Fallout 3



£34.99

I hate to depress everyone, but the credit crunch is biting hard, and capitalism is on its knees. It’s tempting to find a way to relieve the dark, depressing reality of modern life. How about a bit of joyful escapism to take your mind off everything? Wii Sports can be quite the tonic, you know. But there’s another way to get away from it all: remind yourself that, however bad the situation is, things could be a whole lot worse. Enter Fallout 3.

A post-apocalyptic United States is the happy, breezy setting for Bethesda’s latest time-sink. Mankind is on its knees, brought to the brink of extinction by nuclear war, irradiated by the landscape it’s destroyed. The remaining pockets of humanity are struggling to survive in shanty towns constructed entirely from scrap, or hiding out in the remnants of the country’s shattered cities, away from the Super Mutants, Ghouls, and other creatures marauding the Wastelands of the ravaged USA. Your character starts life as an infant being brought up by your scientist father in Vault 101 – a facility designed to keep a select few alive below the irradiated surface. No one can get in. No one can leave. At least, that’s what the Overseer would have everyone believe.

The stylish first hour of Fallout 3 sees you taking your first baby steps from childhood to adulthood. The RPG staple of assigning points to abilities (the usual mix of weapons, science, medical, luck, and so on), is made more interesting by the way it’s presented, firstly in a pre-school story book, and later by answering increasingly bizarre questions in a school exam. The Vault also introduces the dialogue tree system, where a variety of responses reflect either positively or negatively upon your character’s personality balance. In truth, this opening section gives an impression of concentrated ingenuity that rarely resurfaces in the rest of the game. Once your father escapes the Vault, and you resolve to follow him by getting out yourself (with potentially deadly consequences for one of the people you’ve been getting to know beforehand), a soon-to-become-familiar picture is established – one of often frustrating combat, and repetitive, confusing interiors.

Combat is a mix of the VATS (Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System), and real-time shooting. The former is by far the more successful, but it’s not without its kinks. After holding RB to freeze the action, VATS allows you to use your limited Action Points to queue up attacks against specific body parts on a chosen enemy. Based on the distance from the enemy, the weapon used, and the area targeted, each attack has a specific percentage chance of succeeding, resulting in a cinematic mini cutscene with flashy levels of violence. Heads blow off, eyes roll across the floor, bodies ragdoll high into the air in slow-motion - it’s very pretty, if often gruesomely OTT.

VATS has two problems. The first is that its stats-based nature makes it quite possible to miss with a point-blank shotgun blast, which looks faintly ridiculous. The second is that your Action Points quickly run out after a few shots. You are therefore forced to use the real-time shooting while they recharge, which is twitchy, inaccurate, and subject to the same stats-crunching as the VATS percentages. Missing when you see the aiming reticule directly over an enemy’s head is even more annoying than a nailed-on 95% VATS flub. Unfortunately, as soon as Bethesda decided that real-time shooting was in, it chose to go up against the likes of Call of Duty and Halo, and Fallout 3’s attempt at FPS combat is markedly inferior.

Escaping the darkness of the Vault, the sight of the ruined, post-apocalyptic landscape is comparable to the breathtaking money shot from Oblivion. Visually, Bethesda’s game engine has received a significant makeover. There’s still limited pop-in, but the juddering is all but gone, and the draw distance significantly upped. Given the vastness of the landscape, not all the textures are particularly sharp, but the art design of the Wastelands, with their destroyed beauty, faded advertising, and pre-war relics, is fantastic.