Fallout 3 for the pc

Story

The main story follows along the path of “Unknown event leads to quest into an unknown land of unknown-ness”, pretty generic fantasy stuff.
You live in a vault, an under ground safe house from nuclear war. The problem with your vault is no one can leave, no one can enter.
So when your father ups and leaves town, you get mighty suspicious. So naturally you have to break out as well.

In the beginning part of the game is where you create your character, you have a wide variety of options you can pick for colour, size, shape, hair style and a very impressive selection of beards. As you grow up you pick what abilities you want to do well in, get the necessary “here is how to aim” tutorials and the general stuff you get in rpgs, the set up before everything goes wrong with the world.

From then it becomes like Oblivion, you are left with a wide expanse with no real idea what to do next. You can wander the wastes slowly gathering the stuff you need or you can get help from local townsfolk. It is pretty much left up to you. As with Oblivion you can go many routes, evil or good. As they had to shove in the karma system from previous fallouts somewhere, they put it mainly what you do during quests. Along with random pickpocketing or general slaughter of innocent bystanders. Being good generally puts you at a disadvantage, less money, weaker guns, silly hats etc etc but in return people look up to you, they offer information more freely, they will give you random items randomly, sadly most of the time it is a piece of fruit that tips you over your weight limit so you can barely walk anymore while they walk happily off knowing that they have helped you.

One giant major flaw in the game is its end story, which is it ends the game period. No more wandering about after finishing it. Which is a bit strange, you could wander about after finishing Oblivion, you could wander about after finishing Fallout 1& 2. So why force the player to reload the game before the end? Who knows.

Game play

The meat and bones of the Oblivion engine is its vast open environments, where you can spend 90% of the game getting lost and back tracking. Thankfully in Fallout 3 the area of the world map is a lot smaller, sadly they didn’t think to reduce the number of enemies to fit the smaller map. You will get terrorized by dogs, bandits and even robots quite frequently. Which makes short dashes to key locations a big pain sometimes, especially when ammo is low. Making you use the teleport or ” go to ” feature of the pipboy more often then not later in the game.

Stats and stuff, the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system returns, or to those not in the know, strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. If only life could be governed by such a system.
You have a certain amount of points to distribute between them all, if memory serves me right it’s 40. Enough to be mediocre in all by 1 field of slightly better then mediocre in more then a single field. Now these stats govern nearly everything, or should really. You “AP” or action points is governed by agility, the more you have the more you can do in vats before sitting like a rubber ducky waiting for them to recharge. Strength naturally governs melee attacks and the weight you are allowed to carry, intelligence governs you science and medical ability so on and so forth.  The main downside to S.P.E.C.I.A.L is that if you pick the wrong stats, you are stuck with them and when you need to do something sneaky and find that you were 1 agility point off from being able to do it then it can become annoying. The wide selection of skills you can “specialize” in, and improve with the levels you earn do help with, but again wrong fields chosen can come back to bite you. So pick wisely traveler.

Combat is most of the time fun, with aid of the vats system. You can laugh as enemy heads pop off their shoulders like they were only held there with some dodgy second hand sticky tape. There is a wide variety of weapons available to you, some only can be obtained by making them, which require a high enough repair skill. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, laser pistol, laser rifles, mini guns, rocket launchers, grenades, mines are all present. Tho don’t try to use mines with VATs, it doesn’t end well. Most of the time it just feels that you are over powered. Being able to take on say a super mutant (giant green things of pain and death) single handily is okay, but against a herd of them and winning is slightly mad. Especially if 2 of them have mini guns.

You monsters, you darned monsters you gone and messed it all up!

On the pc it runs quite well, steady 30-40 fps on high settings out of doors, 60-80 while in the towns. Looks quite good, no real hitches, tho if you have random crashes, try turning off AA (anti-aliasing) as it tries to do the sum of divide by 0 and naturally falls over. As for the consoles, only the PS3 I know has some framerate issues, but for both console releases it is quite well done.

Also the modding program has just been released for the pc along with the first expansion mission. Which I have yet to play but intend on doing so in the near future.

Pros:

Great side quests
Wide variety of death dealing weapons
Great music
Detailed landscapes
Humour is rampant, very well written
Replay value to see other outcomes is quite high
A gun that can shoot teddy bears that can do enough damage to kill super mutants………..with teddy bears!
DOGMEAT!!!!!!!

Cons:

Story ends the game
Characters repeat a bit too frequently
“Helpful” gifts from citizens push you over your weight limit
VATs makes it way too easy
Multiple plays needed, but with the length of the initial segment, a bit too tedious to do shortly after completing it for the first time.
Same issues as the Oblivion engine, not a lot of work done to it
Due to the engine, can cause motion sickness
Not enough references to other games and media, tho dogmeat still remains and the leather jacket still makes you look like mad max.

and if you don’t get the dogmeat reference, I am ashamed of you.