Fallout 3: Still an Amazing Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game

As a gamer and a fan of the game's predecessors (Fallout and Fallout 2), I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of playing Fallout 3. The game is the perfect balance of fun, gritty, exploratory and ridiculous. The game follows a first-person-shooter type of engine with the skill and experience based RPG elements of the first two titles. If you want a clear picture of this game, imagine if the movie the Road Warrior and the game Oblivion had a baby. Throw in an element of the Day the Earth Stood Still, and you have Fallout 3. Oh, and just like the first two games, the narration is done by Ron Perlman of Hellboy and Sons of Anarchy.

The main story is effective and original. It smells vaguely of those epic and inspiring stories like Star Wars that drive us, while maintaining a unique experience. As a citizen of Vault 101 (an underground community built to survive a nuclear holocaust), you have it all: safety, food, shelter, education and a strong, endearing father figure voiced by the great Liam Neeson. At the age of nineteen, though, all that is shattered! You are woken in your room to find that your father has somehow escaped the seemingly impenetrable vault! On top of that, Vault Security think that you are in on it! Armed with nothing more than a baseball bat, a pea-shooter pistol and your wits, you must also escape before you are killed! You fight through security (as well as a few moral dilemmas) and escape the vault into the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. to find your father. The problem is, you don't know where he's gone. After a bit of aimless wandering, you come across a small town surrounded by a castle wall built out of junk and debris. A robot (reminiscent of "Robby the Robot") stands guard at the gate. Once inside, you see a humble oasis from the dry, hot Washington, D.C. wasteland of 2277 AD... built inside the crater of an unexploded nuclear warhead, sitting ominously (and still armed) at the center of the town.

From here, the player is truly free to wander and explore the seemingly infinite wastes of the game's sandbox environment. You'll have choices to be good or evil. You can either be the generous stranger who gives fresh water to beggars, or the infamous villain, slaver and murderer whose brutality and ruthlessness is second only to his (or her) fame in the Capital Wastes.

The gameplay is almost exactly like Oblivion, but with guns. The special surprise is the VATS system of targeting available to the player. Fans of the previous Fallout games will remember the ability to specifically target body parts with all your weapons. The VATS system allows the player to pause combat and use action points (a meter at the bottom of the screen that shows if you can use the VATS system or not) to target parts of the body, including the head, torso, left and right arms, and left and right legs. There is slight disappointment in Fallout 3, because unlike in the previous titles, you can no longer target the groin. Bad news for the unusually cruel gamer like myself, good news for the game's non-playable characters (NPC).

The sandbox environment (an environment where the entire game is one big level, rather than a series of levels: level one, level two, etc.) makes exploration a HUGE part of this game. If you aren't wandering the wasteland, pretty much asking to be torn apart by a pack of feral robots (which really happens), you will miss about 80% of the game. So get out there! Kill the ten foot supermonsters called Deathclaws! Give medicine to the occasional beggar! Murder and rob the poorly protected merchants and caravans! Get bounty hunters to come looking for you! These things are the spice of the game, don't miss it!