Review – Fallout 3 (PC, X360, PS3)

I did not like Oblivion. Perhaps foolishly, I still went out and grabbed Fallout 3, and I am glad I did. If you liked Oblivion, there is a good chance you will enjoy Fallout 3, unless its gritty post-apocalyptic setting is distasteful in some fashion. If you didn’t like Oblivion, there’s still a chance you’ll like Fallout 3, because of its various improvements to setting, gameplay, advancement, graphics, sound, and design.

The post-nuclear Capitol Wasteland of Fallout 3, where the currency is Nuka-Cola bottle caps, is full of flavour. The neutral colour schemes can get tiresome for some, but the man versus nature theme is intriguing and influenced my play style. I found myself scrounging for every piece of ammo and health pack. I snuck around very carefully in order to get the most optimal shots and to prevent taking more damage than necessary in order to conserve my resources. Unfortunately, this desperate scavenger mentality does not last through the whole game and eventually there were enough money and suppliers that there were no longer any resource concerns.

The combat in Fallout is unique and fun. The game is mostly played in a first-person perspective. While Fallout does provide a third-person view, I found this mode to be very inaccurate and clunky. It was occasionally useful in order to look around a corner when sneaking, but overall the game could’ve just dropped this perspective. Aiming, shooting, swinging, and throwing all take place in real time. The combat innovation is introduced through the V.A.T.S. mode, a paused targeting system that allows you to target specific body parts of your enemies. While in V.A.T.S., you have a number of action points to spend, a concept that will be familiar to fans of previous Fallout games. Your chance of hitting in V.A.T.S. is determined by your character’s proficiency with the weapon you’re using, and the number of actions you can take depend on your weapon. Once you make your choices in V.A.T.S. you’re treated to an action camera view of the exaggerated and gorey consequences. In a lengthy battle, this mechanic mixes paused and run and gun gameplay with satisfying results. The location targeting isn’t restricted to V.A.T.S., either. If you shoot an enemy in the head in FPS mode, they will suffer the same consequences as in V.A.T.S. For example, doing enough damage to an opponent’s leg will make them limp and slow down, or shooting them in the arm will make them drop a two-handed weapon.

While combat is fun, the other interaction with the world is really limited. Aside from lockpicking, where you essentially have to guess the angle at which to place your lockpick, and the hacking, where you solve a puzzle to guess the password, everything else just involves pressing the “use” button. This limitation helps the pace of the game, but it breaks the sandbox feel that Bethseda is trying to sell.

Besides, the pace of the game is completely ruined by an atrocious inventory management and menu system. There is a certain miserly joy to be had from mentally calculating the cost per weight values of all the items you pick up, but having to slog through a straight list of most of your items is tedious. There are not enough categories of items, there are no shortcuts to get to your inventory, and the buy and sell interface is a list of all the items in your inventory. The map and quest menus are all mixed in with the inventory menus, so it ends up being several clicks or button presses to get among all the different tabs that you may want to look at. In addition, the tooltips on certain items are insufficient, and special items are not demarcated or separated in any way. For example, I sold my food sanitizer initially because I didn’t realize that it actually had a special effect if I carried it around until afterwards. It’s a mystery as to why checking your health, your radiation, and your drug addictions require three separate screens, with no hotkeys to access any of them. To make matters worse, there is a slight delay before it brings the menus up as you wait for the animation to finish. Even though it’s just a couple of seconds, over the course of the game it becomes a huge menace.

The dialogue system is typical role-playing fare, with a small variety of paths to take. Fallout incorporates the trendy morality system, allowing you to choose if you’re a hero, a villain, or somewhere in between. Civilians might randomly give you gifts if you’re a paragon of virtue, but that will also mean you’ve drawn the ire of the mercenary companies. The game does an adequate job of making it feel like the morality choices matter, and there are even special abilities that tie into the three moral paths. The voice acting in the game is well done, but the social interactions suffer from entirely forgettable characters.

Moreover, the main plot can be painful at times. There are ineffable parts in the plot that leaves you scratching your head. The optional quests are slightly more interesting, but I did not encounter many that were truly memorable.

What it lacks in quality it makes up for in quantity. The Capitol Wasteland is a vast area with a plethora of points of interest. Discovering and trying to complete every side quest will take a long while, although for me the game got to be a little repetitive by the end and I had no interest in the remaining side quests.

The graphics and sound are where they are expected to be for a title of this caliber. The environment is beautiful and the shotgun blasts are fulfilling. The character models are detailed and decorated, and the audio cues are plentiful and fitting. In addition, the view distance was superb and I could see enemies before they were indicated on my compass (although this might not be the case if my perception attribute was maxed). The ragdoll animation and detailed head explosions when something dies in V.A.T.S. is really rewarding as well, although it can lend itself to some ridiculousness as a creature’s head will explode when you landed the fatal blow in its leg.

One note about the Games For Windows Live version of the game, and a huge pet peeve of mine, is that the game’s Windows integration is very poor. Not only does the installation not install start menu shortcuts, but in fullscreen mode alt-tabbing back to the desktop is dysfunctional. Nine of ten times I tried to do this, I could not get back to the game and had to forcefully abort the game and restart from the last save point. This poor production quality is something I would not expect even from really small publishers, so Bethseda really dropped the ball in this area.

With better writing, a decent inventory system, and a more convenient menu system, Fallout 3 could have been a masterpiece, but has to settle for an entertaining experience instead.