Many video games promise an open ended experience where you can go anywhere and do anything. But no game has delivered more on that promise than last year’s post-apocalyptic adventure game Fallout 3.
You play as a character born into an underground Vault designed to withstand a nuclear apocalypse that was sealed off 200 years ago when the bombs dropped. Everything is great until your father leaves the Vault when you are 19 and you begin your journey out of the Vault and into the ruins of Washington D.C. to find him.
Fallout 3 is unique in its variety. Most of the characters with the exception of a few are expendable, so ignoring or accidentally maiming a quest-giver won’t make the game impossible to finish. Instead, you’re offered a set of choices, some more outside the box than others, and no matter what you chose, there is a clear consequence for the rest of the game and how the other characters treat you.
For example, upon leaving the Vault you may bump into Megaton, a grungy village built around an undetonated nuclear bomb. Do you disable the explosives and save the town? Do you leave the bomb alone? Do you go the evil route and blow the entire town to smithereens? Choices like this one come and go throughout the game, ensuring that no two people will have the exact same game experience.
The sheer size of the game makes no two play-throughs alike. The Capital Wastes you travel through are huge and there are many side-quests available. Thankfully a method of “fast-traveling” between places you’ve already discovered makes long trips across the nuclear wasteland a breeze.
And what a wasteland it is. No doubt about it, Fallout 3 is one of the best looking games to come out in 2008. When you first step out of the Vault, there’s a brief moment as your “eyes” have to adjust to the sunlight. As everything comes into focus, you’re treated to an apocalyptic world that is both terrible and strangely beautiful. Houses are blown out from the explosions and bits of garbage and debris are scattered around the D.C. wastes for miles; food and ammo are hard to find.
Even rarer are human beings. Much of Fallout 3 is spent wandering and scavenging the burned out homes and buildings for supplies. Medicine and weapons you find among the ruins will help you fight for survival against residual radiation and the world’s mutated creatures.
When you do eventually find another human settlement, you’ll more often than not find a trader who will buy the useless junk you may have collected in your travels, like plungers and old books, bent tin cans and broken lawn gnomes.
For your battles in the wasteland, Fallout 3 uses an interesting new combat system. While the game can be played as a simple shooter, another mode called “V.A.T.S.” pauses the action and lets players choose individual body parts to target. With each body part is a percentage of how likely a successful shot will be. Once the player cues up a list of moves, the game shows a cinematic view of the carnage that ensues.
Watching a zombie’s arm get blown off or seeing your bullet fly across the screen with perfect accuracy is a treat to watch every time, and V.A.T.S. puts Fallout 3’s combat a step above the rest.
Impressive as it may be, Fallout 3 suffers from a bunch of issues that keep it from being truly great. The optional third-person perspective looks a bit tacked-on and the character animations are disappointing.
The game is also littered with bugs. Companions can get stuck or be just plain useless at times. You may be fired on by enemies out of your sight that the game hasn’t rendered yet. And most frustratingly, the game crashed or froze at random intervals during my play through.
However, many of the problems have been fixed by a modding tool released for the PC version of the game. This tool lets aspiring programmers design new content which can be then uploaded into the full game. Even though the tool has only been out for a few months, many mods already exist, from ones that improve and refine game features to ones that add new levels, weapons or even new storylines.
While the main game runs about 30 hours at minimum, Fallout 3 will also receive three additional content packs to be sold exclusively for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game. The first content pack, Operation Anchorage, has already been released, and future packs later in the year will expand the nuclear wastes even more. So check your radiation levels, charge up your laser gun, and get exploring.
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