Fallout 3 Review

Amidst the myriad of reviews heaping praise onto Fallout 3, you have now stumbled upon one of the few (if not only) dissenting views about Fallout 3. I do not say this to be contrarian or to be edgy like some emo chick at a party, but I honestly did not like this game. Like some crazy man shouting at the sea in the hopes of keeping the tide out, I intend to take a stand against this game and hopefully present my point of view in a manner that might make you save your $50 for another game. Okay, so let me just strap on my helmet to prepare for probably the entire friggin gaming community to dog pile me, and lets get into this.

My biggest problem in the entire game is the VATS system even if I do understand the reasoning behind having it in an RPG-based game which was going to multiple platforms. Essentially, this VATS system lets you target areas of whatever you want to die. Do you want to shoot off the super mutants arm? Well then bring up VATS, choose his arm and start shooting. In fact, if there are multiple targets you can switch between targets to maybe take down multiple bad guys at once. In an RPG this makes sense but the execution, I feel, is flawed. Each time you use VATS the game stops and zooms in to the target breaking up the flow of the game. Then, once you chose your target limbs to blow off the target, there’s a super slo-mo camera shot of the action as your weapon fires. While some cinematic camera tricks would be fine every once in a while in a game, having this happen every single time I got into a firefight became tedious. Add to the fact that I think the body count I generated was somewhere between the population of Toledo and Pittsburgh, having VATS continually act like the Matrix after about the 100th kill became tiresome.



Of course one alternative would be to not use VATS (like a real man should) but from my playing, I do not think that would be possible. The issue is the amount of critical hits one gets when in and out of VATS. While in VATS your chance of getting critical hits seemed to be higher than if I did firefights like a normal run-and-gun shooter. This is especially important since when I started out in the game, getting ammo for weapons (at least when trying to be a Wasteland Messiah and not stealing everything that was not nailed down) was often more important than health or water so making every hit count and thus using VATS became a mandatory step in getting through a firefight and having some ammo left for the next firefight. Personally, I would have preferred keeping all this chance to hit and critical hit dice rolling RPG garbage in the background more like Knights of the Old Republic did and let me focus on the true purpose of a game like this which is to get through the story and side quests.

To segue to the story, that is another thing which struck me as odd about this game: the side quests were more interesting and more rewarding than the primary story. The biggest thing to know about the Fallout 3 universe is that it is a big sandbox where you can just wander around from place to place (I visited about 90 locations total and I’m guessing I missed about 50) finding or stealing stuff, mostly to up your level enough to get through the final storyline. In effect, the side quests are for level grinding and for once that level grinding is more fun and than the main storyline.

The main storyline, once I got back on track after wandering around for about 45 hours of gameplay, takes probably 2 hours to complete on its own. The most infuriating part of it is the same trick that has been used since Half-Life 1; right when you get to a key point in the game, the mysterious person shows up, knocks you out and whips you away to their ultra super secret layer for the climatic showdown or to finally reveal the big secret. Really, Bethesda, that is where you took it? Ran out of ideas did you? Maybe next time give the bad guy a black top hat and curly mustache to roll his fingers around will you? Right when I am m juiced up and ready to fight my way out of this one building, the bad boss shows up, knocks me out and I am somewhere else.

Oh and to sweeten that deal I lost my NPC who had been serving as my fire support and pack mule. Thanks guys, just lost probably 600 credits worth of weaponry and armor. It cheapens everything I just did and then the big secret is not all that interesting anyway. To its credit though, the running street fight at the end was top notch, worthy of some high praise even if I did not have to do much during the fight with all the teammates running around killing everything in sight.

Graphically the game really reflects a true wasteland with the primary colors being gray, brown, and blood but while that might be correct it is also awfully boring especially when your primary mode of transportation is your own feet so you get to wander the landscape for hours on end and only have those three colors to keep you company. Again, as I put forth in a review of Aliens v. Predator 2 so many years ago, there are color wheels out there that you can get, please use them and discover the wonder of other colors like blue, yellow, and anything else but brown.

So, I guess let us sum up here and call it a day. I did not like the combat system as it seems skewed towards using the VATS system, I did not like the main storyline which pulls a few too many bait and switches, and the color palette was something you could get off of an old 3-color RGB monitor. Oh yes, and the ending is complete shit. The street fight up to the end is great but I think the devs saw they were running of drive space to cram all this game onto one DVD for the consolers and just said, Okay, wrap it up, we only got 100Megs left. No it does not matter what happens, just finish up the story as cheaply and quickly as possible. All those hours of work for an ending like that? It was like having sex with a supermodel then she snaps off your privates with her privates. Very anti-climatic.