...For man had succeeded in destroying the world, but war... war never changes. (Fallout 3 (PC))

Member Name: oodlenoodle9

Product:	Fallout 3 (PC)
Date:	16/12/08 (201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Vast world, beautifully created, very cinematic and dramatic and detailed. Strong story.

Disadvantages: Combat slightly dodgy at times, perhaps too violent for some

Emerging blinking into the sunlight after spending the previous 18 years of your existence in an underground vault would be considerable shock to your system at the best of times. Doing so after a nuclear apocalypse and being forced to try and survive in a blasted wasteland full of deadly creatures and deadlier people makes life particularly hard. Pockets of radiation bring on sickness and weird mutations, clean water is almost non-existent, ammunition in short supply and weapons in disrepair. Friends are very hard to come by.

Put simply, life in the world of Fallout 3 is brutal. Bethesda Softworks' latest creation is a far cry from the largely idyllic world of Oblivion, the result being a weird mutant combination of role-playing first person shooter zombie apocalypse survival horror thriller. Something like that anyway.

The basic premise is a bit obvious and predictable, but very well done. The world is similar generally to what we know today but has a few variations, like the fact that despite the year being 2277 culture seems to be stuck in the mid 1900s. The game is based in the surroundings and city of Washington D.C., an area known as "The Capital Wasteland." The city, whilst probably not very like the real Washington D.C., contains all the famous landmarks - the Lincoln memorial, the Capitol building, the Washington monument, a blackened crater where the White House should be. Of course, they are all blasted and ruined, forming creepy silhouettes on the skyline, but they are there should you feel the need you can explore them. Some are friendlier than others.

The dramatic landscape is rendered beautifully by the "Gamebryo" engine, a versatile tool used in the creation of other titles such as Oblivion, Pirates!, Empire Earth and many others. Vivid lighting produced by the day/night cycle plays across the ruined roads and buildings that are scattered across the landscape, trees, stripped of their leaves, are silhouetted black against the stormy sky, animals wretched and hungry slink around looking for food.

Born in Vault 101, you find yourself introduced to this confusing world by a clever tutorial that takes you through your childhood, finally taking an exam to determine your skills and then one day being forced out into the cruel world of sunlight and raiders by a sudden turn of events. You must make a life for yourself amongst the shattered remnants of society - perhaps you will head to Megaton, a shantytown that has sprung up around an unexploded nuclear bomb; perhaps Rivet City, an aircraft carrier aground on the banks of the river that people have made into a safe haven. In reality, missions take you across the whole blasted landscape, and indeed underneath it through a vast network of Metro tunnels and bunkers and other Vaults. Learning the truth about the world which you inhabit from ancient terminals and the few people who remember takes you from one end of the map to the other - exploration being a deadly business but necessary, and random encounters in the starkly beautiful world making for a game that would be accomplished even without the gripping main storyline.

Gamers familiar with the gameplay of Oblivion will see many parallels with Fallout. Firstly the system of levelling up your character as you complete quests/kill enemies/perform tasks such as picking locks is very similar, with main attributes like intelligence and charisma governing lesser skills like your character's ability to sneak, fight with different weapons, or sweet talk his or her way out of a sticky situation. There is also a system of "perks" whereby you can choose from a list of additional abilities, ranging from "Animal Friend" (animals stop attacking you) to "Mysterious Stranger" (a mysterious chap with a .44 Magnum occasionally turns up to blow your enemies into smithereens).

The fact that your character can pick locks, sneak, steal things, the ability to switch from first to third person and even to a certain extent the gait of the characters is all drawn from Oblivion. A major difference is the fact that guns exist in Fallout, and the V.A.T.S. (Vault Assisted Targeting System) is definitely unique.

V.A.T.S. uses up "AP" (whatever that stands for) points to allow your character to effectively slow time and aim carefully at a particular body part of the enemy, leaving the tricky shooting at a potentially moving or far away target to your character. It feels as if it's more designed for console users and their (comparatively!) clunky controllers, but it's pretty damn useful. Each body part has a percentage chance of being hit, and crippling body parts will reduce their effectiveness. You can even shoot a weapon out of your enemy's hands. Kills in V.A.T.S. are cinematic and messy, with bits of enemy getting bloodily blasted in all directions. In fact the whole of Fallout contains a lot of blood - it is spread liberally across the more unpleasant locations (and actually most locations are unpleasant), and dead bodies gruesomely litter the landscape even before you bring your rough justice to bear on the world's inhabitants.

Add to this the joy of being tasked with endless missions exploring dark, dangerous and eerie, normally underground, locations to find information or some useful item and you have a game that needs a fairly strong stomach to play. Overt horror is not the game's main intention, but it's certainly not for the faint hearted. Plenty of times my character has been crouched in the shadows while some enemy searches for her and I've had an almost overwhelming desire to jump up, empty a magazine into said enemy and run yelling from whatever dark hole I had snuck into!

Another nice feature, reminiscent of Oblivion but done by most role players, is the ability to choose what your character looks like and their sex. Fallout does this well - not giving you so many options that you spend five hours making your character and then decide you don't like them anyway, but enough options to make you feel happy with your choice. And if you're not happy, finding the right person in the world can even "reconstruct" your character's face! Sounds like a pleasant operation...

One thing I really like in a game is the ability to zoom out to a third person camera to examine your hard-as-nails character. Fallout does this well - it is perfectly possible to fight and play the game generally in the third person, particularly with the aid of V.A.T.S. (although in certain fighting situations your target can get 'eclipsed' by your body making it darn tricky to shoot) - and they have provided lots of well-designed armours and outfits so you look mean the whole time as well.

Fallout could easily become depressing given its subject matter of gore and death and little hope for humanity. The developers have avoided this skilfully though. For instance GNR or Galaxy News Radio constantly blasts out cheery 40s music and "Three Dog" the DJ gives morale boosting news and public service announcements. Even in the darkest of places you can usually tune in - shooting holes in zombies whilst listening to the crooning of some hilariously outdated singer is incredibly surreal, but somehow helps keep you sane. Indeed the whole game is pervaded by black humour that suits the surroundings perfectly. The levelling up system and organic storyline keeps the repetition of sneaking through yet another dark tunnel to a minimum - something that Mass Effect, another role player vaguely similar to Fallout, seemed unable to avoid. Finally, the promise of returning to humanity after your latest foray into the dark helps to keep you going.

All in all Fallout is a thoroughly engrossing game with a huge area to roam across (I never got as far as the edge of the map) with beautiful graphics and beautifully designed landscapes. A small gripe I have (a problem Oblivion suffered from too I think) is that, as gripping as the story is, it sacrifices some of its depth in order to be organic and allow you to move on to the next 'bit' pretty much whenever you want. Obviously it is a fine line between wanting the freedom to roam and on the other hand wanting to be told a story not asked to write one yourself. Fallout certainly doesn't do the story badly at all, and it is helped considerably by some fabulous voice acting (Liam Neeson plays James, your dad). Frankly this game is a fantastic achievement by all accounts, and deserves the considerable success it has already enjoyed.

The rating differs depending on who you ask, but PEGI gives it 18+, which doesn't strike me as particularly surprising. Funnily enough it was not the plentiful gore but the drug taking that upset regulators - the game was originally banned in Australia until the developers removed the actual animation of injecting/taking drugs, and the name of one of the drugs was changed from morphine to "Med-X". What a crazy world we live in.


-------------------------------------------
Minimum System Requirements
-------------------------------------------

- Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor or equivalent
- 1GB RAM (2 for Vista)
- Direct X 9.0c compliant card with 256MB RAM (NVIDIA 6800 or ATI X850 or better)


------------------------------------------------- --
Recommended System Requirements
------------------------------------------------- --

- Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2GB RAM
- Direct x 9.0c compliant card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA 8800 series / ATI 3800 series)

Summary: -