Fallout 3
Publisher: Bethesda
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

Here’s a quick and easy history lesson.

Once upon a time, there was a company called Interplay that made some of the best computer games ever. One of its most well known franchises was the Fallout series, which was an isometric RPG set in a post apocalypse wasteland inspired by 1950s culture.

The Fallout games were really good, especially the second one. Even the demo for the first game, which was a self-contained adventure that was custom made for the purposes of the demo, was excellent. Not every developer will go to the trouble of making a demo with about five different endings and multiples paths. Plus, there were miniguns and you could shoot people in the crotch.

Unfortunately, owing to some complicated financial mis-planning, Interplay went out of business and it didn’t look like the fans of the game would ever get to see a third game in what is arguably one of the most replayable and enjoyable franchises ever created.

That was, until another developer came along and decided to buy the rights to Fallout so that they could make more and more games in the series.

Some people were a bit upset at this news because while Interplay was a company that had shown the ability to make lots of different games with lots of different themes, the new company had only ever really made one type of game, over and over. The one type of game they had made was very good and they were very good at making it, but some people decided that a first-person sandbox RPG developer wouldn’t fit very well with a tactical, isometric RPG franchise.

Later, those people were unveiled to be idiots and Fallout 3 was celebrated as perhaps one of the best games the new company had ever made. Way, way better than Oblivion for example, which always felt a little bit samey and empty after a little while.

A lot of this was down to the simple fact that the people at the new company aren’t stupid. They know that they were best at making first-person RPGs and they know they have an engine that is good for making those types of games. They also knew that, in order to make Fallout 3 any good, they have to keep a lot of the same stuff from the first two games in it. So, that’s what they did. Major fear allayed: Fallout 3 is still very Fallout-y.

Story:

The setting for the game is pretty much the same as the first one, though with a few more sinister twists in the opening and a more personal goal than “Hey, go get us that circuit board we need and do it quick!” Instead, you’re looking for your father who has left the huge underground vault that has protected you since birth from the radiation-ravaged wasteland on the surface.

In any other Fallout game, leaving the vault wouldn’t be that big a deal as the vaults were pre-programmed to open after a certain amount of time. As through players of Fallout 2 (and beginners in Fallout 3) can find out though, the vaults aren’t all they seem to be. What is masquerading as a safe haven in a time of nuclear war is actually a vast social experiment, with each vault given certain conditions.

Vault 13, which was featured in Fallout 1, found itself low on water supplies sooner than it should have. Vault 12 was never able to seal properly and everyone inside was mutated. Vault 15 was full of political radicals. Vault 27 was deliberately overcrowded. Vault 42 had no light bulbs of more than 40 watts provided. Vault 77 had only one man inside and a crate full of puppets.

And Vault 101, your home and the place where Fallout 3 starts with your rather dramatic birth, was a vault that was designed to never re-open once it had shut. The occupants were trapped inside and caught under the thumb of a particularly over-zealous Overseer and the gang culture he allowed to form among the vault’s youth. Until your father escaped, that is.

Gameplay:

Your father’s escape naturally throws a spanner into the day to day workings of the vault and, in true Bethesda tradition, the introduction sequences to the game are both tutorial and an exercise in interactive storytelling.

It’s like the opening to Oblivion, except not as linear. There are mini-sidequests and choices to make here which can effect the relationships your character will have later, impact your skills and decide who lives and dies for the rest of the game. Unlike in Oblivion where the Emperor and his men are all protected too, you can slaughter a lot of vault dwellers if you want – though certain characters will get knocked out instead of dying.

Escaping the vault will be a very familiar sensation to anyone who’s ever played Oblivion past the tutorial sequence too. It’s that same blinding HDR effect as you step into the sunlight and the same overwhelming feeling of possibility. You gain a level, choose a perk, and have to face the fact that you suddenly have more options than a hot chocolate factory.

There are problems here though in that, unlike Oblivion or Morrowind, you literally have no idea where to begin. Your father has left you a note saying that he’s fine and doesn’t want you to follow him, and since he’s only been on screen for about three minutes there’s no emotional connection to make you disagree with this sentiment. Plus, you don’t really have any clues of where to start.

Honestly, if we’d had a choice we’d have said to hell with chasing down Daddy and we’d have stayed inside to mess with the delicately balanced regime of the vault. It’s a shame you have to discard the terribly interesting microcosm so quickly.

Fortunately, things do start to pick up again and we were happy to find that the world we had to traverse was a lot more exciting than anything we’d seen in Oblivion. There’s no endless, rolling forests – there’s just a believable, collapsed wasteland punctuated by bloatflies, mutants and vagrants. And men with laser miniguns – it’s here that the VATS combat system comes into play.

VATS, or Vault Assisted Targeting System if you prefer, is a power-up mode which attempts to bring the turn-based mechanic of the original games to the new game and which lets you pause the game, target specific parts of your enemies and cue up a series of attacks. It’s the easiest way to score quick take-downs and super-gory kills, though it does feel a bit over-powered at times. Even with only average perception and a 10mm pistol you can still take an enemy’s head clear off in one hit if you don’t mind getting close enough to see the spray mist your monitor. Yum.

The VATS system isn’t free to use though. Using attacks in VATS mode costs you action points, the amount of which you have is directly tied to your agility stat. Of course, if you want to stand a chance of hitting something then you’ll still need to have a decently high perception stat too, so it’s a classic RPG balancing act. Where do you want to focus your abilities?

One thing that helps make the levelling system feel more fun is the addition of a perks system, which lets you choose special perks and abilities as you level up. The perks themselves range from simple bonuses and stat increases to more involved and inventive things too, such as ‘Black Widow’, which lets women do more damage against men as well as unlocking new dialogue options.

The perks system isn’t new though – it was one of the most popular features in the first games too, but Bethesda has chosen to combine it with the traits system from the earlier titles instead of just porting it as-is. The result is that you get perks much more regularly, which is great, and that there’s a lot more perks to choose from too, which is even better. Each perk has a different set of requirements too, so the replayability is really expanded if you fancy playing through again with a different character style.

Disappointingly though this ethic isn’t carried over to the dialogue system too – you can have the lowest intelligence and charisma in the world, but you’ll still get the same dialogue choices for the most part, though special options may change slightly.

Issues:

Unfortunately, it isn’t all smooth sailing for Fallout 3 and though the game as a whole is appealing, accessible and enjoyable there are a few places which are notably unpolished and uncomfortable for the PC platform.

The most noticeable is the interface, which feels very console-ish and unwieldy on the PC. Bethesda has increased the number of voice actors, but you still only have three dialogue options visible at once for no reason. It makes dialogue quickly become irritating as you endlessly scroll through options.

Using the PIP-boy is a bit of a hassle as well a lot of the time. On a console, it makes sense to have one central system to manage your stats, data and items since you have only so many buttons. On a PC though, it’s just annoying forcing the player to cycle through tabs and filters.

The very scale of the interface is annoying too, with the shop screen being particularly uninformative. Rather than make full use of the screen space, all information is maddeningly abbreviated so that it takes a good long while before you can really read info at a glance and recognise what ammo is good for what gun and what damage it’ll do.

Oh, and don’t even get us started on the world and local maps, which prove to be incredibly difficult to navigate precisely with.

The real problem though is that it’s very clear that there’s an excellent PC game here, but a lot of it is unfortunately hidden underneath an interface that makes too many concessions to the console world. It’s just a shame that Bethesda chose the Xbox 360 as the lead platform for the game.

Still, despite these flaws the game does retain a lot of its enjoyability and it’s a testament to the versatility of the Oblivion engine that sniping is so much fun in both real-time and VATS mode.

In fact, all of the gunplay in Fallout 3 is good. Unlike in Oblivion, where you really only had three weapons (melee, ranged or magic), Fallout 3 gives you a wide range of tools to wreak havoc with. You’ve got grenades, mines, big guns, small guns, energy weapons, fists and melee – all of which behave differently and have different effects. It’s just a shame that sneaking is still very difficult and essentially useless for most missions.

Finding other solutions to problems is one of the main joys of Fallout 3 and Bethesda has done its best to make each different route interesting and lengthy, so there are rarely any shortcuts to be found in the game play of Fallout 3 – something we definitely appreciate.

Picking locks, for example, is completed with a new minigame which is bit more realistic than the one in Oblivion, so taking a stealth approach isn’t something you can do without preparation. Bobby pins are a limited resource and you won’t even be able to try and tackle some locks unless you have a suitably high Lockpicking skill.

The same is true of hacking too, which relies on the Science skill and uses a mastermind-like minigame where you have to guess the password from a few different choices. True, it isn’t massively close to the original Fallout, but it’s still a very good thing and it’s good to see that Bethesda has at least opened the gameplay up from how it was in Oblivion so that there are now consequences to your actions.

Conclusion:

Fallout 3 is a tough nut to score because, on the one hand we think it’s utterly enthralling and breathtaking, but on the other we can see that it hasn’t been designed with the PC totally in mind and that really holds back the experience. Yes, mods will probably come out to rectify that – but should we be made to rely on modders to correct poor game design?

It’s a shame. Fallout 3 is a game from a company with a strong heritage on the PC from The Elder Scrolls series and Fallout is a recognised and highly regarded PC franchise – but this latest instalment is clearly made with the consoles as the primary platform. It’s just the way the market seems to be heading unfortunately.

Still, interface issues aside, there are a lot of things that Fallout 3 does excellently.

The overall aesthetic and feel of the game is the best example of this. Bethesda has clearly embraced the background and basis of the Fallout series, really building on the 1950s-era themes that ran through the earlier games as an undercurrent.

The levels are littered with posters and relics from the pre-war time and everything from the radio stations you can tune in to, to the selection of perks as you level up are infused with the same dry, antiquated sense of wit that made the original games so memorable.

That said, though Fallout 3 is wearing a similar outfit to Fallout 1 and 2, it still remains a distinct and separate game in the series. Like Fallout Tactics before it, Fallout 3 talks the talk but walks with a bit of a limp when you really get down to it. Hardcore fans of the first games will undoubtedly find that Fallout 3 just feels a bit at odds with the previous games on occasion.

Oddly though, we don’t count this as a bad thing. The earlier Fallout games were fantastic and all, but we’re quietly glad that Fallout 3 isn’t just a re-hash of what once was. Bethesda has tried to put its own spin on the game by shifting the perspective and updating the various mechanics and while it doesn’t always work (see: interface), enough of it does to make the game enjoyable on the whole.

For everything we don’t like about the game – and there’s a fair bit of stuff we can list in that category, from wooden actors to occasionally flaky graphics – there’s at least two or three things we do like.

We’re especially fond of how vulnerable the player is made to feel, for example. Monitoring your radiation level, staying stocked on ammo and focusing your skill points on necessities before luxuries; these are all aspects of the game which help make this instalment feel more survivalist than the series has ever done before. It’s something we’ve always wanted to see done with the franchise and while Bethesda hasn’t done it perfectly, it’ll more than do.

Fallout 3 is a game that’s going to divide audiences though – that much we’re already certain of. Players will find themselves drawn into two camps, with those who love it going to battle against those who still think it’s just “Oblivion with guns.”

So, is this just Oblivion with guns? Well, to a degree yes. There are still a few flies in the ointment, like the enemies that spot you from miles away and the bloatflies that will chase you endlessly across the game world just when you’ve run out of ammo. At the same time though, it’s also something entirely fresh and unique.

It’s neither totally a Fallout game, nor totally Oblivion. It doesn’t work all the time, but when it does it’s glorious and unbelievably good, so we think it’s well worth looking past the few bugs for. It gets a score of 8/10, though admittedly it’s only just scraping that if we’re going to be totally honest, because it’s fun and significant, if not quite as good as it could and arguably should have been.

Gameplay: 9
Features: 8
Graphics: 8
Replayability: 9

Overall: 8/10 Recommended

What do our scores mean?