Unrewarding game that does a few things decently.
+ The V.A.T.S. targeting system is neat. It's something fresh and unexpected from a shooter, especially from an RPG. The ability to shoot at specific body parts gives you a small degree of strategy in combat.
+ The story in Vault 101 is really interesting. The whole idea of your progress from an infant to an adult is a fun way to start the game.
+ The gore is pretty brutal.
- Okay, the visuals are stunning. But that doesn't count for crap in this case, because the whole game is just one destroyed wasteland. If you've seen one destroyed building, you've seen them all. Not to mention the blatant lack of different enemies. It's just one Super Mutant after another, and after a while, shooting them quickly loses its charm. The lack of interesting enemies is appalling, considering the work put into the monsters from Oblivion.
- V.A.T.S. gets boring. It's far too inaccurate at any range greater 20 feet, yet your enemies can pick you off from afar like they were trained snipers in the Marine Corps. After about an hour, V.A.T.S. gets old. Plus, if you run out of Action Points, no more V.A.T.S. for you. You're meat in a shark tank.
- Once you leave the Vault, the story gets drawn out, and you lose sense of what you're doing. The main story quickly becomes tedious, unrewarding and all around not worth doing. For hours on end, I was on a wild goose chase, searching for my character's father all across the Wasteland. Each person I encountered had something that they needed help with, and then they sent me on my way to another pointless task. I would say you lose sight of your final goal, but I never really felt like I had a final goal.
- The combat system worked very well for Oblivion. The fast paced action was intense, and really fun. Unfortunately, it doesn't translate to Fallout. The controls feel heavy and clunky, and it just isn't fun. If you actually want to hit something this century, then aiming precisely slows your movement to a rate that a snail would laugh at, making you a sitting duck to the enemies with the ability to thread a needle from 50 feet away.
- The conversations (if you can even call them that) have been reduced from entertaining to 'wait until prompted to select an answer'. Answers will have an effect on your Karma, but other then that, no matter what you say, you're still going to get the same outcome of each one. The conversations in Oblivion were engaging, with each character having a unique personality for you to discover. The characters in Fallout are pretty much cardboard cut-outs that tell you where to go next.
For the first while, Fallout 3 is relatively enjoyable. But once you get into it, you realize that all the cool parts are just shiny trinkets that the developers dangled in your face for years. This is a bad direction for Bethesda to be headed. If you MUST play this game, rent it, don't buy it. I can almost guarantee that you'll get bored of it very quickly, and will be playing something else by the end of the week.