Very Entertaining and Totally Immersive Modern RPG (July 2010 Update - now even better with the Game of the Year edition
One of the reasons I finally finished when I did instead of exploring more was they do cap your experience level at 20, which I reached about 80% of the way thru the game, so I wasn't getting any further fun from gaining experience the last few hours of play. Kind of a bummer but I can understand why they did that - to sell you the expansion packs that will lift this higher.
I have to say as a veteran of the original 2 Fallouts, I really enjoyed their take on the fighting mechanics, and really enjoyed the VATS system complete with slo-mo video and bell ringing sound effects. Very cool. For those whining about how it's not the same as the old Fallouts, I suggest you go back and play the old games. I did and was surprised at how slow-paced the old games were. I could never play a game like that now. I happy to see the changes they made.
In summary, I thought this game was fantastic. My only complaint was there was a little too much reliance on using the same looking subway tunnels to get from one location to another. It was a little too overdone. I would have liked to see them make the map smaller, than to rely on repeating the same subway sequences over and over again to make it seem bigger.
I was very lucky to play 2 back to back fantastic RPG games on my PS3 in the last few months, first Bioshock and now this. I'm looking forward to part 2 of both of those.
July 2010 - UPDATE - Just finished replaying thru the "Game of the Year" edition on my X360 and have to say it makes the game even better to have all the DLC collected into one package. I finally put the controller down well over 120hrs into the game, hitting the new 30 level cap hours ago. And there is still MORE TO DO!! Amazing game. I'm going to bump my original 9.0 score to 9.5 for this version.