**Version played – Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
**System – PlayStation 3
Over the past few months, I’ve been playing a bunch of games that many people consider to be some of the greatest of all time—
Half-Life 2,
Halo: Combat Evolved—games that I’ve summarily dismissed, overlooked, or otherwise haven’t really played before as an adolescent.
Fallout 3 was among those games, and now that I’ve clocked in eighty hours of gameplay, and finished the main quest, I think it’s about time I divulge my full thoughts on this thing.
(I’m well-aware that
Fallout 4 is brand new, so it may seem a bit silly to be reviewing
Fallout 3 at this stage. Just bear with me.)
This is a big game—so this is going to be a big review. There’s a lot I want to go over and talk about, but I’ll try not to bore you with too much detail. If you consider yourself a
Fallout "loremaster," or something like that, you might just want to skim through this.
Foreword (just skip this if you don't care how Fallout 3 was conceived)Fallout 3, simply enough, is the third installment of the beloved
Fallout series, developed by the industry darling and juggernaut, Bethesda Game Studios. If you haven’t heard of
Fallout 1 or
Fallout 2, that’s because they simply weren’t as popular. Initially released in 1997 for the PC, the original
Fallout was created by Interplay, and featured a drastically different style of gameplay compared to its 2008 sequel—most notably, its top-down perspective and isometric graphics. The game received many accolades and sold rather well, for its time—as did its 1998 sequel,
Fallout 2. Both games set a high bar for what had eventually come to be known as the WRPG (Western role-playing game).
However, the
Fallout series soon became stuck in a ten-year limbo. Interplay was beginning to experience some insurmountable financial difficulties, and was on the verge of going completely bankrupt. As a result, the entire staff of Black Isle Studios (subsidiary of Interplay in charge of the
Fallout series) was laid off in 2003, despite them all being in development of a plethora of widely-anticipated games, including
Fallout 3. Though these games were effectively cancelled, Interplay evidently did not want their most valuable IP to go to waste, so they ended up selling the rights to the franchise to fellow developer Bethesda—who, at the time, was known only for creating the ever-popular
Elder Scrolls series—under the condition that they'd respect and leave untouched the world they've created in the West Coast.
Though assets for what Black Isle had initially been developing were readily available, Bethesda opted instead to develop an entirely new game from scratch. At this point, first-person shooter games like
Perfect Dark,
Unreal Tournament, and
Halo: CE were all the rage—so in response, Bethesda turned
Fallout from a top-down isometric RPG to a free-roaming FPS game with RPG elements. Almost six long years passed. Then, in 2008,
Fallout 3 was finally released for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC platforms—to critical acclaim.
Seven years later, the most important person in the world—me—weighs in his thoughts on it.
All right, I don’t even know where to begin. There’s so many things I’d like to talk about in this review—because there’s just so much shit in this game. I suppose there are two big categories: Story, and gameplay. I’ll go into the story first, and see what happens from there.
1. The Premise Now, I’ve never played the original two in the series, so I can’t really say for sure how this game connects with them. As I understand it, the game takes place in the distant future—exactly two hundred years after America endured a nuclear holocaust, which came about as a result of intense and long-standing international conflicts between the US and China.
Prior to the war, a series of survival shelters called “Vaults” were constructed to combat the threat of nuclear weapons—so, as the Great War commenced, thousands of people retreated to these Vaults, where they lived out the rest of their lives peacefully and out of harm’s way. America itself, however—and the rest of the world, as far as we know—was totally obliterated. The Chinese bombs had reduced the entire landscape to an arid and heavily irradiated wasteland, so that nobody—not even centuries later—could ever safely travel cross-country again (which means they must have had a lot of fucking nukes—unless there were other belligerents involved).
You, the player, are born some time in the late 2250s to a man called James. Shortly after your birth, you find yourself (as an infant) in Vault 101. As you grow up, immerse yourself, and witness the type of conditions that your fellow Vault-dwellers live in, you suddenly discover on your 19th birthday that your father has mysteriously escaped—and the Overseer of the Vault wants you (and him) dead—because no one leaves the Vault. After a brief scuffle, you are forcefully spat out into the Wasteland, in search of your father—with only yourself to fend for.
Post-apocalyptic settings are rather done-to-death—and this game was created in the very midst of it all becoming a big cliché. In fact, its sheer unoriginality is what initially led me to neglect this game for so long—I just didn’t care about the premise. After delving a bit deeper into the game’s story and lore, however, it was clear that I was missing out on quite a lot.
1a. The Main Quest The main quest of the game is surprisingly shorter than you’d expect—most of your hours will be spent on the rest of the game, but I digress.
I always thought that this game’s method of storytelling, at least at the very beginning, was kind of strange and awkward. The scene of your birth in particular always makes me cringe—it’s entirely from the baby’s point-of-view, so when you exit your mother’s womb, you get a nice shot of blood splatter all over your screen for a brief moment. Beautiful. Always hated that part, but I can’t say it’s not a good way of showing you how the rest of the game is going to be—gritty and uncompromising.
After you name yourself and waste about thirty minutes trying to perfect your player avatar, your mother’s heartrate flatlines—complications resulting from your birth results in her death. It’s this particular moment that drives the rest of the game’s plot.
Your mother and father were both scientists. Since all the water in America has become irradiated, James has a dream of providing clean water for all the remaining denizens of the Wasteland, dubbing his plan “Project Purity”. However, due to your mother’s sudden death, James felt obliged to abandon the project and head off to Vault 101, so that he could raise you instead—putting Project Purity on an indefinite halt. As soon as you came of age, however, James immediately fled, and left little in the way of explanation or closure—leaving you to escape the Vault yourself, and forge your own path.
That’s not an exaggeration, either—you really
can forge your own path in this game. Like other Bethesda games, it’s all about choice. Whether you want to help your father complete his dream, or let the Wasteland suffer, is ultimately up to you. You can choose to be a hero, a villain, or something in the middle. Personally, I always prefer to be a hero, if I’m given the choice—I see no fun whatsoever in being a selfish asshole, and even though it’s just a video game, I still find it very difficult bringing myself to performing any overtly villainous deeds.
I love that the game gives you that choice, however. That is, if you don’t
want to be a goodie-two-shoes like me, you don’t
have to. Either way, the main story doesn’t actually change a whole lot—merely the means and measures by which you achieve your goals. You still have access to the same quests in both moral paths.
I’ve heard many people criticize the main quest rather harshly—some people say it’s poorly written, others say it’s boring—I can’t say I agree with either of those statements. The main quest, I think, apart from being the most important storyline in the game, also serves the purpose of giving the player a
reason to play the game.
In a Wasteland as big as this one, the player most definitely needs a sense of purpose. All around the landscape are the remains of burned buildings, destroyed houses, crumbled and disjointed roads, dead trees, totaled vehicles, craters of radioactive substance—just deadness and deadness as far as the eye can see. Everything is dismal and dilapidated, and human beings have almost completely destroyed themselves—and are continuing to do so—over ridiculously petty bullshit. It’s only natural, then, that you’d want to help make it a better place, right?
Or maybe not. Maybe you hate what humanity has done to itself, and you think they
deserve whatever pain and suffering they’ve brought unto each other—so you’ll
keep the waters poisoned, for all you care. It’s all your choice—but either which way, you have yourself a tangible purpose. Something that keeps you walking. You’re not just aimlessly wandering, doing odd jobs and running pointless errands for the weak—you have a mission, and you have the liberty to solve all your troubles by whatever means you deem necessary. I think that’s really a beautiful thing, and though the game doesn’t exactly
perfect the morality system (and I’ll get into that later), it’s still an impressive job, if you ask me.
Still—while the game’s main story may be lacking in depth, I think it makes up for that in having very interesting and likable characters and NPC factions, which I’ll go over next.
1b. The Characters All of the people you meet on your journey—at least, all the ones with names—have a story to tell. Don’t just assume that these people are here just for decoration or some other worthless expendable purpose, like in most RPGs.
James, your father, probably ends up being the least interesting character, in terms of his personality. Since he’s your father, and you’re kinda meant to be on his side, his personality is very polite, inoffensive, patient, and stoic. He’s very soft-spoken, he’s always happy to have you around, and you can always count on him to do the right and most noble thing—he doesn’t really have any character flaws that make him intriguing in any way. It’s his actions that make him who he is, and that’s what sets him apart from the other characters you’ll meet.
Other characters, like your childhood friend Amata, the conniving bastard Moriarty, the cool and quick-witted Threedog, the snakelike Mr. Burke, the chauvinist pig Dukov, the condescending Col. Autumn, and the countless other names you’ll come across on your adventure all have very vibrant personalities and histories (even a robot who is programmed to think he is one of the first signatures of the Declaration of Independence!), and I’d highly recommend going out of your way to listen to what all these people have to say—it can be pretty interesting seeing how these people made it in the Wasteland, and what they’re all doing now in order to survive. Plus, a lot of their dialogue is superb.
Some of the men and women became scavengers and hunters, or set up caravans to aid their fellow Wastelanders—while others have ended up living a life of vice, fighting drug addictions (or “chem” addictions) and selling their bodies to prostitution just to make ends meet. Pre-war folks who managed to survive the bombings, called ghouls, can also be spoken to. Their melted, rotting flesh is rather horrifying to look at, but you’ll find that they’re nothing to be afraid of. They’re resistant to radiation, and they can live for centuries—some of the ghouls can even tell you what it was like before and during the Great War.
It’s all treated in a very gritty, hyper-realistic way, and the amount of care they put into making these characters so believable is very hard not to appreciate. Some characters end up following you during certain quests, and they
will die if you don’t cover for them—which can be rather emotionally distressing if you’ve grown to like them.
In fact, the first thing I did after beating the game was revisit Vault 101 to find Amata. It sounds silly, but that sort of thing speaks volumes for this game’s level of characterization. It’s great.
Apart from that, you’ll also meet a variety of factions—though, perhaps not to the level of some other modern RPGs. The two biggest and most significant factions are the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel. The Enclave is a large political organization led by President of the United States, John Henry Eden. Described as the last bastion of the pre-war American government, the Enclave aims to rebuild the country and restore it to its former glory—by whatever means necessary, and often without any regard for human (and non-human) life. Collectively, they operate as the game’s primary antagonistic force, if you choose to be a hero.
The Brotherhood of Steel (BoS) is another shady organization of elite soldiers. Their power armor is iconic—a member’s helmet can be seen on the game’s cover; it’s one of the main symbols of the franchise. They have two main purposes: to protect the Wasteland, and to gather and preserve as much pre-war technology as they can find, similar to the Enclave—except they’re a lot more diplomatic. The conflict between the Enclave and the BoS becomes important towards the end of the game, and in general, though the Brotherhood is not necessarily a force for “good” (as evidenced by the Brotherhood Outcasts), they’re still enemies of the Enclave—so, by proxy, they’re friends of yours (again, if you choose to be a hero).
Both of these factions have their qualities and faults, and the game allows you to decide for yourself who you’ll end up trusting in the end.
One unfortunate thing to note about all these characters, however, is that they were all voiced by only a small handful of voice actors. I think I’ve only heard about ten or twelve unique adult voices in this game—and that can get kinda distracting, especially when some of the villains and good guys are voiced by the same person. It’s not a big deal, though—they all did a fine job (and they had to read a metric fuckton of lines, which I have a lot of respect for)—I just think they probably could’ve hired some more talent, if only for the sake of variety.
1c. The Side Quests My favorite thing about the game’s story is not even the main quest itself. I, like most other people I know, actually preferred the side quests a lot more.
Side quests are essentially special favors that you can perform for some of the people you meet. Each side quest starts off rather simple ("Find this person," "Give
x item to my brother in this location"), but there always seems to be a little bit more to each quest than meets the eye. For example—my personal favorite quest, Blood Ties, has you (at first) protecting a small village from a group of people who call themselves “the Family,” and rescue a boy that they’ve purportedly held hostage at their base. What you expect from this quest is to locate the Family, blast them all to hell, and take the kid (granted, you
can do that, if you want to be an impulsive bastard, but just wait).
What ends up happening (if you’re willing to talk it out with their leader) is that you learn that the Family is actually a group of misunderstood (albeit highly psychologically damaged) people who—get this—call themselves “vampires,” because they’ve developed a taste for blood. They took the boy because he tried to eat his parents, and they wanted to put him in a safe place where he is accepted for being different. While that
still sounds pretty crazy, the way it's explained in the game actually makes a lot of sense. After talking it out, you can simply ask the leader
politely to stop attacking the village you’ve been trying to liberate. He then obliges, commending you for your reasonableness.
That sort of thing is
very smart, and not at all what I’d expect from a game like this. You don't
have to solve all your problems with brainless violence. And that’s just one side quest.
There’s another where you meet a ghoul called Mr. Crowley (nice little Ozzy reference there) in an underground tavern. He hates humans, and if you speak to him, he’ll tell you all about these people who are prejudiced towards ghouls, and how he wants them all dead. He ends up giving you a list of people, and says that he'll pay you to shoot them all in the head. From here, you have a choice—oblige, or find the individuals listed and try to warn them that some crazy ghoul wants them dead, instead of killing them. I just think that’s so cool how the game allows you to take paths like that.
To my understanding, there’s over forty more of them to complete. I’ve gone through about half of that, and while not
every one of them is good, there’s still enough interesting shit involved to keep each one of them fresh. Often, you’ll find yourself just
drowning in shit to do—I’ve had seven or eight different side quests to finish all at once before—which is fine, because the game allows you to finish them all at your own pace.
The bottom line is that the side quests are great, and they pretty much make up the meat of this game. It’s kinda like
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask in that way. Finding all these interesting locations you’re sent to, talking to all these people you meet—the sense of adventure is spectacular. I mean, it's true that there’s a lot of games out there that pretty much have you doing the same sort of thing, but I think
Fallout 3 happens to do it very well.
1d. The Lore Holy shit. You could fill a library with the amount of lore this game has.
I’m not too big on lore myself—I find it interesting from the perspective of a casual observer, but I’m not one of these nerds who likes to know every little thing about a game’s lore (I’m also not a huge fan of reading). However, like with the morality system, I simply appreciate that it’s there. You CAN be a nerd and study the game’s lore if you want to, because there’s so much shit to sink your teeth into, but it’s not always necessary.
Since the game takes place centuries after a nuclear war, naturally, there’s going to be a lot of questions the audience may want answered. What was the Sino-American conflict over? When were the Vaults built? Did everyone have access to the Vaults? Who are these people attacking me, and what is their purpose? What the fuck are the Super Mutants and Centaurs? All of these questions (and many, many more) are answered if you wanna to sift through the ashes enough.
There’s many ways you can gather these little story details as you go along. NPCs are the easiest and most common way—you can ask them a wide variety of questions regarding their circumstances and whereabouts, and they’ll usually have some pretty interesting stuff to say. There’s also computer terminals that you can hack into, and read a bunch of dossiers about various people, places, and other things.
Sometimes you can even find notes in broken mailboxes in the remains of residential areas. My favorite type of lore, however, is when the game uses the environment, your surroundings, and imagery instead of text, so you can glean for yourself what’s going on, rather than being straight-up told. There’s bits and pieces of that in this game, as well, which complements the game’s immersion beautifully.
The lore is so rich, I could probably play the game nonstop for another year and still find new stuff hidden here and there. As cool as that sounds, however, I would argue that this is plays almost to the game’s detriment, and I’ll try to explain as succinctly as I can.
Because there’s so much shit to read, it can sometimes be difficult to separate important information from insignificant information. Fans looking to be loremasters won’t consider this an issue, but for players like me, who don’t always give a shit to know every little detail of the game’s universe, it can be a real drag having to keep track of all this stuff.
You might be asking—what makes information important? That’s a good question.
Information is important when a moral decision you make is dependent on it. For example—there’s a particular quest called Tranquility Lane (part of the main story) where you end up trapped in a VR simulation, along with a group of other people, while searching for your dad. The administrator of the simulation is an evil bastard, who disguises himself an innocent little girl. He has total control, and treats all of the people in the simulation as his personal playthings: he can torture them, terrorize them, and kill them—and they’ll be none the wiser. They don’t even realize that they’re just in a virtual world. When they die, he can simply bring them back to torture them all over again.
What you expect to be able to do is SAVE these people—that makes sense, right? You expect to find the administrator in his pod, kill him, and free all of his subjects. But as it turns out,
you can’t do that—and the game never really makes that clear,
unless you read some text that you previously thought was unnecessary.
What you’re supposed to know is that the VR simulations have been going on for
centuries, and there is absolutely no way out of it; if the pods are released, they'll just die anyway. The solution is to activate a hidden failsafe that will cause a secret Chinese military simulation to run—violently killing everyone, not only in the simulation, but in real life, as well.
That’s actually what you’re supposed to do. I find that extremely unintuitive, and the only way I could’ve known that is if I studied the game’s lore a bit closer than I did. I ended up playing the administrator’s stupid and sadistic game instead, all because I
thought I was going to be able to save the people at the end. But nope.
I chose not to absorb every last detail of the mission, and I got punished for it. Now, to me, that’s bullshit, and I think the game could’ve went out of its way to make that a bit clearer—but really, I can’t be that angry over it. All the information I needed to have
was given to me—I simply didn’t pay enough attention (to something that I didn’t think I’d have to pay that much attention to). I didn’t have my notes prepared for the test, so to speak. Still, I’d just prefer video games be video games, and not history lectures.
So yeah, just beware—make sure you fucking read everything. Don’t assume that the information you’re being fed is useless, because it might honestly come in handy later on.
Fortunately, most of the game doesn’t really work like that. In my opinion, it's better to have all the lore in the game be shit you can read at your own leisure, rather than trying to find a needle in a haystack. Granted, most of it
is just for leisure—but not all of it, and that's really the one misgiving I have about the game's lore.
I can’t believe I’m just now finishing #1.
2. The Gameplay This game is fun to play in ways that you probably wouldn’t expect at first.
Being an FPS with RPG elements, the gameplay is going to be stat-oriented. At the very beginning, you can set up your initial stat build. Your stats are, in order: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck (S.P.E.C.I.A.L.). You can raise and lower each of these stats to your liking—you can have a strong-but-dumb character, a quick-yet-frail character, a smart-yet-asocial character, et cetera. Personally, I like to make my characters as well-rounded as possible, so I choose to even out my stats. Jack-of-all-trades.
On top of your base S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, you also have a set of skills that you can improve on. Every time you level up, you’re given a few skill points with which you can raise your skills. The skills can range from how well you can wield heavy weaponry, how much damage you can take, how much you can heal yourself, how easily you can hack into computers, how easy you can sneak up on your opponents, how well you can repair your weapons, and perhaps most importantly, how well you can break into safes and other locked things. And more.
Figuring out what type of character you want to have is key, and some character builds are more effective than others—but it's all up to you. There’s also a perk system—a perk is like a passive special ability you gain when you level up. Some perks raise your stats further, increase your shooting accuracy, increase the amount of damage you deal to certain enemies, or give you
completely unique abilities, like the ability to turn off hostile robots (if you sneak up on them), or the ability to eat dead corpses (seriously).
If someone doesn’t like the FPS-style gameplay, they have the option to switch to third-person, but I don’t recommend this at all. The game is very clearly designed to be played in first-person, and the third-person experience is, frankly, awful. It’s so awkward, you can barely see what you’re doing, and the camera? Just fucking horrible. Don’t even bother with it.
Now, to go into detail on some of the more intricate aspects of the gameplay…
2a. Combat & Weapons What’s the most important thing about a shooting game? Answers may vary, but for me, it’s a combination of two things that are inextricably intertwined: How good the combat is, and how cool or fun the weapons are.
This, unfortunately, is one of the weaker aspects of
Fallout 3.
I know I’m not alone on this—many people are rather dissatisfied with how the combat is treated in many Bethesda games—and this game is no exception. The most common word I hear used to describe this game’s combat “clunky,” and I absolutely agree.
The weapons in this game really aren’t that fun to use. You have a dinky little 10mm pistol to start off with—it’s very weak, and firing it just feels fucking bizarre.
I can’t describe it—it’s just that, in every other shooter I’ve ever played, the pistol actually felt like a weapon, and not a piece of clicking cardboard. Amusingly, however, someone told me that I can actually take it all the way to the end of the game, and I did just that. It's not that it's a bad weapon, I guess—it's just horribly dodgy to use.
Along the way, you can find assault rifles (Chinese and American), hunting rifles, and shotguns, all of which are better, but they still feel incredibly awkward. Most of the weapons you’ll find are in very poor condition, and will stop working if they grow more damaged (same goes for armor)—so it’s paramount to have a high repair skill to help fix them.
Trying to aim with any of these weapons is a feat in and of itself, so the game introduces one of my least favorite features in a game, ever: The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.)
V.A.T.S. is an automatic targeting system that allows you to lock on to any foe in your general vicinity, and fire at them in slow motion,
Matrix-style. Once you lock on, you can actually choose which body part you want to fire at—their head, their chest, either of their arms or legs, or their weapon. It’ll even give you a percentage that denotes your chances of landing a hit on that particular area of their body, and with certain perks, these percentages can be raised even further. The amount of times you can shoot in V.A.T.S. is limited to your number of Action Points, or AP. This doesn’t end up being much of a deterrent, however. The purpose of this system, I guess, is to help with your shooting accuracy.
The problem I have with V.A.T.S. is that it makes the combat two things: Boring and easy. Once you initiate your attack, a bullet-time cutscene occurs, during which you are almost completely invincible. Critical hits happen much more often in V.A.T.S. than normal, so it basically gives you every advantage you can get—there’s no reason not to use it, and you end up
relying on it, because the game’s manual aiming is so sucky and awkward.
Personally, I have a lot more fun actually firing and killing enemies myself, without the help of some cinematic targeting system. But the aiming is so quirky, and shooting enemies feels so unsatisfying, that it’s almost never worth it. Enemies never flinch, reel back, or give you any sort of indication that they’re being injured by your fire, which doesn’t really make fighting them all that fun. Now, granted, a lot of the enemies in this game are very large, and they tend to wear armor—but even the mole rats and dogs don’t react to you shooting or hitting them. The most they ever do is cry out in pain when they die (and sometimes you can shoot their heads off, too—which is honestly more disturbing and gross than anything else). Kinda lame.
My favorite weapon to use is the Shishkebab—a makeshift flaming sword made out of broken motorcycle parts that you can craft together on workbenches, once you have the schematics. Swinging it at enemies instantly lights them on fire, which causes residual damage. As they burn, most enemies scream bloody murder, which is the closest thing to satisfying the combat ever really gets. Other fun weapons to use are the proximity mines, which you can plant anywhere—like behind a door—and wait for your foes to trip them, and blow 'em to smithereens. The shotgun is nice, because it allows you to forgo V.A.T.S.—shotguns aren’t meant to be “accurate,” so you can’t go wrong with them at point-blank range.
Pretty much all the other weapons are lame—especially the energy weapons. So disappointing. They’re just not fun to use at all, and I don’t even know why. Even
Halo did plasma weapons better.
You might be wondering about the enemies—are they at least fun or interesting to fight? Well, not really, to be honest. I won’t deny that I like some of the enemy designs—specifically the giant mutant animals you encounter, like the mole rats, the lobsters, the blowflies, the scorpions, and the bears—but they all follow the same basic “find player → run towards player” attack pattern. There is no strategy in the combat
whatsoever—literally just point and fire, run if they get too close, and keep firing until the stupid thing is dead.
The human enemies—like the raiders (just a generic group of crazy fucktards who scavenge the wastes in search of nothing in particular) are a little bit smarter, and require a bit more strategy to kill, but they still end up being pretty brain-dead. Though, in hindsight, I suppose that type of behavior
is fitting for the raiders...
The most annoying enemies in the game, the Super Mutants, are also one of
Fallout’s most iconic. They’re a group of big, hulking yellow monstrosities who scream and yell a lot. They’re fucking annoying as fuck. I hate them—they’re not even difficult, they’re
just bullet sponges. There’s many varieties of them—regular, Brute, Master, Overlord, and Behemoth, and they all pretty much fight the same way—the only difference is the type of weapons they use, and how long it takes to kill them. They’re the worst, and they’re
everywhere in this game. A couple of them are actually friendly, however—look out for those.
So yeah—the game sort of drops the ball in terms of what I consider to be the most important aspect of any shooter. That sounds bad, but fortunately, however, I think the game still manages to excel at being fun in almost every other way.
I’ve heard that
Fallout: New Vegas actually improves on the combat in a number of ways, which is great. I don’t know exactly how, but I’ll have to check it out some time.
2b. The Exploration Fallout 3, true to its roots, is an open world RPG. It’s one of the largest and most detailed overworlds I’ve ever seen, and the exciting thing is that you get to explore every inch of it. Backtracking is mitigated somewhat by the ability to fast-travel, too, so you’ll never get bored of traveling to the same locations, if you ever need to.
The Wasteland is a beautiful mess. I love the scenery in all its dilapidated glory. Torn down villages greet you with their tattered and corroded welcome signs. Broken bridges tower over poisonous rivers that lead to nowhere. There's abandoned schools occupied by ravenous raiders. And of course, all those ghost towns, broken-down cities, and empty city metros you can visit.
Numerous measures are taken to make each new location you find as interesting as possible. You can pick up almost everything in this game—not just weapons and tools, but miscellaneous objects, like forks and plates and clipboards and billiard balls. Not all of this stuff is useful—in fact, I’m pretty sure the majority of the stuff you can collect has absolutely no use in the game whatsoever—but rummaging through all these useless knick-knacks makes it all the more personally gratifying when you actually find something of value in the rough.
Each new area is guaranteed to be a veritable goldmine for looting. Toolboxes, footlockers, and safes may not be unlocked—so you’ll have to use bobby pins to unlock them. There’s something undeniably thrilling about finding a locked container in a room and trying to open it with something as simple and unassuming as a bobby pin. Some locks, of course, are more difficult to open than others—the ones that are locked harder will contain more valuable stuff.
Sometimes, a safe will be sealed by a terminal, instead, and you’ll have to hack into its computer to open it. The way hacking puzzles work is incredibly stupid and unrealistic, but they’re still surprisingly fun. You’ll be given a selection of words—one of them is the password, and you have to find it in four attempts. For every attempt, it’ll tell you how many of the word’s letters match up with the real password (e.g. if “WATER” is the password, and “BAKER” is entered, it’ll tell you that you got 3/5 letters). It’s pretty nifty, actually. Being a bit of a word nerd myself, I really appreciated these puzzles.
You can’t pick up everything you see, of course—there’s a limit of things you can hold, and it’s dependent on an item’s weight. If you exceed that limit, you’ll start walking
very slowly. That’s a clever limitation—I’m sure
Fallout didn’t originally come up with that, but it makes more sense than having a set number of things you can carry.
2c. Atmosphere I’m a huge fan of great atmosphere in movies or games—and this is one highly atmospheric game. A lot of this can be accounted for its relatively stripped-down soundtrack and dirty, dismal art and graphic design. Everything feels hopeless and downtrodden, and you feel kind of alone—not really in a
Metroid way, though. The game is more
Mad Max—in that the grittiness can almost be overbearing at times.
There’s a moment where you’re rummaging through an old pre-war library occupied by the Brotherhood of Steel, trying to find some ink, of all things. As you shift through the yards of rubble, you’ll come across the children’s section of the library—in which you can find a harrowing image: the rotting skeletons of deceased children strewn across the floor, like ragdolls. It’s pretty chilling, and puts the realism and cruelty of war into perspective—the whole “war is hell” theme is beaten into your head quite hard, and I’m perfectly okay with that. They sent such a powerful message
just by using imagery—no fucking text. It allows you soak in the message on your own, rather than being
told how to feel.
That's what I like to see.
Other extremely atmospheric moments can be experienced when entering other Vaults. I haven’t given myself enough time to access more than a couple Vaults, but to be honest, after witnessing what I did in Vault 106, I’m not sure if I really care to visit any more of them. They’re pretty fucking scary—and it has nothing to do with what’s actually in them. It’s all to do with how they make you feel. You’re trapped in a maze with a bunch of people who have gone insane—and all you want is a way out. Sometimes, your vision gets all blurry, and you start hallucinating. Bethesda could make a decent horror game.
But of course, I can’t talk about the game’s atmosphere without bringing up how the overworld makes you feel, too. Days and nights go by rather quickly, and even though the game doesn’t ever really take the day/night system into account in any major way, I always make sure I never enter any new locations at night, simply because I
feel safer during the day. Totally silly and irrational, but that’s just how the game makes me feel.
The radio is a great feature that’s also become one of
Fallout’s hallmarks. Not only can you use the radio to pick up distress signals while roaming the wastes—you can also listen to a couple of straight-up music stations: Enclave Radio and Galaxy News Radio. The Enclave Radio exclusively plays American marching tunes, interspersed with brief fireside chats with President Eden—of which there aren’t very many, so it gets rather old quick. You gain access to his signal early on, so it’s a good way to introduce yourself to his character. His words are earnest, yet something still seems off about him.
Galaxy News Radio, however, is hosted by Threedog—a much more colorful personality, and a fan-favorite of the franchise, to my understanding. He plays a bunch of old ‘40s pop and R&B songs—an excellent touch, which is juxtaposed
brilliantly by the treacherousness of the Wasteland. Having the radio on is actually a pretty cool and inventive way of calming your nerves: As you’re caving that fucking raider’s skull in with your newly-found brass knuckles, the silky vocals of the Ink Spots can help keep you chilled out—almost as a way to desensitize you to all the horrible shit that’s happening around you. Everything becomes normal and “okay” when the music's playing. That’s actually ingenious.
All in all, the game does a fantastic job of making you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world, but you
really feel it. I can’t say the same about other games, like
Halo: CE, which made me feel absolutely nothing. The fact that there’s a concerted effort from the developers to elicit any sort of emotional response out of the player at all is, in my opinion, commendable.
3. Other Things I Liked Here’s some smaller things I liked that I couldn’t quite fit anywhere else:
- Though I’m against drug use as a rule, I appreciate the clever implementation of drugs & alcohol in this game. A lot of drugs are addictive, and therefore dangerous to use—and drinking alcohol lowers your intelligence stat. Subtle anti-drug messages are good.
- Just all the little details. You can’t use the Shishkebab (the gas-powered flame sword) near gas leaks, or you will explode and die. If you jump from too high a height, your limbs will break. This game is more “realistic” than games that
try to be realistic.
- Sometimes, there’ll be small rigs, like bear traps, mines, rigged shotguns, or tripwires that you’ll have to keep your eye out for and disarm before you trigger them. Even monitors can blow up without warning—make sure you check if a grenade is strapped to it first.
4. The Bugs, and Other Minor Game Flaws While the game is mostly good, I cannot overlook the extremely high number of little flaws that the game has—and they really build up over time. (This is going to be very disorganized.)
The game is prone to freezing, and various other frame rate-related issues. If there’s too much shit happening on the screen at once, your game will run slow as fuck—this ended up nearly ruining the final mission for me, because there’s just so much shit happening.
Because the Wasteland is so vast, it can be difficult to account for each little crack, crevice, gape, fissure, opening, split, rift, interstice, and hole the game has—and make sure that, when you walk over it, you will not get stuck. You have to be very careful when walking around these jagged areas, because if you get stuck, you’re pretty much fucked—either fast travel to the nearest location, or, if you can’t do that, load up your last save, and lose all your progress up to that point. On rare occasions, you can even clip through the ground. Marvelous.
Saving is very important in this game—in fact, it almost completely breaks the game, because of how easily it can be abused. Because you can save the game at any point (and it is recommended that you save every five or ten minutes), a number of exploits are possible. For example: Did you fail a speech challenge? No worries! Just reload your last save and try it again! You can apply this to almost every situation in the game, and have everything go your way. Bullshit.
It feels almost like cheating, but you really do have to save
all the time. You never know when you’ll come across a raider, armed with a fucking missile launcher (completely at random) who can instantly kill you in one shot—you have to be prepared for shit like that. But sometimes you won’t be. Having to save
this often just to account for all the game’s bullshit randomness can get pretty tiresome at times, and it’s hard not to resist the temptation of taking advantage of your save states.
Even hacking puzzles are flawed. If you start running out of attempts, you can simply close out of the hacking puzzle, and enter it again—bam, you now have free attempts. Bullshit.
The quick-select system for weapons is bugged as fuck in ways that are difficult to put into words. It’s just very unresponsive, and I got fucked over on at least three separate occasions where I needed my quick-select to work, but it didn’t. I think if you repair one of your weapons, it actually takes it out of your quick-select—which is annoying.
Finally, I really think the karma system could have been fleshed out a little more. There’s not a whole lot that happens to you if you choose to be good or evil—future games like
Infamous have shown how far we can take this “karma” thing we have going.
*Phew*
I think that’s everything. It’s enough, anyway.
5. Overall With all its flaws, I think I’ve played myself a pretty fucking solid game. Funnily enough, I think I actually ended up enjoying it more than your average
Fallout fan—and I don’t really consider myself one of those just yet.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they didn’t like the writing, how the story was handled, or the combat—and while I completely agree that the combat was pretty mediocre, I think the flaws are vastly overshadowed by the rest of the game’s qualities—namely, the copious side quests, the wonderful characters, the exploration, the looting, the atmosphere, and of course, feeling in control of your world. Making those heavy moral decisions.
It’s not perfect—not even close—but I can see why so many people think it’s an important benchmark. The thing about games like this being put on a pedestal like that, though, is that it sets up unreasonable expectations for future generations—I tried this game a long time ago. I got bored, and put it down, disappointed. If we remove it from its high place in the industry, however, and just play it for what it is, it’s a fun game with lots of fun shit to do—and there’s still so much left for me to get done.
There’s better games out there, but I don’t
dislike this one just because of that. I'd recommend this game to anyone who wants a highly immersive adventure, and anyone who has a penchant for games with
rich, extensive lore.
I look forward to playing
New Vegas and
Fallout 4 at some point in the future.
Final score:
7/10
If you enjoyed reading this review, check out my other reviews:
Half-Life 2Halo: Combat Evolved
