Some guy is trying to get caught by stealing games from a plant or something and then releasing them to p2p in quick succession. Probably not the smartest thing to do when it comes to that kind of leak material, but screw it: it lets some people play it before launch and share their impressions for people who may be not be sure whether to buy, rent or skip this game. Like in a review!



Let’s get some things out of the way first. It does not play like a normal FPS even though it’s in first person. It’s not exactly Oblivion with guns, although in many ways it is. Some have called it Oblivion meets Bioshock, but that’s not really it either. Also, I have never played Fallout 1 or 2 for longer than 15 minutes. I just could never get into it. I started playing it waaaay too late and although I’m sure it was great back in the day, it just didn’t feel like a lot of fun when I played it. So no, Fallout is not holy for me and I haven’t been waiting for part 3 for 11 years. I wasn’t even planning on playing it until it got leaked (I’m just a sucker for pre-release stuff). So with that out of the way: how is the game, without spoilers?

Fun?
Fallout 3 starts out a little smoother than its predecessors. After a pretty epic way to start the game and create your character, you’ll end up in The Capital Wasteland after some 30-60 minutes. Hell, you could probably rush through it in 20 minutes if you wanted, but there is a lot of stuff to do and people to talk to. It’s fair to say that creating a new character will take you longer than in Oblivion if you fuck up your stats. Which is why it is a good thing that Fallout 3 doesn’t suffer from a lame leveling system with major and minor skills. It’s more similar to KOTOR in a lot of ways, but more on that later.

When you first set your first steps in the Fallout 3 world, it’s pretty cool. Everything is really a wasteland and it just stretches out for what seems like forever. You can do the PAX demo stuff at first by going to Megaton, the town with the unexploded nuke etc. The game encourages you to go to Megaton with a lot of signs pointing that way, but you can do whatever you want just like in Oblivion. I wanted to see the “evil side” ending of the first quest there of course, which just ended up giving me a waypoint in the middle of nowhere. If you’ve seen those trailers or played it, you know what that means. So it was up to me to go there and finish the quest.

Now, it took me a good 2,5 hours to even get there. On the way, you encounter mutated insects and animals, Raiders (Mad Max type enemies who prowl the Wasteland) and locations to explore when your HUD’s compass indicates one nearby. You can teleport to any location on the map, but only if you have been there first. After arriving at the destination, there was some more talking and interacting before I chose the evil quest ending and reward. It was nice. I also became aligned as evil pretty harshly after that. Going back to a neutral or good path felt pointless, so I just rolled with it. Deciding that some more leveling and questing was in order before I followed the main quest to D.C., I explored a bit.

And by a bit, I mean I spent 11,5 hours until I reached the next main quest location. Sidequests in Fallout 3 are not just sidequests you casually do. They take 1-2 hours minimum! You get 20gs for them so it’s well worth it for the cheevo whores, and some quests give you things like cheaper goods at traders or very useful weapons and armor. Still, I had spent a good 10,5 hours before I ever reached D.C. and at that point the game was really becoming a bore. Not that it was badly made or anything, but the game didn’t really give any impression that there was a story behind it. You are just one guy in a huge world and you don’t mean shit. A group of Raiders will rape you in the first hours so you’ll have to be smart to survive. If you enter some locations, you might get raped by enemies who can be survived but who also take so much ammo that you almost run out of it near the end of the location. Ammo, stimpaks (medkits) and caps (money) are rare when you start out, so straying off the path can be a real hassle. Since you have a weight limit of how much you can carry, like in Oblivion, it doesn’t really pay off to explore when you can barely hit anything with your crappy skills.


This is the kind of epic you'll be waiting for, don't worry because it gets better than this!

Most games end within 10,5 hours, but I only just entered a devastated Washington D.C. at that time. Of course, I thought I could just walk to the waypoint through the city. That quickly became a one hour mistake, as streets were blocked by rubble and the chose path quickly let me to packs of Super Mutants (the game’s main evil enemies after Raiders), Raiders, mercenaries who attacked me and other badness. I was just not prepared for what lay in the ruins.

Following the waypoints on the map a bit closer, it turned out you had to go through some underground metro passages to reach your destination. Fair enough. Luckily, as you reach that part of the game, it becomes a lot better. Gone are the boring wastelands you’ve almost grown used to. Playing the role as a lone survivor in a whole lot of nothing quickly becomes a more directed experience where you get more quests in the area, explore a more predictable path and generally take the lessons you had to learn in the Wasteland to apply them to urban warfare.

From there on end, the game only becomes better and better. In a way, the game just throws out any guidance that you have grown accustomed to in modern games and really focuses on the role playing. You’re not just a gamer on the couch who is playing through another RPG. You get kicked out into the wild, have to learn how to adapt and how to survive. You learn what weapon type best suits your style and whether you need to focus on things like lockpicking, hacking, etc. And when you thought you were ready, it turns out you still had a lot to learn.

As the game progresses from D.C. onwards, you’ll just become more and more of a badass until a very epic finale. I started to understand what people were talking about when they say that Fallout takes some time to get into. It took me about 12-15 hours before I was convinced about its epicness. After 33 hours, I saw the light and finished the main quest. After 43 hours, I had gone back to finish sidequests and I still have about 4 quests to finish. It’s a long game, not 100 hours long but still looong.

Pray tell us what was not so epic
So, the game is pretty sweet. But it’s not without faults. Some design choices just feel a bit lame and some things feel “not perfect”.



Let’s start with character creation. You can create a male or female character which influences your gameplay through some unique perks of which you can choose 1 for each of the 20 levels. You can spend some time creating nice hair and face. You can also just forget about that, since you will pretty much never look at your own head, ever. Most of the time you’ll be wearing a helmet or a quest reward mask that gives some nice freebee bonuses. At the start of the game, you can assign points into the usual categories: Strenght, Intelligence, Agilty, etc. The game only gives you a very slight indication of what does what though, and once you have your Pipboy3000, you can see exactly what the stats do. This is kinda weak, because why the hell couldn’t I see that 15 minutes before? Immersion is one thing, giving vague descriptions while showing the whole mechanic system down the road, it feels a bit cheap. Unexperienced players will have no idea what to choose and they may go back to create a new character if they find that their choices have failed. For instance, Strength defines melee combat which many people will ignore. But it also defines the amount of weight you can carry, which means a lot of trading money will get lost if you gimp your strength. Luckily, if you create a balanced character, it’s not that bad as the game is a lot more varied in options than Oblivion where you could just ruin your character by bad choices.

Although the game is not Oblivion, the roots are visible in other sections. You can pick up a ton of useless items just like in Oblivion. This turn around, some items can be crafted into weapons. However, the game does not tell you that, so if you sold those items and forgot who you sold them to: tough luck. You might have to spend 2 hours trying to find that one rare item to create that weapon that you only just found a blueprint for. There are a couple of NPC’s that sell most crafting items, as long as you chose the “right” path and didn’t kill them early on. There is a weapon that will let you shoot the junk items as ammo though, like a spitting gravity gun. It’s kinda fun as an idea, but not overly practical depending on the path you’ve chosen.

This path is reason for another matter: playing as a good guy will not reward you as much as an evil bastard. At all. Fallout 3 is from the school of Oblivion and KOTOR where a quest can start with one npc who gives you a quest, for instance: kill this guy. Then you find the guy and talk to him, and what do you know, he’s not that bad! He even offer you another reward if you don’t kill him. Do you kill the guy, do you try to make peace between the two NPC’s, do you kill them both? It’s up to you. But… what if you just take the best quest reward choice, then kill both/all NPC’s and steal all their loot? It’s a post-apocalyptic world, money is scarce and so are resources. Stealing ANY item will give you negative karma (evil points) and stealing is really the best way to make money fast. You can try to be a goody two-shoes, but seriously, I can only recommend playing it as an evil guy the first time around just so you don’t get lost or stuck. You don’t necessarily suck as a good guy, but you gimp yourself with the lack of ammo for some weapons that you may have the best specialization in. Being bad pays off, a lot :)



Not only that, you can even sneak into a trader’s room and steal all of his useless crap, then carry your overburdened ass slowly to the trader 30ft away. Then you sell him his own goods… Yep, NPC’s are fucking retarded just like in Oblivion. Scare some abusive woman’s kid into unsafe freedom and npc’s will start asking if you saw the kid after a while. But then you can still ask her if that annoying brat is her son and she’ll say stuff like “Yeah he’s always running around causing trouble”. NPC’s also still have that standing-still-while-slightly-turning-towards-you thing to them, which can look really stupid if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bethesda made a lot of progress on the dialogue though. Lip syncing is a lot better, characters have a lot of different voices and faces and a lot of the dialogue has a lot of humor. Hell, it contains some of the most adult dialogue I’ve seen in a game. Use the girly Black Widow perk to coax a dude into doing my job in return for the promise of a threesome with his love interest? Fuck yeah!

Yes, I was a hot red head evil vixen who manipulates men into what was best for her. Don’t you dare judge me, Pewella is a fucking badass bitch from the pits of hell!

Most of the interaction goes through a mix of Oblivion and KOTOR dialogue systems. Gone is the stupid speech minigame from Oblivion, enter the now standard [Speech], [Lie], [Intelligence] tags that enable you to chose new dialogue options. It plays a bit like KOTOR because of it, which doesn’t hurt the game. Good and bad choices get mixed up once in a while, but in 90% of the time, the “good’ option is still the top one and the “evil” option is the bottom one. There are gray areas, but you can still go through all the options in a conversation as if an NPC didn’t notice you just said you would rape the town he is protecting.

Some other things can also be a bother in the game. The map for instance. There is no minimap on screen. All you have is a worldmap and a local map on your Pipboy. This is really lame, since the local map is 2D and it’s often not very clear where the hell you are supposed to go. Be prepared to get lost in big buildings a lot of time. Why there isn’t a 3D holographic type of map that your Pipboy projects in the bottom of the screen is beyond me. Too hard to make? Too big? It’s not like the guns don’t take a quarter of the screen and you r HUD still shows HP and ammo so it’s not that immersive anyway. The map can also be retarded. It can tell you to tale subway routes while you can just teleport to a nearby location and walk 15 seconds to an unexplored location. All in all it is some help, but not very easy to use and sometimes not helpful at all.

The Pipboy suffers from more of these types of things. Quest notes are grouped into one big pile which can only be filtered on quest basis. So if you want to find that schematic for that weapon so you’ll know what you need, get ready to search. The Pipboy sometimes adds unneeded info like a password you’ll automatically enter. But most of the time it will also not make a note of where you are supposed to go when an NPC tells you it. Sometimes an NPC only tells you where to go once, leading to a lot of aimless searching in the beginning of the game when you are already confused enough.

Also , after 40 hours I still sometimes push the wrong buttons to navigate through the menus. The menu’s are also pretty small, so forget it if you have an SDTV. Most of all, the Pipboy screams PC use. The console versions are nice for those without a good PC to run this game, but it’s obvious that it’s been made for the PC. Menus would be a lot easier to navigate with a mouse. Also, the target reticule in the game is VERY VERY SMALL. This isn’t too bad when you are aiming at stuff far away, but sometimes enemies will rush you. By then, it will become a fight against the controls while trying to conserve your ammo by missing as little as possible. Ammo is expensive and sometimes hard to find after all.



This problem is countered by the main gameplay gimmick of Fallout 3 which I’ve almost forgot to mention. The V.A.T.S. system lets you pinpoint bodyparts to aim at in frozen time. The closer enemies are and the more skilled you are with a weapon, the more likely you will hit it. You can stack a set of actions before you let them roll out in slow-motion time. Every shot will cost you Action Points (AP) which usually translates into 3-7 shots before you run out. Run out and get rushed, and you either back away and hide until you regenerated AP, use an item to get more AP or try to fight the controls and hit enemies in FPS mode. In theory, you could max your weapon skills and try to FPS this game without using the VATS system. This usually gets you killed because your aim is crap in real time at long range, or you end up in a close combat fight where you’ll waste your ammo.

Still, it lets you play through levels methodically and you’ll get the hang of it in no time. It feels like it could just be a 2D isometric game If the viewpoint was there. And there is even a 3rd person viewpoint if you want to use it. It’s not very intuitive, but it’s there. This game is as much an FPS as Oblivion was, so don’t discount the game just for its viewpoint.

Finally, the leveling. There are 20 levels to gain, each of which gives you a perk. You don’t need to have 20 perfect perks for your character, but it pays off to plan ahead. The drawback of the level cap is that when you play an evil character and kill everyone, you get a lot of loot but also a lot more XP. I reached the cap after finishing around 80% of the main quest and maybe 1/3rd of the sidequests. Fallout 3 does not have enemies that level with you, or at least not noticeably so all the time. You encounter tougher enemies over time in the Wasteland, but at level 20, some of the sidequests are ridiculously easy. Some also give you sweet quest rewards for a relatively easy difficulty, which become pointless if you already have max XP and much better equipment.

The quests and leveling seem to be designed to allow for three playthroughs as good, neutral and evil while not having to replay quests if you don’t want to. It’s a nice gesture but it doesn’t always work for people who like to do all quests in one sitting.

Final thoughts
Still, this is one giant and epic game. I hate to bring it up again, but Oblivion felt big and epic to me even though I didn’t really care for the main storyline and I hated the repetitive “go through the portal” quests. Fallout 3 goes above and beyond that. The main storyline is pretty good, the sidequests and the game world are very well designed most of the time, as long as you didn’t finish most of the game already and only went back to finish the sidequests for the achievements. There is a ton of detail in the world and it’s a small miracle that Bethesda managed to pull off the creation of such an enormous world without breaking some sense of continuity.

Some things may annoy you in the interface, but just imagine that the Pipboy 3000 was not the best model when you got it or something. Close quarters combat is a bit flimsy, but then you should’ve have let them come that close if you didn’t choose a beefed up shotgun/melee character. You can’t play the game as an FPS, although the killing animation with VATS can become a bit of a drag. Still, it stays fun to watch decapitations for about 30 hours ;)

The recreation of the D.C. area is amazing. At one point I forgot to ask an NPC where the National Archives were for one quest, so I looked it up on Google maps. Turned out that it was exactly where it was supposed to be. The world is believable, well designed throughout the game and if you think the map area is small, you’re forgetting that half the content is inside a building or underground.

Sometimes guns will hover in midair, apparently the game can freeze for some people although I haven’t had one freeze, graphics can mess up when you enter an area which can only be fixed by exiting it again. These things are part of a giant gameworld just like they are part of a game like GTA4 or Saint’s Row. You notice them when it happens, but that’s mostly because you tend to notice the negative while ignoring and taking for granted the good things that the game offers; of which there is a lot.



Still, it is a long game in a season packed with AAA games. It takes a looooooooong time to get into it, and I don’t know if I even would have stuck with this if I had rented it for a day or two (or was able to). I’ll go as far as that I would not have gotten to the good parts if it hadn’t leaked early; that was pretty much the only thing that kept me going through the harsh first part of the game. If you have a lot of spare time and have to decide between this game and some 8-10 hour shooter that you will only play singleplayer, get this game. If you have a job and only a couple of hours which also have to go into LBP, Dead Space, Gears 2, Resistance 2, Fable 2, etc etc: maybe save it for the winter holidays or for the game drought of early-mid 2009? It is not a game for everyone, that’s for sure. You have to delve into it, stick with it, and let it reward you. But it does reward you if you do.

The negatives may sounds like a lot in this review, but that’s mostly because I’ve tried to name them all. The good may feel underrepresented, but that’s because you’ll just have to see most of that for yourself. There is some epic rape of your poor underpowered character at first, then there are some epic quests, some golden moments and a lot of great badassery to be had in Fallout 3. And I honestly think you shouldn’t miss out on this game just like you shouldn’t miss out on something like Bioshock. I’m inclined to say: guys who told me Fallout 1 + 2 were epic, this feels a lot like you’ve described it and you were probably right*.

Final Grade:
6.5/10 after 5 hours
7.5/10 after 10 hours
8.5/10 after 20 hours
9.0/10 after 40 hours

Be prepared for what you are getting into, but give it a chance if you can. Still, it’s not for everyone and some gamers will go crazy before they start loving it. I guess it’s like LSD!

*X-Com: Terror from the Deep will still shit all over those two games for all eternity though