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There is a sweet, funny tune on the radio, a welcome Fifties-tinged break from the steady run of political announcements and news. The sun is out for once and things look almost peaceful here in future America.

But this is a Mature-rated video game, Fallout 3 from Bethesda Softworks, and anything sweet and hopeful usually spells trouble – reload your gun the second things start looking up. The video-game sector may be drawing in new audiences with popular musical fare such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, part of a general trend toward supplanting competition with creative collaboration, but many of this fall's major fictional games aimed at adults continue to revel in gory chaos.

And those interactive storytellers are having to go to extreme lengths to out-doom the daily news as the Bush years stagger to a close: The two new titles I played this week, Fallout 3, an epic role-playing game for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PCs, and Resistance 2, a Mature-rated PS3 shooter, take place in thoroughly destroyed versions of the United States. (A third wrecked-Earth game, the high-profile Gears of War 2 for the 360, launches Friday.)

In Fallout 3, the destruction is courtesy of a nuclear war. The series is set in an alternative reality that resembles the futuristic imaginings of the Fifties, complete with chunky robots and floating cars with tail fins. In this reality, however, progress screeched to a halt during a shooting war with China in 2077 – five years after the United States annexed Canada, according to an old newspaper headline.

The novel-length story presented in this instalment begins with the birth of your character in 2277, in an isolated underground vault. The attending doctor, voiced by Liam Neeson, is the hero's father, and after a few growing-up scenes he escapes the vault to explore the world outside. Your teen character is forced to leave as well and a long chase through the mutant remnants of humankind follows.

In Fallout 2, the game that ensued was played from a top-down perspective, with a main character about three-centimetres tall on the average computer screen. Here, the radioactive world is three-dimensional and the game is best played much like a typical first-person shooter. It has the same structure as Bethesda's fantasy hit Oblivion in that you travel long virtual distances and interact with a host of characters to put the story together. Much of your time is also spent attending to your character's skills, health and weapons.

When players aren't menu-hopping or stockpiling anti-radiation pills, Fallout 3 layers on the atmosphere. The always-present radio, for example, has two stations that alternate news items about your travels with music. One is run by a group called the Enclave and mixes patriotic speeches with military marches. The other plays Billie Holiday-style ballads and has a progressive host. The developers have piled on details like this, presenting a broad foundation with big themes just waiting to be discovered.

Unfortunately, what takes place on top of that foundation can be disappointing. Many of the encounters with the hundreds of characters scattered through the game feel flat, with dull dialogue and voice acting throughout.

There are dozens of quests and missions to undertake in whatever order you wish, but the action itself often fails to engage. The combat relies heavily on a targeting system that puts everything in slow motion and focuses on exploding body parts, usually a good sign the developers ran out of ideas to make the action interesting.

Since this is a role-playing game, everything improves as you advance your character and there are all kinds of development options, from making him or her a smooth talker to being a gun expert – no two players will have the same hero at the end. But Fallout 3 asks a lot of those players (this thing eats up time like candy) and too often the return is flawed. It is certainly epic in scope and its themes are promising, but after many hours it has offered few truly memorable moments.

The same cannot be said of Resistance 2. Sony has invested a lot in this slick shooter from Insomniac Games and its single-player campaign rolls along like a supercharged sci-fi movie.

It, too, offers an alternative history as aliens have invaded the United States in the early 1950s. This sets off a chain of barely linked action sequences that jump from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge – the warships look almost lovely floating above it in an orange sky – to small-town Idaho and then Chicago and on and on across the ruined States. One view from an impossibly tall tower actually looks like a screen-grab from Google Maps, and to hammer home the overall tone, the phrase “America is Forever Lost” figures prominently on the back of the box.

Themes aside, the appeal is purely visceral as the first-person shooting takes centre stage. There are waves of aliens – some of them shimmering and hardly visible, some big and impressive and still others simply gross – and after each wave is dispatched, the hero lets out a sigh of relief.

That exhalation may be the one sign of real humanity in the game, for Resistance 2 is not about plot or character development: Its real heart and soul are its online modes, including a co-operative campaign and multiplayer battles featuring 60-plus players.

It is, in other words, escapist eye candy with a competitive edge, offering players the opportunity, like Fallout 3, to correct horrendous wrongs from the comfort of their living rooms. That is a formula that has proved to be hugely successful, especially over the past eight years, and it shows no signs of going away.