Don't leave your life lying around. Fallout will steal it.
User Rating: 9.5 | Fallout 3 X360
Sandbox games take years of time and money to produce, especially if you want a good one, but when they're done right nothing can beat them. In my travels through the Capital Wasteland I've seen incredible things, things that could never be possible on any other format than video games, and no other genre than sandbox games. The biggest challenge of making a game like this, apart from obviously building a massive open world and making sure everything works, is attempting to fill the world with life, to make it feel the way it looks; real. Games can only fake it for so long, eventually you realize what's parlor tricks & repetitive random encounters and what's real, well-planned events. Looking at Fallout 3, I've never been so immersed, so wanting to see new things within the world, in any other game, bar none. Let me put it this way. I once found my way to the top of Tenpenny Tower to watch the sun rise. Hardcore Fallout fans have criticized the game for being "Oblivion with guns" and if that's true I'm planning on buying Oblivion now. The level of care and attention that went into every facet of this game cannot be described without saying "You have to play it" or something similar. Every system used by this game works brilliantly, from SPECIAL to VATS (though shooting can be rather muddy, as the sensitivity never gets that "just right" feeling no matter what you set the sensitivity to), to Karma. While some karmic choices seemed obvious (The Power of the Atom has you choosing to disarm a dormant nuclear bomb that a town was built around OR detonate it), others had far more complexity (What's worse: allowing a small group to pillage a town, or hunting down and murdering them?) Another thing is that it's never simple 2-path answers to the quests. In the example above, you can do those things, or intimidate them into leaving the town alone, try to broker a truce, or convince them to leave at great personal expense. This level of intricacy is in nearly every quest, and it's a nice change from the standard "Bomb-an-orphanage or send-a-kitten-to-college karma choices games use all the time anymore. The main quest is fun and makes you care enough about the characters to continue, though Bethesda really needs to stop this whole thing that stops you from playing after the end of the story. If it weren't for the shooting problems and the general uselessness of the melee and unarmed weapons, this would be a 10 without second thought. 
