Fallout was a fun RPG series that allowed you quite a few different opportunities to either be the good guy or be a total asshole for fun. The premise for the series is simple. Nuclear war happened and now most of the land in the United States is an irradiated desert wasteland. Think Mad Max.
Fallout 3 is the newest installment to the series, and in some ways it is one of the best. In other ways, it really isn’t anything special. To start, the graphics of the post-apocalyptic world are gorgeous, even though most of the world you’re going around in is largely just ruins, charred trees, desert wasteland and the Potomac River, which can give you radiation poisoning.
The gameplay can be a bit unforgiving because of the fact that quite a few things can up your radiation count and if you get too high a radiation level you’re dead. Also if you don’t play nice until you’re strong enough, towns will try to kill you. Though, as stated earlier, you can be an ass. You just have to be willing to pay the consequences, which can be pretty much anything from people just shunning you to people outright trying to kill you.
The story is pretty cool. You were brought up in Vault 101, though you and your father think you both have been there pretty long due to brainwashing by the overseer. One day your dad escapes the vault, and you have to break out of a vault on lockdown with security personnel who are armed to the teeth hunting you relentlessly. You follow the trail to the town of Megaton, and then the story pretty much goes in quite a few different directions, due to side quests and the main quest. Some of these storylines include the complete destruction of the town of Megaton.
The world is a wide open one, with a lot of gameplay possibilities, so replayability is pretty much on par with massive games like Morrowind or Oblivion from the Elder Scrolls series. Due to the size of the area, unless you have no life while gaming, there is no way you’ll be able to see and do everything. However, there is one small problem with the endings. They don’t show the effects of your decisions. I mean you might help a town prosper but you really don’t see that. You might kill an entire town, then again, if you do that you already know what the future of that town is: either resettlement or a mass grave. The game has about four endings, each pretty much saying whether you were a good guy who was virtuous, a good guy who lacked certain virtues, a virtuous prick or just a prick who didn’t care who he stole from or killed. So the endings can be a bit anti-climatic. There is also a distinct lack of real boss battles where there are multiple opportunities to kill a big high level bad guy. Then again, they were focusing on building up the story, so I really can’t complain about that.
Honestly this game is a good buy. It’s a bit quirky in terms of some aspects of the game, but based off of other recent releases, this is where your money would be best spent if you have a high-powered gaming rig of a PC, an Xbox 360 or a PS3.