Main story: a Bloody Mess or a Capital Waste?
This feeling lingers as you begin to explore. You soon get your first 10 mm pistol, which you'll want to hug after all those years. You'll soon find the hunting rifle. You'll pick up Jet and Psycho and ammo off the corpses of raiders who look incredibly close to what you remember from the first 2 Fallout games. You'll probably use VATS to kill them.
The VATS system is fun, although it's not nearly as fun for melee weapons, since you can only aim for the entire enemy, which seems weird and kind of defeats the purpose of having VATS system in the first place. But I guess to be fair the real purpose of VATS here is pausing the action, which is kind of a lukewarm praise. You get time to catch a breath and you save ammo with the precision shooting, but the usefulness of shooting body parts is limited. There won't be any eyes or groin shots; and crippled limbs will give the enemy pause, but I was disappointed to see a super mutant recover and run towards me after I busted his knee cap, or to see him still be able to shoot when I crippled his shooting arm, or to aim when I turned his face into a busted jar of marinara sauce. Shooting at the weapon is viable when you see a missile launcher or a minigun pointed at you, but it's not life-saving and you will probably achieve the desired results faster by just shooting at the heads, which often seem so unhappy with the shoulders supporting them, they're just looking for an excuse to fall off. After a while I actually began treating corpses with head still on them as special achievements.
But back to the beginning and the awe. The wind howling and blowing the swirling dust clouds across a broken highway, the sound of your boots, the skeleton of a bridge to the right and the mangled Washington monument far ahead to the East. Don't look for tilesets and textures, just look around. It's beautiful.
Of course, it's not a painting, it's a game. Looking at it is not enough. We need something to do. Well, there's plenty of that here, although you may find the pace a bit slow in the beginning and the story a bit retarded throughout.
Yes, the story is the main problem in Fallout 3, especially later on, when it truly begins to get silly. Following a tradition started in Oblivion, Bethesda proved once again that it's very possible to create an incredibly detailed world, full of interesting locations, characters, items, background lore and side quests, that it's in fact possible to even capture the feel of such a game as Fallout, and at the same be unable to weave a compelling tale. If you thought Oblivion's story was weak, reach the ending here and weep. It's annoying on so many levels it needs to be experienced without spoilers. Even Ron Perlman won't cheer you up. I'll say one thing, though. After it ends, unlike Oblivion, the game will not let you back - another annoyance - no matter the outcome of the story, so make sure to save. And another thing, this one a good news, as annoyed as I was with having to live through that finale and then with having to reload the game from an earlier spot, it was surprisingly easy to shake it off and get right back into exploring the wasteland, of which, having spent over fifty hours, I still covered less than half.
Now that I got that off my chest, let's return to what is good about Fallout 3. The exploration, the side quests, the loot, the weapons. The map is smaller than Oblivion, but good folks at Bethesda seem to have crammed about ten times more locations into it, and there are plenty of cool items to look for and cool characters to encounter. The characters will give you quests that are put together better than the main story, although that, as I've mentioned, is not saying much. It also needs to be said here that some of the story shortcomings mentioned above leak into character interaction. For example, a mild spoiler here: a certain computer character will gladly undo everything it did for the last couple of hundred years following a total of about four lines of simple - if not dumb - dialogue choices. Another notable absent is the humor of the original games. People are rude, but they aren't funny. There are amusing moments here and there, but on the whole the capital dwellers are a lot more uptight and less imaginative than their Californian brethren.
But trust me, most of the quests are fun. The loot is also fun. There may be actually too much of it. I have two lockers full: one of weapons and ammo I've collected which I am not going to use, the other of random items I thought were cool.
You will meet characters whom you may talk into joining you. The most famous and heavily marketed of these, Dogmeat, actually becomes a bit of a hassle as you level up, as he always gets targeted first and frequently dies, forcing you to reload. I ended up leaving him at the house late in the game (you get a house and you can buy items to, if not customize it, then at least fill it with). When I came back later, a much more capable Super Mutant in tow, the dog was gone. Don't know what happened to him, but I'm sure he'll turn up at some point, maybe in the sequel.
The combat, aside from what's already been said about VATS, is pretty decent. The slow-mo animations rotate and don't really get old no matter how many times you've seen them. The enemies aren't super bright, but they display semi-smart behavior: they duck behind cover, toss nades, and retreat from you if you try to rush them. There are mines and bear traps to step into. Old cars catch fire and trigger small thermonuclear explosions, which are pretty neat, if improbable. Even Fat Man, a mini nuke launcher advertised early in the campaign, isn't as cheesy as I thought it would be. It's actually about the only decent weapon against a certain creature you'll meet and also fun to shoot. There's also a good arsenal of less goofy unique weapons in the game, and on top of that you can make weapons yourself after buying or discovering blueprints.
Besides combat you will engage in such minigames as lock picking and hacking, both of which are a lot more fun "in person" and add significantly to the overall feel of the game. In fact, I got more feedback on my character's improvement from two of those skills than from countless shootouts.
All right, so as not to turn this into something that takes you as long to read as it will take you to finish the game, I'll be wrapping up.
Fallout 3 is most definitely a Fallout game, although it's not up to the level of its predecessors. There's a lot to enjoy here: the atmosphere, the wonderful nuclear desert and the mysteries it conceals, the loot, the side quests. I'll continue exploring it myself, as I picked up the explorer perk at level 20, which reveals all the locations on the map. And I just now visited Bethesda ruins for the first time.