The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I bought Fallout 3 earlier this month and trucked my way through the main campaign while doing very few side missions in around 18.5 hours.

The experience overall was very satisfying but I didn’t like a couple of the plot points in the main quest, namely a section in the middle and the ending.  The ending is pretty unsatisfying since you are done with the game and not allowed to continue to mess around in the huge playground they’ve given you to play in.

If you follow just the main story you will only see the south central part of the map, the southeast, the far west and that is about it.  You will only visit / see maybe 15% of the available square miles of desolate wasteland which means you miss some of the cooler things in the game.

Early on, I made it a point to try to visit all of the Vaults that I could and at a point in the main story they will put all of them on your map so you can easily visit them that way.  I think I hit all of them except one and they were pretty neat with each one carrying out a different experiment.  Since my hacking skills were really good I was able to hack into the computers and read about the experiments that were going on in each vault.

The weapons throughout Fallout 3 were pretty fun to play with and I especially loved the Combat Shotgun that I found named “The Terrible Shotgun”.  The Fat Man mini-nuke launcher was also a lot of fun but the ammo for it was somewhat..limited.

The graphics in the game were some of the most immersive i’ve ever experienced where I really got into the game and the setting with dust devils going across the landscape and the sound of the wind whispering all set against a backdrop of 50s style music crackling from your radio combining to make for an excellent experience.  In this sense Fallout 3 reminded me a lot of the alternate timeline type world that exists in Bioshock as well (which has inspired me to reinstall Bioshock since I only played an hour or two of it back when my computer was still a piece of junk).

I highly recommend Fallout 3 if you are a fan of real-time RPG games - don’t expect a Square Enix style turn-based RPG out of this one.  The VATS system is a lot of fun for doing frozen time queuing of nasty attacks but it does not make the game turn-based and I actually only used VATS every few fights so I played it mostly as a run and gun type of game.

For scoring i’d give Fallout 3 a 9/10.  It could have rated a 9.5 but the main campaign was a little bit short and the ending was fairly abrupt and anti-climactic.  I do give them props for utilizing Ron Perlman for the narrator again which keeps with what Interplay did with Fallout 1 and 2 so Bethesda did make efforts to stay true to the Fallout series.

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