Reviewed: November 9, 2008
Reviewed by: Peter Shaw

Publisher
Bethesda Game Studios

Developer
Bethesda Softworks

Released: October 28, 2008
Genre: Action-RPG
Players: 1

9
9
9
8
8.8

Supported Features:

There were many attempts to give the game as much of a feel of the original Fallout as possible. This included gritty dark environments, little fear of taboo subjects, and slapstick social commentary-type humor. Unfortunately this breaks down to dismembered corpses hung in buildings, drug addiction a rearing its ugly head at times, and lots of cracks about the Cold War. It’s not hard to see effort in what they did, but they didn’t do a lot to give it a little bit of special spark. What’s more, these same elements are repeated to the extent they lose their effect about half of the way through the game.

The story is told through an initial series of slideshow style cut scenes narrated by Ron Perlman. Fallout explores an alternate future where the bombs of the Cold War were used and they destroyed the world. The Vaults were created as bastions of humanity where they could ride out the initial horror and the slow poison of radioactive fallout until it was safe to emerge. Vault 101, your home, epitomizes this and has protected generations of people for nearly 200 years after the atomic wars.

You’re introduced to the game in a creative fashion, your first few training missions occur in your childhood, walking and picking up items are covered in a toddler stage. When you grow up into an adolescent you’re given your Pip-Boy 3000 and social interactions are explored. This is also where the player first meets their initial emotional attachments, your father and his friend Jonas act as your parents would since your mother died in childbirth. While your friend Anata helps you form a bond to your residence inside Vault 101, Butch gives you an enemy and a rival. His group of greaser-like thugs terrorize the other citizens of the Vault, but overall not much is wrong with where you live.

The utopia is shattered in a matter of moments when your father decides he’s had enough of life there and commits the ultimate taboo of opening the Vault door with little reason given. You’re driven out of the Vault by a security force looking for answers and you’re left alone to wander the wasteland of the United State’s capital, Washington DC. With little more than a general direction it’s up to you to find the path your father took and to locate him.

The story winds through several predictable plot twists, but once again there are a number of side quests to distract someone as they work through. There’s another element though that is rather unique. The game has a large focus on exploration. Sometimes you will be wandering in the wastes and come across a small town. It’s up to you to go digging around and finding clues as to what the fate of this town was. There are no quests directly associated with these unique areas but it becomes fun to dig through computers and data files to find the fate of locations.

As you level up you can increase all of your skills with a set amount of skill points as well. This lets you improve specific abilities to your needs. Each skill has its own dynamic uses and there aren’t many throwaway skills. There are definitely not enough points to specialize in everything with the level cap at 20 so some sacrifices are necessary. You also get to choose one perk from a list. These perks have many uses but several of them are deceptive in their lack of usefulness. Managing your perks is perhaps the most important aspect of leveling. Beware of ones with quick payoffs but will sacrifice a perk slot for something that could have been more useful at a later time.

Fallout 3 attempts to blend the shooter and RPG genres together, and their attempts are admirable, there are times the shooting aspects take a back seat to the role playing parts. You have two options for using your weapons in the game. It incorporates a standard first person or third person perspective for using your weapons, even complete with a zoom function for more careful aiming. This mode is deceptive though, because one might be tempted to strafe around an opponent or shoot from cover but neither are very effective. The game lacks a true shooter game’s engine so these flaws rear up from time to time and may lead to a few cheap deaths.

The next option is the V.A.T.S. system, which makes a return from previous Fallout games. When V.A.T.S. is engaged the action stops and you can highlight your target. On that target then the body parts and other components all have a hit percent associated with them with the ranged weapons. The V.A.T.S. for melee and explosive weapons have a flat percent for enemies representing a general hit chance, but the overall effect is the same. You then select what you want to attack and your character carries out as many moves as their AP allows for. When the attacks are selected the actions are carried out in slow motion, leading to very cinematic combat moments that can be very enthralling. Watching your bullet leave your gun and travel in slow motion to burst a raider’s skull will rarely get old.

Both systems of combat are effective and fairly well balanced. It’s easy to use them in sync with one another. They give the game a very dramatic feel at times when everything is working together. The fighting is randomly dotted with you checking your Pipboy at times as well though. Every time you need to heal yourself, repair an injured limb, change weapons, or activate a supplement to your characters abilities you need to bring up the Pipboy. This can sometimes break up the flow of the combat and slow things down.

The Pipboy serves as your menu screen and it has three basic functions behind it. Your status, items, and data are all covered in different tabs. In status there are three conditions that are illustrated health keeps track of your hit points and damaged limbs. As you go through combat in the same way you can injure your opponents extremities they can return the favor. Paying a doctor to work on you, resting in a bed for a period of time, or applying stimpacks to the affected areas returns you hit points and will repair your damaged limbs.

Next down is the section for the rads you receive. Being a nuclear wasteland the old capital is ripe with life threatening radiation. Radiation can be picked up from just the environment, every water source is at least slightly contaminated making long swims a risky venture. Radiation can also be picked up from your food or drinking water. As your rad level increases it starts to affect your stats finally leading to death in the later stages, again doctors can cure your radiation sickness for a price or you can use radaway packs that are found in the game. Finally your stats are covered in the last tab. This keeps track of your lost stats from radiation status, limb crippling or other ailments.

Your items are all managed through different tabs as well, weapons, apparel, aid, misc and ammo. Weapons and armor are both equipable and repairable from their respective tabs. As you use weapons or take damage in the game your items start to lose quality. This affects their reload speed or damage for weapons and the resistance to damage for armor. They can be repaired with similar items you find in the world or certain vendors can fix them. The aid section contains all of the items that either heal you in some form or boost your stats. Most of the healing items are medical supplies or food while stat boosters are mostly drugs you pick up.

The miscellaneous and ammo sections are fairly self-explanatory. All of this ties into the overall weight your character can carry. Every item has a certain weight with it, and this weight has to be managed at all times. Large items and weapons will weigh you down and if you become over encumbered your character loses the ability to move. Anyone familiar with Bethesda’s earlier title of Oblivion is well acquainted with this system. This makes you put a priority on what items to take with you and will often focus your attentions to items that are useful to you. Thankfully the game lacks a lot of dead weight, and almost every item you carry has some kind of use associated with it. Also in a strange decision no kind of ammo has weight to it. You can carry enough ammo to supply small armies and your character is just as agile as before. This breaks the game’s feeling of desperation at times and can lead to a slightly more shallow experience.

The final tab is the data section. This covers your maps, quests and notes that keep you from having to write anything down on your own. The maps come in two forms, local and world. The local map shows you doors to other areas, while the world make plots out all of the important points you’ve traveled to. You can then fast travel taking a lot of monotony out of the game by zipping between important locations. Any important notes are taken down and you’re given a quick list of your active quests. Activating the quests brings up the important markers making finding the quest specific characters and items very simple.

Getting quests involves some form of character interaction usually, which is where the game really starts to show some of its flaws. The game is a lot more polished with its friendly character roster than its previous brethren in the Elder Scrolls series. There are still consistent problems, most of which lies in a limited voice acting cast. Most of the important people have unique voices, but there were at times limited scripts. When a quest important character is giving you advise on your next path, and interrupts himself telling you not to steal something as you eye his safe in a completely different voice, the game loses a lot of luster.

Most of the interactions have three very obvious choices, good, indifferent, or evil, and unfortunately they are all blatantly obvious. Literally your choices revolve around giving money or water to the poor, or murdering everyone in their sleep. The middle ground on the other hand just makes you seem indecisive most times so the interactions and development of your character lacks anything resembling a personal bond forming. The whole experience of choices is pretty heavily predictable, with evil being obviously evil and good being blatantly good.

The character models are top notch but several hiccups appear at times. The lack of blinking can be disconcerting and there are very few emotions reflected in their faces. Most of the models tend to repeat as well so there is a lot of repetition in citizens and the enemies you face. There were also several major graphical glitches in the game, which seem to be widespread among many people’s copies of the game. Some of these were scrambled textures, long pop-in, or strange vectorized polygons on the screen.

The weapons all have a satisfying report to them, and the background noises sound crisp and clear at all times. Using other character’s voices to immerse yourself in the game world is also well done. You can hear when your enemies have found you out as you’re sneaking around, and then use their responses to tell if the coast is clear. In fact the enemies expressions at times become a crutch, where more powerful ones who move stealthily can easily catch you off guard.

The perks and skills you choose can drastically change your options. You can intimidate with your strength, outwit with your intelligence, or out talk with charisma through many encounters in the game. Many of the quests have different payoffs in the game, some even feature unique items and perks.

There is promise of downloadable content at some point that will hopefully raise the level cap for the main character. Also if Oblivion is any kind of model to follow, there will certainly be at least a couple large expansions for the game. These don’t make the game a horrible investment but the finality of the ending certainly puts a damper on the value of the product. At the very end no matter what choices you make in the game you are no longer allowed to play your character after that point. This makes building a character all the more impersonal because no matter what at the end it is completely ripped away from you. Hopefully the downloadable content forthcoming will alleviate this problem.

After the initial jaunt though, visiting old locations gets repetitive and dull. Interior areas that are their own separate instance on the map never change, and sometimes several visits are needed making returning to areas a little dull. And once the level cap it hit, the game effectively stops progressing in any kind of meaningful way. Any form of completionist should beware, the level cap is easily reached before even half of the map or quests are done.

In the first hours of the game Fallout 3 is a unique title that has many thrills and spills in it. Later on though it struggles at times to break through the mold of being a child of Bethesda’s previous works. Overall it’s a good game but one that lacks something special to push it into the realm of greatness. The license of Fallout is well used and isn’t ever abused, but it isn’t used to its fullest potential either. The game is a good one, without a doubt, and it isn’t a bad way to spend your money this year. In the end though, literally, it lacks a dynamic overall feel that keeps it from standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest RPGs of this generation.