A right direction for the Fallout Series....One of the best RPGs of 2008
Reviewing core game:
Someone said this game is Oblivion with guns, but I disagree. It's a lot more and that and it is a lot different from TES games. First of all you don't have classes or anything like that. You still have skills but in Fallout 3 you have S.P.E.C.I.A.L.-which stands for Strength,Perception,Endurance,Charisma,Intelligence,Agility and Luck. They affect your role in the game.
You start off by going through a tutorial like prologue where you go through 5 mini sequences in Vault 101, where you live after the Great War of 2077 where the big countries started attacking each other with nuclear weapons. It is 200 after the war, in 2277. You were told that everyone was born in the vault and have to die in the vault. When you were born, your mother died after you came out of her. When you were 10, you were assigned a pip boy on your wrist that will be on there forever. You were assigned to have the first responsibility in the vault. Just like everyone else older than you.
At age 19, you found out your father left the vault which isn't allowed by and curcumstance. Now the police in the vault are looking to kill you. You have to get out of there and find him. After you escape the vault, your game truly begins. You will have to look at your pipboy almost every minute. You organize your stuff and quests there. And even radio from the wasteland.First you will have basic weapons like pistol or hunting rifle. But as you level up you will be able to add skill points and perks. Also you will find more advanced weapons to play with. You level up from exploring and killing monsters.
The V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec assisted targeting system) you get to pause time and shoot any big parts of an enemy. However you can't with melee weapons or unarmed weapons.
Talking to NPCs is also a part of the game, a big part where you have options that will affect your whole quest or who lives or dies and what reward you can get. By doing that and killing different people or monsters, you gain or lose karma which affect how people look at you in the wasteland. I prefer being nice but I occasionally steal things and still have very good karma, which is a flaw in this game.
The game is open world and there are hundreds of places to explore. You will most likely finish the quests you can find and the main quest in about 60 hours or so. However if you explore everything, you can double or almost triple that if you can stay with it the whole time. However, during those hours you might find it hard to not use the VATS because of the simple iron sights, instead of the real iron sights, however this game isn't really a traditional FPS so don't expect it to be. There is a mod to fix it though.
Now the graphics isn't bad, but it isn't good either. So I recommend you use mods to greatly improve the textures and the sky so it looks more natural. It looks really green when you don't have any mods on it. Also gameplay and UI mods will help too because the game has some bugs that makes the game crash to desktop or stutter. I recommend Fellout, Classic Fallout Weapons, RH_Ironsights, Darnified UI, Mart's Mutant Mod, Fallout 3 Stutter Remover and one of the radio mods.
PROS:
Good voice acting
Detailed world
Variety of weapons (nuke launcher)
A lot of interesting quests
VATS (makes the game a lot more fun)
Twists in story
CONS:
A lot of crappy quests
A few misses in dialogue
Needs a bit more variety in everything
Minor bugs and crashes
Repeated radio stations (fixed by mod)
the graphics...