It's a big world out there but some things may Bug you
The game's story takes place in 2277 after a nuclear apocalypse and focuses on you, a nineteen year old, who's ma dies while giving birth and you live with your dad in Vault 101.The game's character creation and tutorial is cool because it's part of the story(though when replaying, reload at the part where you escape the vault cause you can reset all your stats there and won't have to worry about going through the 45min tutorial) and you can customize your gender,race and your face in multiple ways. After that you get to choose which attributes(from 7) and tagged skills(from 13, and they evolve as you kill enemies to level up and add skill points) you want though mostly focusing on guns and repair should do the trick and unfortunately the unarmed skill is pretty useless. Soon after dad escapes you're forced to leave into the Capital Wasteland(which is a stunning sight) and look for him.He could be under that rock there,or husk of a tree here and yes if you look hard enough you can find him that way,however if you're a story kind of person the game has a nice clean story for you to follow to get to him.The story isn't so long and starts off slow but gets more interesting during the second half, though it feels a bit rushed because playing the evil way wasn't well thought out and the final battle's too easy!
The Wasteland's is a hostile place filled with a nice variety of creatures from mutants,other wild things and Raiders (while these guys are sentient, it's unfortunate that they are always hostile to you)so you'll be doing a lot of combat.Despite the FPS looks,the combat engine uses "die rolls" to determine whether you hit the Mark, so its very clunky, though they improve as you improve your skills.You also have VATS which is really a special mode that uses action points that allows you to pause the game, aim for an enemy hit box(the chance of hitting it depends on its distance from you and your skills) and watch yourself destroy it.If you like juvenile death scenes(disintegrating people into goo is fun),than VATS will be your friend, however having to pause and watch clunky gore animations can get rather tedious, and the fact that you can't take advantage of melee weapons here is sad. Another problem with combat is that enemies are rather dumb,just standing and shooting and you'll end up getting plenty of fights with one enemy that can even survive a mini-nuclear bomb and they're annoying(Not hard). Enemies in factories also respawn after a day which is annoying and as you level up you'll go from meeting weaklings (eg dogs)to tougher enemies(eg albino rad-scorpions)in the wasteland.Still combat is fun(at least before plenty of damage sponge enemies take over) because there are strategic advantages to hitting different body parts and there are all kinds of cool weaponry.
There are plenty of side-quests to do and "dungeon" like areas to explore. The sidequests are offered by the weird people you meet and have multiple ways to finish and this is the fun part of the game as they are usually varied and being able to talk your way out of situations, or hack a computer to avoid the fearsome firefights depending on your skills is very satisfactory and allows some openendedness in the game(and these tactics can also be applied in other situations) and this also makes the game replayable. You may also be forced to make a morality choice in the game and the fact that the writing does try to tackle the big ideas which gives some drama to them though some of the ideas in the game(such as cannibalism,drug addiction) have been treated rather simplistically and its sad that you can't join,say raiders and the game blocks some pretty cool options.Still the choices do have meaningful consequences that go beyond the karma bar, which in this game is really useless. Apart from sidequests you can be creative and cause mayhem in settlements and if you do observe hard enough cool opportunities may pop up(buy the girl a drink, you never know!). Talking to people is also fun as the dialogue can be funny and the characters always have something to say, though your choices can be pretty narrow, even feeling as if the game's forcing words into your mouth and the game has censored some things.
The graphics do look neat when it comes to the environments(texture clipping and pop in do happen) and things you drop stay for long periods of time but character models and animations look awfull!Sound effects are also cool however the music is a mixed bag with the radio stations being cool to listen to(until they start repeating) and some of the ambience tunes sound nice but the combat music is awful, doesn't fit the game at all!The voice acting is also ok, there are some great moments but there's just not enough emotion(partly due to the poor animations) and they do end up repeating. The biggest problem of the game though is that it glitches. As you keep on playing and your memory space grows bigger it will start freezing a lot and expect the game to slow down terribly in rough situations. The game also has stupid happenings, expect a town to get slaughtered because enemies spawn near them and people don't seem to react even if something bizarre happens around them. The freezes are terrible to the point where they might ruin the game for you so be careful.
Overall Fallout 3's a game with issues but it has some charm into it.Though there are similarities to "Oblivion" and it can be quite different from previous Fallouts(some skills were changed and were downright dropped for example),the game is great fun when your creative and has interesting ideas thrown into it and add the free expansion packs and it's mark gets raised a bit for me!!