Fallout 3 takes you to a post-nuclear war wasteland of what was downtown Washington D.C. in this terrific game.
GAMEPLAY
Fallout 3 is simply brilliant when it comes to gameplay. Not only that, but you can get more than a hundred hours of gameplay in one play-through. It combines the experience of a First Person Shooter and a RPG all together. You travel through and open world, completing the Main Quests and Miscellaneous Quests if you want more fun, achievements/trophies, and XP. As you play through the game, you can get an extremely wide variety of armor and weapons to carry in your inventory, and other items that you can sell for the game's currency, Bottle Caps. With Bottle Caps, you can purchase goods from merchants or in stores across the Wasteland. You will encounter many enemies, such as Feral Ghouls in the subways and Super Mutants downtown. When battling enemies, you can use Action Points in V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System). When using V.A.T.S., you can target certain people (and boy parts when using a ranged weapon) to shoot at, in slow motion of course.
Unfortunately, Fallout 3 does not support any type of multiplayer. Traveling the wastes with a buddy would probably be fun, but at least we have a fantastic single player mode. NOTE: Interplay is working on a MMORPG project for Fallout.
GAMEPLAY SCORE: 9.95/10
STORY
If you like a good story, you'll love Fallout 3. There's a sci-fi plot, expanding as you go through the Main Quest, and even more for the Miscellaneous Quests that you participate in. Fallout 3 delivers one of the best sci-fi stories in a video game ever. So far, that's wonderful gameplay, and a wonderful story. Could it get much better?
STORY SCORE: 9.85/10
GRAPHICS
Yeah, you guessed it. Fallout 3 has beautiful graphics. Washington D.C. looks absolutely stunning in this game. To go with that, there's highly detailed items and character models. Character animation is also fantastic, despite some animation glitches every now and then, but everything else makes up for that. Some characters could look a little strange in dialogue, and many Super Mutants look the same, so that could use a little work in the future installments, but it's all beautiful if you put those few flaws aside.
GRAPHICS SCORE: 9.9/10
THE SMALL STUFF
CONTROLS: Well, there's nothing absolutely wonderful about the controls, but they all work great. You can easily use the smooth controls in the game with no problem, but you might sometimes shoot instead of activating V.A.T.S. accidentally if you're not paying attention at all to where your fingers are. So, there's really no problem with the controls.
CONTROLS SCORE: 9.5/10
SOUND: The sounds are pretty great, as well. Sound effects are very nice, with terrific voice acting, too. Only real problem is that you'll surely recognize some of the same voices throughout the game.
SOUND SCORE: 9.7/10
REPLAY: You'll definitely want to play the game again, unless you get bored of it (which you won't) or don't have the time. You can get achievements/trophies for making different choices that affect your karma. For example, you get different achievements for reaching three levels with a certain type of karma. You can also play Miscellaneous Quests that you missed or collect bobble heads that you didn't get when you played the first time. You can often make different choices that affect the Quests as well. Unfortunately, completing the game doesn't really unlock anything.
REPLAY VALUE: Very high
NITPICKS: When I played the PS3 version of the game, it would freeze every now and then.
"DOESN'T BUG YA" SCORE: 9.87/10
OVERVIEW
SCORE (AVERAGE): 9.8 out of 10
GUILTY PLEASURE SCORE: 10 out of 10
HONORS: 2008 HSGA: Best Multi-platform, 2008 HSGA: Game of the Year, HalfSwiss Medal of Honor: Best Game of All-time
See the advanced review and more at: http://halfswissgamersblog.wordpress.com/