An ill wind blows over the drab, broken brown landscape around you, it carries a dark dust with it that dances through the air.  The wind dies as you reach a rocky outlook and the vista before you is grim:  Watertowers, brown with rust and muck jutt forlornly from the craggy ground; buildings stand half-demolished with parts of the window-frames swinging gently in the breeze; the highway is broken into collapsed sections.  Nobody's going anywhere.  This is the world of Fallout 3. 

Fallout 3 is a third- or first-person role playing game (RPG) with action elements set in a dystopian future of the last few decades of the 21st Century.  At the beginning of the game, you are treated to the explanation that when nuclear war broke out, a privileged few were sent into underground bunkers, called vaults, where they continued thriving in order to wait-out the poisonousness of the landscape outside.  The game begins with your birthf and the subsequent death of your mother; the doctor is the man you will later search for upon leaving the vault, your father and guide for your first sixteen-or-so years. 

The training stages of the game are the training stages of your life, learning to walk, learning to pick things up, talk to people on your tenth birthday and undertaking life choices at sixteen. 

Your life in the vault is mercifully short as it quickly becomes wearing; you're raring to get out to that horrible world you've been sealed away from and so, when your father goes missing and you give chase, you step out, blinking into the blinding light of the brutally scarred landscape of Washington DC, the scale of the place and the difference in colouration is a breath of fresh air, though it quickly turns sour.  The first lead on your father is to head to nearby Megaton, named after the huge nuclear device around which the town is built, but you have to get there first.

What I did was explore the map.  It is vast.  Bethesda, the developer who picked up the Fallout series were also responsible for Oblivion, the winner of a myriad gaming awards, such as game of the year from G4, Gamespy, GameSpot and IGN, among many others.  I first came across a decrepit old school.  Much of it was missing, however I was able to walk through its front door and, following a loading screen (as standard, there is loading between the outside world and interiors, though the outside world is completely free-roaming in a nice load-as-you-go fashion) found myself inside a poorly-lit school filled with raiders who are hardcore looters with interesting hair-dos and kinky armour.

The atmosphere was intense and claustrophobic.  I found myself picking up everything and saving around every corner because the air was thick with suspense.  It has real elements of Silent Hill and Resident Evil games where you are the only one who isn't crazy in a world whose very essence is against you.  Fallout 3 definitely mixes genres in a sublime way.  It is part FPS and it leans heavily into RPG territory.  Meanwhile, it's a puzzler and action/adventure game, blended seamlessly into survival horror and with its bony, stained fingers in so many rotten, irradiated pies, it's little wonder that you can end up a touch confused as to what to do next.

Lock on target
I found myself not really wanting to throw myself into the main storyline, or any quest for that matter and just explored like some kind of nuclear nomad, picking off the vicious zombified dogs, feral ghouls and troublesome bloatflies (which are about the size of a watermelon and shoot unidentifiable globules at you from their rear ends) as I encountered them.  Sometimes, I ran into more raiders and they would supply me with better weaponry, notably the flame thrower, missile launcher and electric pistol, which, upon making a critical hit, would cause the victim to glow brightly and dissolve into a pile of fine, white dust that remains despite the howling winds.

A new combat mechanic is the use of VATS, or Vault-Tek Assisted Targeting System.  It's nice, this.  As you can see from the image above, what it does is shows you a schematic of the creature you intend to shoot/incinerate/bludgeon/slice/electrocute/skewer/mash/explode (delete as appropriate) and show you the probability of striking a particular part based on your combat skill and distance from the target.  If you wanted to get this behemoth to stop hitting you with a fire hydrant, you could go for his right arm, for example.  The action points bar helps moderate this mechanic, limiting the number of times you can accurately attack a part.  To me, this is a great feature, since I find the game sometimes a little too frantic to engage in real-time battles against multiple foes, however VATS has its downfall, that being that it appears to halt time for everyone else around you, while you take your time deciding what to target, making your mind up whether its better to go for head or arm, which is more likely, you could, mid-battle, hit the VATS button and fuck off for a cup of tea; it really does break the action and where everything else is pretty much real-time, having VATS actually just stop time altogether while you remain able to switch between targets and stuff really doesn't do anything to suspend disbelief.

Almost as a pay-off for that interruption to the action, there is quite a high frequency of your VATS shots being played out in a gory cinematic complete with shaky camera angles, slow motion and various focusing techniques.  It's really quite good and, if you slice a limb or head off with your firepower, it's very grisly as blood splashes in gloriously macabre fashion, eyeballs and jaw bones fly in all directions and your headless foe drops with a sludgy thud to the floor.

Breaking the action
After getting into a few more quests, I was aware of being far more familiar with the controls and was much more able to find my way around the PIP-Boy 3000, which is a wrist-mounted computer with maps, inventory, quest notes and radio.  The PIP-Boy 3000 really does illustrate the bizarre blend of design styles that you'll find within Fallout 3.  The TV test cards, icons and a lot of the clapped-out old cars, architecture and much else has a 1950s feel to it, despite being set in 2077; the PIP-Boy 3000 has that vintage feel to it, with its black screen and green (by default) 1970s - 1980s DOS-style text.  As with VATS, (which is run from your wrist-mounted computer) time halts when you activate the PIP-Boy which again can interrupt the action drastically when you're hoping to switch weapons, take pills or use medical 'stimpaks'.

As with other RPGs where your actions influence your reception (the game tracks your naughty-or-niceness with a system of karma) it can lead to some peculiar interactions.  In Tenpenny Tower, (the hideout of what's left of the well-to-do in their 1950s garb and stained dresses) I went apeshit with an assault rifle and killed a bunch of people (it was after I'd saved, you see) including the building's owner and the shadowy Mr Burke (I received the angelic-haloed good karma for both of those) and then gunned down a few residents (horned bad karma for those) and everyone in the tower was scared of me.  I went outside for a spot of 'fresh' air and a pee, then went back in and everyone behaved as if nothing had happened.  What is it with RPG coding that means that if I do something bad, it stays bad?!  So I'm afraid Fallout 3 loses some credibility there.

Nuked to Oblivion
I would say that after a few hours' teething with Fallout 3, you will feel yourself being happily familiar with it.  If you played Oblivion then everything will be familiar to you, but you will still stumble over the first couple of hours and you will be a bit uncomfortable with just how creepy this game can be.  Instead of magic, you have a vast array of weapons.  Instead of spell creation, you get to make your own weapons and devices, where you had potions you now have chems - sort-of like narcotics that boost your attributes and, should you use them too frequently, you can become addicted.  Oblivion players will also find the voice acting rather familiar.  It stumbles a little and can be a bit cringeworthy in places, particularly when characters say "toosk toosk" for "tsk tsk" which to me is always a tut caused by the sudden release of palate-tongue suction, if you, erm, know what I mean.  The quest system is precisely the same and it allows you to get more and more involved.  Instead of money, there are bottlecaps for reasons I've not yet had explained to me, and the story continues at your pace.  As will Oblivion, the higher the level of your character (for you earn experience points and actually have the amount of experience each kill gives you flashing up on the screen) the more challenging those random encounters in the wilderness become.

Fallout 3 also gives you a radiation mechanic.  If you're too close to a source of radiation or ingest irradiated food or drink, you will acquire more rads.  The more rads you are exposed to, the more your body suffers.  You suffer radiation sickness in varying stages and this is reflected in your stats.  Your strength may be reduced and you will find yourself incapable of running due to being over encumbered.  If you can't take any chems to rectify the situation, you're going to have to shed some of that much-needed inventory.  And, of course, if you're stuck in a place where you're acquiring rads by the second and can't get away quickly enough, you're pretty much done for.  It's a well-thought-out part of the game and adds that much more hostility to terrain.  The land really is against you in Fallout 3 and it takes someone with some guts to head on out there and take on the razed Washington DC.

To me, the gameplay's faults are few, but still quite significant, the graphics, however, are faultless, lush and, though they suffer from a certain drabness that you would expect in such a bleak world, are actually gorgeous and just helps to build a feeling of isolation and desperation.  This game has atmosphere by the murky bucketload and it all feels so hostile, dangerous and trecherous; there's a beauty about it as well and I found myself filled with the hope that I never see things looking this way, though perhaps it's a foregone conclusion.

It's very immersive and you do get pulled in, though I felt myself resisting because to begin with it simply didn't hold my attention.  Once I got into it more, spending more time playing, I fell in in a big way and I'm really enjoying it now.  There are still those things that jar with me, but they're fairly easily overlooked.  In comparison to Oblivion, I think I would still rather play Oblivion, though.  It has a vibrancy to its visuals, a less tense survival horror feel to it and is just a bigger game, particularly with its DLC, though quite what DLC we have in store for Fallout 3 could be nerve-shreddingly horrific, which is something to tentatively look forward to.

So there you go, a 'glowing' review of the nuclear catatrophe that is Fallout 3.  It's excellent and immersive, once you break through the unfamiliarity of it all, and find the drive to take quests forward.

83%
Not quite as good as its elder brother.

8-D
• Vast, expansive free-roaming environment
• Beautiful, if oppressive visuals

>:-(
• Overstrung, gut-wrenching, nail-biting tension
• Realism-dropping mechanics and awkward voice acting

PC system requirements