings. Some of them are real life historical land marks, such as the Capital Building and the Washington Monument, in amongst numbers of Fallout universe landmarks (such as Vault-Tec HQ). D.C. is a serious hot spot though, with a lot of combat going on. From time to time you'll get a bit of quiet exploration, but pretty much any area you enter will involve a lot of combat from the get go.
Combat is a real treat as far as RPG combat goes. Using a kind of mix between first person shooters, Oblivion's combat style, and classic Fallout target shots; it really does leave you with a lot of options in the way you deal the pain. Sadly, while V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting aka click to blow off this limb) System is great and results in some seriously awesome targeted bloody mess, it isn't really backed up too well by the shooter mechanics. It's not useless entirely, and in the right circumstances can be quite fun, but the real time AI combat is quite basic. Often it'll end up with you running backwards firing almost blindly at the on coming, insanely fast moving, enemies. You'll still be scoring your kills, but the real time combat is quite dumb in a lot of ways. It's worth noting though that V.A.T.S. is really not a special power persé, in the sense of slow motion in Max Payne, but is really the core way combat is done. You'll have a set number of action points which you can spend setting up shots, and then a bloody cinematic firefight will follow. It's a great integration between first person action combat and more traditional, thoughtful RPG combat, but when you run out of action points you'll have to resort to the rough FPS gameplay. Keep in mind that everything, regardless of whether it's V.A.T.S. or FPS action, is still governed by your stats, though quite nicely hidden behind the combat system. If that rocket-fired-into-someones-skull tactic isn't quite working for you, chances are you really need to skill up with big guns.
The 'two actors, one game' issue of Oblivion has also been somewhat resolved. Oblivion was something of an achievement with it's almost endless number of dialogue lines, having almost every character deliver them in the same voice made you stop caring very fast. Fallout 3 certainly doesn't have unique voices for everyone you encounter, but the number of voices you'll hear has been seriously increased. There's also been a lot of spacing work done between characters that use the same voice. It's pretty rare you'll encounter identical sounding people within five minutes of walking from one to another. Finally the amount of recorded dialogue has been increased, with characters having their own flavor to them, regardless of sound. Add that to the fact that much of the dialogue was recorded twice for player character gender differences, and there's a lot of unique talk going on in Fallout.
Karma also comes into play in your post apocalyptic social life. Very simply, perform charitable deeds and your karma will go up... go on a killing spree in your local bar and most likely it'll go down. Karma is your reputation in a lot of ways and while it may not always be obviously having affect, it does affect how people will treat you. Be it gaining entrance to a town or simply buying items, your life may be easier or harder depending on how you play and the morals of who you're dealing with. What's great though is that you'll never get the full details of your karma level revealed to you as a statistic, just in a general way of whether you're good, evil, or in between. Oh sure, you stole stimpacks from a poor family, but just how evil does that make you?
Despite the huge, dense world created in Fallout 3, the game only has a few dozen of quests. While they're far more unique than a lot of what was done in Oblivion, expect a lot of the extended gameplay to come from your own desire to explore. Fallout also manages to keep to story far more driven. Oblivion had it's own epic tale to go with it's expansive world, but it never felt particularly urgent. Oh sure, the world was going to end, just not any time soon while you killed fish in a pond somewhere. Fallout manages to maintain a much stronger story through some great writing, unique quests, and a constant reminder of your part in the world via Galaxy News Radio, a 50s music and news radio station that will remind you what exactly is going on.
At the end of the day, Fallout 3 does fall short in several respects. The world is great and the quests are engaging, but there are just too many little things that will break you away from being engaged in a couch potato drooling state. A lot of Oblivion's bugs have come across into Fallout pretty much as they were. Rag doll style corpses have the occasional habit of dancing a post death jig all over the floor, AI really isn't all that crash hot, and the town people have a bad habit of behaving like robots. This was no more apparent when at one point two AIs where stuck walking into each other. Eventually one of them won the battle of repetitive-animation-wars and pushed the other one off the edge of a walkway, killing him. What was even better was finding a skeleton somehow lodged through a wall, going nuts with its collision physics. Getting too close to said skeleton resulted in a whole lot of high speed health loss and death. Also, considering the density of the world, Fallout really could have used more of those generic or randomly generated scenario quests. Doing all the structured quests will already be taking you into the 30 to 50 hour mark (assuming you're not trying to speed run), but it would have been great to have a few more of those 'go here and kill this' type scenarios, even if just to keep you exploring in new directions.
Summary:
While Fallout 3 does have its fair share of issues, it's pretty hard to say that it's not one of the most ambitious games in quite a while. Between it's setting, graphical detail, and the sheer amount of character in the world, The Capital Wastelands is one of the most realized game worlds. It would have been nice to have more to do, to give the game a bit more on going purpose, but exploring it is pretty addictive in itself. Combat could use some tweaking, even just having some sharper controls would have been great, and the world does suffer from Oblivion syndrome from time to time, however despite all of the above, Fallout is still a hideously engrossing adventure that you'd be a fool to miss out on... or incredibly smart if you know.... you have a life, that you'd like to keep going with.
Gameplay - 9.5
Incredibly engaging world with some strong writing to back it up, could have used a bit more 'extended play' quests.
Graphics - 9.0
The wasteland is well and truly above Oblivion, but a lot of the character animation issues remain.
Sound - 9.5
Great voice acting for the most part, along side a decent selection of tunes and some of the crispiest weapon sounds.
Replay - 9.5
The world is engaging and dense enough that even other total quest completion, there is a lot of room for replay and sandbox style gameplay.
Overall - 9.5