Reviewed on:
Xbox 360Also available for:
PlayStation 3, Windows PC
The Good:
Post-apocalyptic wastelands are stunningly realized. Unique FPS combat delivers gruesomely cinematic action sequences. Engrossing character development system.The Bad:
Character models and facial animations don't quite measure up to those of other top-tier games. Time consuming inventory system can be a drag.The Verdict:
Set it in one of the most dauntingly enormous game worlds yet created, this post-atomic holocaust adventure masterfully combines role-playing smarts with a slick first-person shooter presentation.
I wouldn't want to live in Fallout 3's post-nuclear holocaust future.
For starters, there's not a speck of green to be seen anywhere amid the dilapidated ruins of Washington D.C., save the lime skin of minigun-toting super mutants who wander the wasteland with an aim to kill anything not as deformed as they are.
Worse still, radiation has spoiled almost all food and water supplies, forcing wasteland explorers to inject themselves with rare pharmaceuticals to keep from transforming into diseased ghouls.
And that's saying nothing of the grotesquely enlarged insect population, which includes dog-sized roaches and even bigger ants that breathe fire.
Simply put, it's bad times for all residents. But, my goodness, is it ever a fun place for a gamer to visit.
Irish actor survives World War III, becomes your dad
Fallout 3 sucked me in from the moment my character was birthed into the hands his loving father, voiced warmly and persuasively by Liam Neeson. I'd never taken on the role of a baby before, but I found toddling about the metal-walled rooms of Vault 101, a 200-year-old bomb shelter buried safely beneath the District of Columbia, to be both interesting and strangely agreeable.
As the first half-hour or so of the game progressed, I moved through a series of scenes that led my avatar from toddler to outcast prepubescent to self-assured teen. These formative moments allowed me to select key physical attributes, including gender, hair style, and facial features, and also to distribute character points amongst such traits as intelligence, charisma, and strength.
It was an entertaining, innovative, and decidedly engaging method of producing a role-playing game character.
The world is your irradiated oyster
While I enjoyed the opening minutes, it wasn't until I ventured outside the Vault and into the vast expanse of the Capital Wasteland that I truly began to understand and appreciate what Fallout 3's developer, Bethesda Softworks, had wrought.
Players familiar with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, another of the Maryland-based studio's games, will have some notion of what I mean when I say the scope of Fallout 3 is truly epic. The world, composed of an enormous, seamless outdoor map that stretches out dozens of kilometres in every direction from the Vault, feels real and all but limitless.
I visited townships built out of the ruins of the capital city, with teetering, gutted towers threatening to collapse and obliterate them. I saw many of Washington's most famous landmarks, including the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument (as well as that stretch of ground separating them known as the Mall, which, in the future, has been transformed into a perilous network of trenches and bunkers patrolled by mutants).
And that's to say nothing of the game's countless interior locations set in random buildings, subways, and sewers, which play home to strange survivalist cults and roaming raiders. I even found a highly secure city built within the remnants of an old aircraft carrier.
Point being, ambitious players interested in exploring every nook and cranny of this virtual D.C. will need a hundred hours or more to fully investigate every last location.
Morality meltdown in the post-apocalypse age
