Toronto – If you had asked me to envision Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s brother I would have said it can be no more enticing than a disfigured midget orc painted in a horrible color palette. Seriously, who wants to play as elves that look hideous and the other races and NPC that were scrawny walking, oozing pus-bags? Ugliness does not equal realism. I also had to work with a stamina system that depletes for no apparent reasons. Put that factor in and now the games sounds like: ugly old grannies from the first hut of the game beats the shit out of my more ugly convitct while he/she is sprawled unconciously on the ground and every other exchange is so frustratingly dice-based and the game world so immense for no possible practical rationale that I might as well be playing paper D&D. Enter Fallout 3 which, to be fair, wasn’t Bethesda’s game to mess up. Interplay had already screwed up in Fallout 2 a decade ago. Bethesda injected a dose of their experience on the Elder Scroll games. And out of all the warm, composting fecal matter came something definitively pristine and enjoyable. Wow.
And that’s probably as far as you should read this review: it is insanely long. The rest will consist of verbal description of this awesome-ness. First off, Fallout 3 is NOT ugly. Here, you will actually wish to see your character’s Asian/African/Hispanic/Caucasian face. So, character creation for me was a rewarding process which took 45 minutes while the game pretends baby Lone Wanderer is being born. The initial tutorial was a good rump through the ropes of the game with the Wanderer as a toddler. But be forewarned – the VATS system is never officially introduced. I’ll get into this later.
The story states that you live quietly in a fallout shelter vault. The vault administrator is a psychotic control-freak but the alternative is a harsh world outside where you need to tread each step carefully or not at all. When you found out your father has secretly left the vault, your “best friend” advises you to get-the-freak-out or my-administrator-daddie-will-pulvarize-you to make an example, there really isn’t an option. So you leave and fend for yourself. If you have the hardwares, you are dropped into a vivid and beautifully wasted landscape – the Capitol Wasteland. See the pics for reference – the soot, the fog, night times with creepy-crawling supermutants, it’s all very pretty. And the sounds are pretty interesting, too. Killing green giants while crooners sing out lavishly “I. don’t. want to set the world. on. fai-R…” is refreshing the first time, but gets tiring soon. But first thing to learn in the wasteland is to duck – reduce visibility and increased safety. I spent the first 60 minutes crouched in a tool shed wondering how to get rid of 2 dogs, a mutant rat and a raider. I had to accurately hit the dogs’ head to drop them in two shots and get to more cover, or else the raider will drop ME on the third. And here’s why it was hard for me – I didn’t know about VATS. Akin to Vagrant Stories (which I’m sure very few people have even heard of), Fallout 3′s VATS is a body-parts targetting system. It also pauses the game to let you figure out which limb to dismember, and doubles as a binocular view. So, no, Fallout 3 is not to be played like Crysis, although it can be as intense as the other especially at lower levels, as you wonder if you should drop your enemy’s gun, cripple him, or go for the headshots.
As you progress through the game, since this game mascarades as an RPG, you can spend XP on skills that determines your effectiveness on different weapon types, speech/barter, lock-picking, etc. I found all but Small Guns or Energy Weapons, Lockpicking and Sneaking completely irrelevent. Regardless of your playing style, you will find larger weapons (the Big Guns) have too few ammo scattered around to be very useful. The Fatman mininuke can actually splash the Lone Wanderer and when I had to use it, I always end up gibbing myself. The Melee weapons max out at a certain damage and the strongest one (Shishkebab, a flaming sword) blows you up when there’s a gas leak (love those wavy lensing effects though). Since VATS is used a lot you can sniper anything if you have the stats. And if you want to be a karate kid, well, be my guest. Walk up to a Deathclaw and see if that’s your cup of cake (chances are… NO.)
If you don’t feel like doing your own dirty work, you can hire henchmen for it. Technically, you can only have one at a given time. But with some well-known tricks you can get up to 3 or 4. The tricks are easy enough – (a) get a dog called Dogmeat or a robot henchmen, kill it and then get more people (b) certain dialog sequence (c) fire and hire people without losing sight of them. For all your work, it makes the game that much harder. Yes, HARDER. With all that henchmen, you are unlikely going to get much XP (you need to do >50% damage on each target). So the more henchmen you get, the slowly you are likely to progress in levels, which caps off at 20. Which is also why I said Melee playing styles are useless – you’ll never beat Charon’s shotgun bullets to your targets and they’ll die and you’ll wonder why you gave away 150 XP. Some of the best weapons, though, are not from the stores. This is the wasteland, so a little McGyver knowledge goes a long way. These include the afore-mentioned Shishkebab, a dart gun that cripple anything that walks, a rifle that shoots impaling spikes, and a suction machine that shoots everything else that’s not a gun. Personally, I prefer the Lincoln Repeater and A-350′s plasma rifle, both of which are one-shot-kill at higher levels and work like snipers.
I find the story interesting, but surprisingly linear. Yet once you get out of the Vault, you can go anywhere, shoot anyone, and do whatever you wish. The result of letting people get non-linearly through a linear plot, is that very often you skip entire sections of the story because it is no longer of any consequence. For example, my brother played through it and skipped entire sections of the game and made it obsolete by unknowingly taking on tasks that wasn’t to be found yet. To give you an idea how much side-quests there are – I was Level 16 before I finish the second objective of the story. And this is where Oblivion-esque size is well-appreciated. There’s simply tonnes of sewer, derelict buildings, shacks and power stations to run though. The NPCs are usually colorful, too. Make the drudgery of level grinding and RPG fetch quests that much more fun.
I think I will end with: Fallout 3 is a time sink. It does not give them back. But it does give you a taste of post-apocalyptic North America. We need to figure out what the annexed Canada looks like in the next game…
