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War. War never changes.

What a fantastic first impression. The game starts with the usual Fallout 50s music followed by a fade to dramatic music and a cut to a high definition display of the wasteland ruins of Washington DC. Bethesda could not have started this epic experience any better.

I am going to stop just short of calling this the best game that I have ever played. However, this is easily the best game I have played in the past 3-5 years, maybe longer. I put almost two hundred gameplay hours into this game and the expansion packs, and while my wife was ready for me to quit playing this damn game, for me hour 200 was just as satisfying as hour 10.

Now that I have the obligatory fanboy business out of the way, let’s talk about the actual game.

Fallout 3, while not perfect, does a lot of things right.

The gameplay balances a good mix of shooter and RPG elements – for combat, you can either use the VATS system (which will feel more familiar to Fallout veterans), or you can “run and gun”. By mixing the two combat styles, the game fails to really be superior at either of them but still manages to keep combat fresh and enjoyable. Levels and experience are more evenly earned and consistent (although my character hit the level cap of 20 a little over half way through the main game). Outside of combat, the wasteland is a huge and impressive world to explore. The current generation “open world” is definitely a major improvement over the area/zone based world of the previous games, and there are plenty of huge interesting and captivating missions and side quests. There is plenty to do in this game, and it is by and large meaningful and entertaining (as opposed to typical obnoxious RPG fetch quests).

The game soundtrack has two main components: a handful of typical Fallout brand 50’s music, and a ambient/environment appropriate instrumental track. I did not listen to the 50’s songs at all – to be honest, they kind of kill the mood for me – but the instrumental background music creates the mood perfectly and does exactly what it is supposed to do. There are some other unlockable radio stations later in the game, but I opted to not use them. Voice acting is top notch (with the obvious exception of the main character, who has no voice at all). It’s been a couple of weeks now since I put this game down so my memory may be hazy but I can’t think of any really bad voice acting in the game. The kid who talks about fire ants and how his dad calls them “fuckin ants” is especially priceless.

Graphically, the initial stage in Vault 101 is a little underwhelming; the vaults are supposed to be cold and sterile, so that is likely by design. Walking out into the wasteland for the first time is both awesome and overwhelming. It is wreckage and ruin but beautiful at the same time. For the first time in this series, the game designers and artists create the feeling of being out in the open post-apocalyptic wasteland, and initially it feels like you are wandering aimlessly in the ruins of the end of the world. Really well done stuff – I am definitely impressed.

I will not recap the story here like I did for the last two games – this is still a newer game, so I won’t ruin any of it for people who have yet to play it. What I will say is that, while this is not the strongest storytelling in gaming by any means, it feels like a definite improvement over the last two games. The “indirect storytelling” from the first two games is totally gone here, but there are still plenty of plot points that have to be discovered without any handholding. The story isn’t “hit you over the head” obvious, but the important pieces are much more easily accessible. The new development studio even made it a point to use the Fallout Bible as their foundation so that they were consistent with existing Fallout continuity. The references to the previous games are all over the place, and there is practically no “retconning”. I only have three (relatively minor) complaints: Character development, story length, and ending.

My character development gripe is the same stock complaint that I have with any moral-compass-choose-your-patch character: Since you can make the main character whoever and whatever you want, he (or she) doesn’t develop much at all.

The story length complaint is going to sound pretty unreasonable: The story just isn’t long enough. That sounds crazy, I know – I just said that I played this game for 200 hours and now here I am saying the story is too short – but it’s true. If you ignored the side quests and missions, the main story of the game could feasibly be completed in (I’m kind of guessing here) under 30 hours. Dropping one or two major side quests in the name of extending the core plot of the game an additional 15 hours could have been an improvement. I know, shut up and let the writers do their jobs. I’m just being greedy here, I’ll let this one go.

And finally, the ending. It wasn’t a bad ending, per se, but it just felt kind of incomplete to me. This is kind of related to the main character development, I suppose. Congratulations, you saved the inhabitants of the wasteland (or destroyed them), you’re a hero (or a scoundrel), here are a couple of blurbs about what happened next. Fin! This complaint was made worse with the Broken Steel expansion pack. Broken Steel was an awesome expansion pack that fixed a lot of things (including retconning one of the original ending’s major weaknesses and bumping the level cap to 30), but when you finished broken steel? Nothing. A character from the brotherhood (rendered using the in game engine) says “You saved the brotherhood (ruined the brotherhood) – you’re a hero (you’re a villain)!” And that’s literally it. Throwing some kind of fancy pre-rendered ending screen up or something would have at least brought some closure to it all, but no. It’s just over.

So, yes, I’m a fanboy, but I can admit that it’s not perfect. As a final complaint, there is some unusual buggy behavior on the PS3 (especially in the expansion packs). The most significant issue is the occasional hard crash, which is TOTALLY FUCKING INEXCUSABLE for a $60+ game on a $400+ console. Consoles are supposed to “just work”. If I wanted buggy software and crashing I’d play games on my PC. At points there are major lags as the game tried to draw too many objects too far out on the horizon (this mainly happens in the expansion pack Point Lookout, which is kind of hazy and swampy). My current save game file – end of the game, all side quests complete, all expansion packs complete – is a whopping 15MB, which seems insane. The save files start at around 1MB, so I’m kind of curious as to what makes them grow so large.

A petty and bitter complaint: Now that I have played the $60 game and all 5 $10 expansion packs, the Game of the Year edition is out. It’s the core game and all of the expansion packs for $60. A fucking steal compared to the $110 I paid, and worth every penny.

Overall, minor complaints, and even with those complaints in mind this is still absolutely the best single game I have played in the last couple of years. I’d absolutely recommend this whole series to anyone who calls himself or herself a gamer.

A final note: As usual with this type of game, save early and save often because once you fail that speech check you don’t get to try again.