Fallout 3 - second review (Xbox 360)

When the unthinkable happened in the year 2077 with USA becoming involved in a short but devastating nuclear war with China, a few fortunate individuals were able to buy a place in a Vault-Tec nuclear shelter. Equipped with all the conveniences you'd expect of a modern home, the survivors could wait in comfort as the fallout faded and then return to the surface to rebuild their lives. That was the plan, anyway. When politics are involved, things are rarely that simple.

Fallout 3 begins with the birth of your character and the subsequent death of your mother through complications in childbirth. A series of playable flashbacks from your life as a child through to your teenage years allow you to define the sort of person you'll grow up to be, whilst reinforcing your duties as a lifetime citizen of Vault 101. Everyone is taught that they're born and die in the vault and that the outside world is uninhabitable and contains nothing of any value. This straightforward life is shattered one day when your father vanishes from the vault, and all hell breaks loose as a consequence. After a chaotic escape bid you find yourself outside in the real word for the first time in your life with no idea of what to do other than to try to track down your missing father and discover why everything you've known since birth appears to be a lie.

Your adventure is set in the vast, post apocalyptic wastelands of Washington DC with parts of Maryland and Virginia. You're dropped into the middle of this ruined landscape and left to fend for yourself, which is a daunting prospect when your life experience is limited to living in a box underground. A quick walk from the vault door over to the nearby cliff edge reveals what appears to be a makeshift town on the horizon, surrounded by crumbling freeway bridges and twisted pylons. It's here in the town of Megaton that your travels begin..

Fallout 3 is the first title in the series to be developed and published by Bethesda Softworks, the creative force behind the Elder Scrolls series, who took the franchise over from Interplay. The top-down turn based strategy of the first two titles has now become real time and played from a first person perspective. It's essentially an action RPG that anyone who has played Bethesdas other next-gen title 'Oblivion' will be instantly familiar with, and revolves around the concepts of skills, perks, inventory management and guns.. lots of guns. Even though you're now able to run and gun, the RPG elements are just as strong as ever.

Your character has attributes in seven key areas, each of which directly affects your abilities in the game ('perception' governs how soon you spot enemies on your scanner, for example) and you also have thirteen skills ranging from medicine and guns to speechcraft. You can nominate three of these skills as 'tag skills' which receive a special bonus and allow you to focus your character's skill in the areas you feel will be the most useful. As your character gains levels you'll be given more points to spend on these skills, and you can also choose one 'perk' per level from a huge list including the ability to find more cash and ammo than usual in stashes, improving your abilities with a particular type of weapon, or even affecting the way you learn to give you more points to spend in the future.

All of this management, along with shuffling your inventory around, consulting maps, tracking mission notes and a pile of other useful functions is carried out through your Pip-Boy, a very cool retro-looking wrist computer that you'll find invaluable throughout your travels. The navigation for the Pip-boy is almost identical to the system used in Oblivion, with categories chosen using the shoulder buttons, and a number of related menus in each. The wealth of information on offer is initially daunting but using the functions becomes second nature in very little time, and the arrangement feels far more focused and streamlined than Oblivion's journals.

That's something that comes across throughout the whole game. I aways felt Oblivion was a little bit pedestrian, with none of the sense of danger or discovery that you got from the previous title, Morrowind. There was never any thrill gained by stumbling across new areas of stories, which can kill an RPG and leave it feeling shallow, but fortunately Fallout 3 fixes all of that with a vengeance. The sheer scale of the devastation in downtown DC is made all the more shocking by the presence of well known landmarks - the Capitol Building, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial (sans head) and the White House, which is now little more than a radioactive crater. The play area is absolutely huge, and often complicated by the need to use unorthodox methods like sewers and the abandoned metro system to gain access to areas blocked off by debris. With over 200 square miles of landcape plus lots of buildings, tunnels and facilities that can take up to an hour to fight through, you won't be short of exercise.

At some point during all of that walking you'll come across various characters getting on with their lives, and almost all of them can be communicated with to a surprising degree. Many will have their own stories to tell, which may raise the possibility of carrying out a side quest, and the depth of the information of offer and the quality of the voice acting is brilliant throughout. There are around a hundred quests in total including the main story ones, and a lot of these will have you running all over the map in search of people, information or resources so you have a lot of potential gameplay in front of you. I'm informed that you can grind through the main story quests in around 20hrs, but if you do that you're completely missing the point.. and most of the game.

Of course, talking doesn't always solve the problem, especially when that problem is a giant mutant scorpion or a team of Talon Company mercs with a contract to kill you. The combat element is where Fallout 3 really comes into its own, with two distinct approaches to reducing things to tiny pieces. Run and gun fans can treat combat like any other FPS and hone their manual targeting skills, but the more tactically inclined can use a system known as V.A.T.S. which freezes the game and allows precise selection of targets, equipment and various body parts with a percentage chance of hitting each displayed alongside. A very similar system was used in the old Playstation RPG Vagrant Story, but not implemented anywhere near as well. The player only has a limited number of points to spend in every V.A.T.S. session (which recharge when not being used) and different guns require different amounts of points per shot so there's always a balance to be struck between risking that one killer shot, or going for less damage but more chances of hitting. You'll occasionally get a critical hit, especially if the enemy didn't see you coming, and this does a lot more damage so stealth is another possible angle to consider during attacks. You'd imagine that V.A.T.S might kill off the spontaneity of the combat, but it works like a treat and there's a lot to be said for queueing attacks and thinking about how best to use your armoury rather than just blasting away with the first gun that springs to hand. V.A.T.S does apply a penalty of sorts by causing your guns to wear out faster, so it all remains nicely balanced. Be aware that the combat is intensely violent and gory with no punches pulled, so steer clear if you're of a sensitive disposition.

It's possible to tell you all this about how well the game plays, but what a review can't get across is the suspense, fear and thrill of making your way through such a vast range of possibilities and discoveries, all set against an incredible backdrop. Walking through a wrecked city with no idea of where you're going, or what might be waiting for you is an amazing experience, made even sweeter by the incredible attention to detail and the richness of the backstory and characters. The images on this page are all actual screenshots, and they're more than matched by the quality of all the in-game audio. Fallout 3 is a true voyage of discovery and plays almost too well for words. It's without a doubt the greatest RPG I've ever played, and I'm still walking the wastelands and uncovering new twists to the story more than 50 hours in. If you're even vaguely inclined towards RPGs or have yet to be convinced that games can be an artform, you owe it to yourself to play Fallout 3. It's one of the few next-gen masterpieces, and will be remembered as a turning point in the history of RPGs.

10/10