This game gave me a feeling I have never had from a video game.
This, first of all, has a tremendous amount of gore in it, limbs being detached, (as well as heads) and sometimes the V.A.T.S. (which I will get into later) will actually do a slow motion zoom following the bullet, then following the head rolling on the floor. Amazing.
Okay, so you are in a world with your dad, and then he leaves you, so you go out to find him. That is the oversimplified version, and I don't want to tell anything more than that, especially because if you are reading a review of it, you probably haven't played it yet.
You leave your little vault area, and when you step out the view is breathtaking. It is so overwhelming and so enormous that I literally spent the first five minutes of the game just looking around from the door of the vault itself.
The gameplay is fairly challenging at times, as it is a shooter where the shots is far from always accurate. The game has a V.A.T.S. system, which basically is when you pause the game, and click on the body part you want, each labeled with a % that tells likeliness to hit it. At a first read it may seem a little bit odd, but these are actually by far the most satisfying sequences of any firefight, and may be the most exciting part of any video game I have ever played.
The way the game works is that ultimately, the stats of the gun outweigh your stats to use it or your level. The better the gun, the better you can kill. Your personal stats, which are built up in typical Role-playing fashion, dictate numerous things, including how efficient you are with a gun. The whole system works very well, and I was a little skeptical when reading about it online myself.
If you have played Oblivion, you will know that every character had speaking parts. You also have the option of responding to the characters any way you want to, and have more freedom in completing quests, with there being the occasional time you could lie about completing a quest. There are perks which allow the player to get different ways of interacting, such as the Black Widow perk, which is gender based, and allows for men to be seduced into giving up things such as money to your character.
The game, if you haven't figured out, is excellent. What makes it a 9.0 and not a 10.0 is that the game doesn't give you the option of fighting with or against the main force in the game; you can be the most evil character and the the most angelic character ever to grace the Wasteland and either way will fight with the Brotherhood of Steel, (the good guys) for the main quest. If the player could join factions, (such as the Brotherhood or the Enclave), and have different endings based on his decisions, then this game would be a 15.