War. War never changes.
It’s been several years since our last installment of a true fallout game. Fallout Tactics and Fallout Brotherhood of Steel were unsuccessful attempts to whet fans’ appetites while plans for a true sequel fell through. But finally, bethesda releases a true successor, both spritually and numerically.
This game is, in every sense of the word, wonderful.
Deeply immersive from the beginning, this game takes you right back to the ruined world we remember from the days of Vault 13, but this time truly puts you in the shoes of the vault dweller.
I have been told that this game plays a lot like Morrowind and Oblivion, two games that I did not have the privelege of playing very much–but all accounts seem to agree that while similar, Fallout 3 plays a lot better.
There are so many ways to play through the game, it’s ridiculous; and therefore a bit difficult to really get into storyline specifics, but the skinny of it is, you’re in a fallout shelter “Vault,” you get out, you look for your runaway dad, adventure (and possibly hilarity and tragedy) ensues.
They kept the AP based “turn” system, but modified it slightly into something they call VATS, which works extremely well for specifically targeted shots. Or, if you’re a Halo fan, you can go through the entire game as if it were a First Person Shooter. They didn’t make either mode particularly broken, but I am of the opinion that melee weapons are more effective in real time (if you circle-strafe) and firearms are most effective using VATS and targeting specific limbs.
With fully recorded dialogue and obscenely detailed environments and gameplay, it’s really difficult to find negatives about this game. One thing though is that you can’t really go through the game in ‘tard-mode’, which is to say, no dialogue options change into grunts and gestures (like they did in, day, Fallout 2) if youre Intellect stat was 3. Not game-breaking, but it’s a replay option that many people liked. Besides that, my only big gripe is that sometimes corpses vanish before you can loot them in the overworld. Which has happened to me maybe twice out of thirty random encounters. I’ve yet to get stuck, I’ve yet to see something that made me feel like I wasn’t playing Fallout, and I have yet to see something that even remotely made me think that the developers were lazy.
To my surprise, children appear in the game quite frequently, although they are totally immune to gunfire and any other forms of damage and/or abuse. A cheap trick, to be sure, but understandable…they needed to keep sickos from raping and murdering the kids to keep any would-be Jack Thompson Jr.s off their backs. And to be perfectly honest, there is only one kid that I really had the urge to swing my baseball bat at…when he just looked at me and said “quit it” I was ensaddened. 
But hey, there are plenty of other people to murder and loot, am I right? It’s Fallout! And yes, this really is Fallout, in every sense. It feels so right…and I feel so…irradiated.
I am going to be very sad when I finish it, because I don’t want this game to end. I have been lead to believe that Interplay still holds the rights to a Fallout MMORPG, which I don’t know is true or not, but if I could think of any one game right now that, if turned MMO, could be a WoW killer. This is it.
Gametrailers.com has a really cool retrospective special on the Fallout series that is worth checking out if you are even remotely interested in this game’s richness. There’s a lot of history behind it, and no matter how many time you play these games, you’ll always discover something new.
To be Frank, I was excited about Fable 2 as well. Which I’m expecting to be a superb experience as well, but what with my Secret Project and Fallout to keep me busy, I haven’t even wanted to start it yet. Fallout is that good.
Verdict: YES.
