MadCap's Game Reviews - "Fallout 3"

Once upon a time IN THE FUTURE!!!!, there was a scientist named James and his wife Catherine who came up with an idea to bring clean drinking water to the entire Washington, D.C. Wasteland area…oh, yeah…there’s gonna be a war in 2077 between the United States and China over Alaska that’s going to result in the entire world getting bombarded by nuclear arms fire.

…okay, maybe this wasn’t the best place to start this out the review…

I’ve covered the Fallout series in gloriously resplendent detail before, that is to say the DLCs for New Vegas have been covered.  As for the rest of the series Fallout is good for the story, Fallout 2 is only passable because I get to blow up an oil rig at the end, and New Vegas really needs some post-Hoover Dam playability and an apology letter for ending Lonesome Road as it was after all the teasing.  But then, there’s Fallout 3.  It gets a lot of flak from Interplay fanboys, and with good reason.  After all, why on earth would we want our games to be playable?

My jabs aside, I found Fallout 3 to be a very different animal than its two predecessors, at least in the vein of its mechanics.  It runs very similar to another game that I’ve touched upon…oddly very similar…and also owned by Bethesda…

Nope, can’t see a connection here.

Fallout 3 does not exactly have the open backstory that New Vegas has, starting you out with the wonderful family unit of a father voiced by Liam Neeson (who abandons you in a hole in the ground, and thus drives the plot), mother (who dies in childbirth), and a dog…okay, not that third one (though you can get one later). You get a wonderful scene of your birth from your own perspective as a newborn infant in a dark and gritty room, before flashing forward a year later to a brightly lit, almost clinical-looking place where your father’s encouraging you into a playpen.

If you’re not sniffing Sharpies…or are me when I first played…you might notice something up right from the bat here.

Nevertheless, the first nineteen years of your life pass in bizarre white flashes whilst in the clandestine Vault 101, stopping at points to allow the player to become accustomed to the interface.  Moving around, conversations, combat, leveling system introduction, all lovely and done in a way with mostly no break in the immersion until you’re about to leave.  And leave you do, when your father decides to make a Houdini from Vault 101 and makes all Hell break loose, forcing you to fight your way out and into a world of brown and green…sadly, none of this is the vegetation. Well, not living vegetation, anyway.

Where is Daryl when you need him?!

From there, you wander the ruined landscape of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area.  And those with a clever eye might get a notice right away that the map seems to be spread out an awful lot like Cyrodiil…though that’s probably just coincidence, am I right?  For all the gripes I’ve heard about it, I really don’t see why this was a lot of people’s concern.  I apparently just don’t have clever eyes and really didn’t pay it much mind until I had it pointed out to me.  Even then, it never really bothered me all that much.

Combat is a bit different from Oblivion as well, if only in the variety of objects.  Unlike the lands of Tamriel - which have shooting weapons that are limited to just bows, spells, and staves – the Capital Wasteland has a tasty arsenal of weapon, some you can even make yourself.  My personal favorite is the gun that shoots railway spikes.

Yes, you read that properly.  A gun. That. Shoots. Railway Spikes.

You also have the various varieties of melee weapons, blunt and sharp, governed under your Melee Weapons skill (convenient, that).  Unlike the successor to this game, New Vegas, your skills with guns are split up between Your Big Guns and Small Guns skills.  Something I’m rather glad they changed in the development of New Vegas.  There’s also the V.A.T.S. aiming system which pauses the game with the push of a button, allows you to auto-target an enemy and fire at a specific area.  And yes, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how fun it is to watch a railway spike fly through the head of a Super Mutant, sending it splattering lovingly across the camera as its eyeballs fly at me like I’m watching some terrible 3-D movie.

Boomstick? I am the boomstick!

Points I take away from V.A.T.S., though is that the animation sometimes drags on far too long and you can very easily break combat with it using a single perk. Oh, right, perks! Yes, Fallout did it before Skyrim and it’s done here actually better than in that game.  You get a perk every time you level up, and if you meet the skill or previous perk requirements, you can pick a new perk for all sorts of bonuses.  These range from these range from anything to making mutated animals docile around you, to bumping up a skill a few points, to “Grim Reaper’s Sprint”, which will completely refill your Action Points if you spend them all pulling off an attack in V.A.T.S. Played correctly, this can seriously break the game and nearly render the player nigh undefeatable.  Something I’m actually rather pleased that they changed with New Vegas. You can also get perks for completing certain quests, such as learning to use Power Armor by undergoing training with the Brotherhood of Steel or saving the mutant Harold from life as a tree (it makes sense in context) and getting one of a few different perks depending on how you play out the quest.

Slipping back into skills, there are several that have nothing to do with combat.  Some skills (and aforementioned perks) can sometimes unlock certain lines of dialogue that will allow the player to completely skip some combat situations, or get special items or assistance from NPCs.  Unlike in New Vegas, such options take your skills into account and gives the player at least a chance of success rather than outright denying it to the player unless their skill is at a certain level, which I really do prefer.  In the way New Vegas pulls it off, it either robs the player of opportunities or forces them to either grind or find an alternate route to get what they want.

Some would call that openness, I call it busywork.  And needless busywork at that.

A Wanderer's Best Friend

The inventory system, health system, and journal all run off of the Pip-Boy, the player’s wrist mounted computer.  It’s easy enough to navigate through and flows enough, the inventory organized into a few convenient item groups, though most players will happily slave items to hotkeys and be done with it, I can’t say that I blame them.

But anyway…now’s about the time where I get into the main plot and it’s…well, it’s better than Oblivion was, if only by a stretch.  We get a reintroduction of two of Fallout’s mainstays, namely the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave.  The plot revolves around both groups, though admittedly both only really get involved in the plot during the second half. As stated in the introductory paragraph, your mother and father concocted a brilliant plan to purify the D.C. Tidal Basin in order to provide drinking water that is both clean and not irradiated for the entire wasteland.  But then you were born, your mother died in childbirth and your father decided to take you away and go crawl into a hole for nineteen years…for some reason.

Really, his logic is that the Vault would keep you safe, but then why wouldn’t he just stick around with the Brotherhood of Steel? The Citadel, their base, is arguably the most secure location in the Capital Wasteland.  Why waste the time trekking across several miles of wasteland to get to a Vault? But I digress.

Basically, the plot revolves around the Project Purity purifier, built in the old Jefferson Memorial.  The Enclave concocts a plan to introduce a virus that will kill all the “unclean” life in the Wasteland…(yep, just got Godwin’d) and the player cannot side with them…directly, at least.  When the final battle breaks out, the player actually has the option of either distributing the virus through the system or simply activating the purifier…either option kills you.

Yeah, no, really.  In vanilla Fallout 3, this brought the game to a screeching halt.  You’re given no prior warning before entering the endgame, something that I really think contributed to New Vegas with its nice – albeit immersion breaking – pop up menu warning you of the final quest playing out.  However, Fallout 3 has something that New Vegas does not, and that is post Main Questline content! In the form of DLC!

Of course, not all of Fallout 3’s DLC is post game, just the first one I’m going to cover here.  Broken Steel, no doubt made because of the massive backlash against the ending of the game.  In which…well, you can break steel…it’s not really broken, per se…yeah, so kind of a stupid title there, Bethesda…

But as it stands on its own, vanilla Fallout 3 stands as a very excellent game.  It has it’s gripes, but overall it’s playable, has a decent storyline for the Main Quest, and at least has an ending that doesn’t have me feeling like I worked so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.

…come back next week while I try to clean the references out of my ears.

Fallout 3 is available from Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.