Paradise Falls but will it rise again?

It was with great pleasure that I sat down to play the extra hour of Fallout 3. After the tantalising 30 minute intro with Liza, I was champing at the bit to get out there and get amongst the post apocalyptic goodness. Fallout started way back in 1997 with great success, quickly followed by Fallout 2 and Tactics. In 2003 though, Black Isle died taking the original design of Fallout 3 with it until Bethesda breathed life back into the franchise. So with big shoes to fill I hit Fallout 3 so damn hard it would rattle the teeth of a whale.

Changes from Black Isle to Bethesda - Remove red and green shader, replace with orange

After completing the tutorial I headed into the big bad world. My first impression of the world was wow how cool is this! The crumbling structures and broken ground give the just the right feel of the scope of destruction. Unfortunately, after playing for a while it starts to feel a little drab, so drab in fact that the prospect of seeing some colour would be a pleasant change. It does come from time to time in the form of a toy car or a doll but it is few and far between. I pressed on through the post apocalyptic destruction, looking for my first real fight.

The actual game brought many aspects of the concepts to life, but one thing it left out was colour.

I found it soon enough when I went to a destroyed high school and ran into some raiders. Initially I tried to FPS the fight but soon changed to VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System). This greatly reduced the difficult I had with shooting the incoming bad guys and allowed me to choose where I could shoot them. Not necessarily hit them but I could give it a go without using twitch reflexes. I welcomed this with open arms cause I am by no means a twitch player. Now the thing about the VATS is that when you trigger it after loading your firing configuration, the game goes into slow motion. Far enough, I can handle that the first time, second time too but I started to question the merit of doing it everytime I use the system. I can understand a slow mo for critical hits but please don’t slow it down everytime. Maybe half speed, or even three quarter speed but not slow mo everytime! Another shortcoming of the VATS is that there wasn’t a great deal of advantage with shooting dudes anywhere but the head. Sure you could cripple an arm or a leg but it didn’t have that much of an impact. Wow that super mutant slowed down a little or at least it took 2 extra seconds for that Deathclaw to show me my insides. Occasionally you had the opportunity to shoot a grenade on a guy’s hip or the weapon out of the hand but they were few and far between. And seriously, a sniper rifle should have some fucking range! Other glaring things were odd collision models and bad BSP’s. There is nothing more frustrating than aiming at some dude, then wasting several rounds of precious ammunition, not to mention action points, on blasting away at a door frame. If I can’t hit it don’t let me try to hit it! One final thing about the combat, the animations for NPC reactions to fire is generally good but I do feel that a little bit more variety in the death animations could have made a real different. There are some nice touches where bits of people are spread all over the place but there is something rather odd about severing a guy’s head with a combat shotgun.

Severing heads is fun, but does seem to happen with unjust frequency.

The AI on the whole is good but from time to time it can confound you with some seriously retarded behaviour. I’d expect a super mutant to be dumb enough not to notice a car on fire, soon to explode, but a Brotherhood captain? Also Dogmeat, your faithful canine companion that you may pick up, is as useful as tits on a bull when it come to fighting more than one enemy. I’d have to say Dogmeat’s crowning moment was when he charged into the midst of several super mutants, followed by the massive explosion of a vehicle then the short text saying ‘Dogmeat is dead’. My response, ‘No shit’. Dogmeat now waits for me outside Fault 101, permanently.

I was a little disappointed that the level cap was only twenty but I have to say that when you hit it you can really kick some major arse. There is nothing more satisfying that drilling 3 dudes in quick succession with your assault rifle. But I wasn’t even half way through the main storyline when I hit the cap and I really didn’t seem to have much to look forward with regards to upgrades on my character. You see levelling in FO3 is half the fun for me. I can spend ages weighing up the pros and cons of a new trait I want to pick and where I want to spend my skill points. Once I hit the level cap I missed that fun, until I discovered bobble heads. Perhaps the developer had a higher purpose in mind. With downloadable content being the new thing of our time perhaps as you purchase new content you level cap increases to accommodate this. As I write this review I see that there are several new downloadable packs for FO3 and in each one it talks about a higher level cap. I can only hope that the content scales to the new level.

The collector's edition comes with a RL bobblehead, if you can find one.

Despite a couple of issues, I love this game. A session that should have been an hour turned into eight straight hours of playing. From what I gather you can complete the main story in this time but I went for the complete fallout package of meet and greet the locals. I could crap on about this game for ages but rather than spoil the fun for you guys I’ll recommend that you play it, seriously. I won’t say that this is my favourite fallout, I still think fallout 2 is better with tactics being a close second but I can see this game setting a very high bar for more fallout madness to come. Also, if you haven’t had the pleasure of a fallout experience then this is a good place to start. Don’t forget, if you need a kick of nostalgia or want to see the origins of this baby, then fork out $25 bucks and get the collection of the old ones.

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