After a ten year absence (we are ignoring the travesties BOS and Tactics) a new Fallout game has dropped. Brought back to life by Bethesda as a FPS first person perspective roleplaying game. For those that have been living out in the woods, the fallout series takes place 200 years after a nuclear war. For a full write up you can check out the games wiki

During the run up to launch Bethesda repeatedly said, “It is not Oblivion with guns.” Let us set the record straight early in this review. Yes it is. Within two minutes of playing the game you get this impression. Need comparisons? In Oblivion the game starts you in a prison that you have to escape, fighting for your life on the way out. In Fallout 3 you start in a vault and need to escape, fighting for your life on the way out. As you exit the sewer you can adjust your stats, as you exit the vault you can adjust your stats. Towns and Interiors load when you enter them in Oblivion, same thing with Fallout 3. Both games use the same voice actors. Both games have a lockpicking minigame, you can buy houses in both games. If you look at the facial textures particularly the old woman in Megaton, they are taken directly from Oblivion. Even the creatures have the same attributes. Imps= Bloat Fly, Molerats=wolves, Bandits=Raiders, Ants = Skeletons….wait what? Yes just like skeletons you can shoot the things a million times and not kill them, but they go down pretty easy if you use a club on them. Clearly they are using a revised Oblivion engine in Fallout 3.

Bethesda has put some effort into masking this by moving the controls around, changing some of menus and viewing angles, and adding in VATs. The remixing doesn’t help. The controls are just as good as oblivion but are not intuitive at all. The menu options are irritating, and VATs is a hindrance in most situations. There has been one change for the better that stands out. Fallout 3 creatures do not level with you. Apparently Bethesda took a hint from the Oblivion mod community. How close to Oblivion, Fallout 3 is, will depend on the mod community. Bethesda has stated they will not make mod tools for Fallout 3. If the modding community manages to crack Fallout 3 using patched Oblivion mod tools the gig is up.

None of this means Fallout 3 is a bad game. Fans will immediately recognize numerous references to the old fallout titles. Bethesda really nailed the retro-future post nuclear world. From burned out cars to robots, they nailed it. In terms of appearance Bethesda did the series justice and then some. But enough of the generalizations let’s dive in……..

Physics: 8/10

The physics in this game are improved over Oblivion. Gone are they days of walking past a desk and it’s contents flying across the room. Bodies fall and lay realistically with no obvious signs of head soccer bouncing. One thing you will immediately notice is that you can pop the heads off creatures with the weakest gun. What makes this od is that the head doesn’t explode, or the back of it at any rate, like it does in real life. The head separates from the neck and bounces away as one piece. Another issue is falling jumping from medium heights does no damage. Got chased up a flight of stairs by raiders? No problem leap out a third story window onto a broken barbed wire fence. No worries, it won’t hurt, we promise.

Graphics: 9/10

The game looks amazing. Bethesda really really nailed the look and feel. We simply cannot stress this enough. The outside world does have the Resistance: Fall of Man drabness, and you may get sick of the gameboy color scheme pipboy. But it wouldn’t be a Fallout game without these. The issue we have is the lack of 1080p support for the PS3. All the cool developers are now able to produce games in 1080p. There is no excuse, other than they didn’t want to take the time.

Sound: 10/10

In Fallout 3 you don’t come across the same voice actor every third NPC interaction. While they have reused previous actors they’ve added enough so that you don’t have two people with the same voice talking to you at the same time. Even better is you do not get the sound file slip-ups like you did with Oblivion. Remember when argonians voice would go from from rough lizard like voice to noble born elf in mid speech? Yeah that doesn’t happen here. All the sound effects are top notch and the epic music is thankfully absent.

Story: 10/10

The story follows you on your quest to find your dad. It takes about 20 hours to complete, but you miss a lot of opportunity to explore the various history of the waste. A good example is the conversation you can have explaining the history of megaton. Totally unimportant in terms of game play but it may prevent you from nuking the city.

Content: 9/10

Stated previously the main quest takes about 20 hours to complete. Like Oblivion numerous side quests and exploration increase play time by nearly ten fold. The world is smaller than Oblivion but there is more to it. You won’t be tracking across miles of empty land in Fallout 3. Another thing that ads to the replayability of the game is the choices you make. You cannot un-nuke megaton. Once it is gone it is gone. Failed skill attempts also lock you out of play options permanently. This is like other Fallout titles. In the Fallout series, if you haven’t been the game 4 or 5 times you haven’t really seen all that it has to offer. The biggest gripe is the lack of Mod support. Oblivion, Homeworld, Half-Life 2 is still played by everyone in the office solely because of mods.

Controls: 7/10

If Bethesda would have just left the Oblivion controls alone everything would have been fine. But they tried to avoid the “Oblivion with guns” stigma and wrecked them. Sure movement is the same as always and the controls are responsive but there is no intuitiveness. Maybe it is because the mind feels Oblivion but the hands don’t. You will spend the first couple minutes of the game hitting the wrong buttons for everything. Another annoying factor is the menu selection. You cannot simply cancle out of a conversation you have to find the leave conversation phrase (like “I have to go now”) which sometimes requires you to back up through several layers of choices.

Gameplay: 8/10

After you get used to the controls the game is quite fun to play. Weapon creation is particularly interesting as it gives purpose to all the otherwise useless crap laying around the world. You will have a love hate relationship with VATS. On the one had it enables you to make sure most shots hit. ON the other hand it takes control off of you and drops you into slow motion. No circle strafing with VATS. The time it takes for VATS shots to play itself out you will take hits from any enemy able to range attack. This reason alone makes VATS only desirable when you absolutely must get a head shot in.

AI: 8/10

The AI is pretty standard fan fair. It is as quality as Oblivion with your enemy being smart enough to take a knee for a better shot or retreat in the face of a superior enemy. One thing changed from Oblivion is that enemies no longer try to path find their way toward you while you plug away from a high rock. They will retreat out of site forcing you to get off your perch and hunt them down.

Online: 0/10

This generation of consoles there is no excuse for a lack of online component. Throughout the game you can have a companion and with the limited amount of ammo co-op seems a no brainer.

Environment: 10/10

This seems to be where Bethesda put most of it’s efforts. The depth of the conversations, the attention to detail on things like burned out cars and wrecked buildings, the realistic mutant creatures, the retro-future styling. It all really nails the Fallout world.

Conclusion:

Fallout 3, despite it’s few short comings, is an outstanding game. Whether you are new to the Fallout world or a veteran that has been cursing the gods for the past ten years it is a must buy. There is simply too much to enjoy in this game to pass on it. Even if you never looked twice at Fallout 3 it is worth picking up to see what Oblivion would be like with guns.

What has become a regular feature at Horny Melon, you can play the Fallout 3 review LittleBigPlanet level by looking up the level name “LBP Review: Fallout 3″ or the user name Mr.Flesh (our web designers user name, the office PS3 is out for repairs). For those of you who didn’t buy or couldn’t afford the collectors edition Fallout 3 there is a LBP Vault Boy Bobblehead for you to collect provided you can get to it.