I don’t know that I’d call this a full review, but I completed a playthrough of Fallout 3, and wanted to share my impressions. (Evil, Speech, Repair, and Energy Weapons — Ash Pile FTW!)

Super Mutants are jerks. This one didn’t need his head anymore.

There are plenty of folks discussing this game now, so I figured you’d be dying for another review…

Combat

Combat is satisfyingly visceral and gory. There’s an RPG-style targeting / turn-based mode called “V.A.T.S.” that helped allay my fears of an FPS-a-thon, though you ALSO fight in FPS style while waiting for your action points to recharge. It feels to me as though range is king, and the longer range, the better — but I didn’t actually try to play through as a melee type, either. And, if you combine it with pickpocketing, you can put grenades in peoples’ pants. Classic!

Roleplay

Most “moral” choices boil down to SUPER DUPER GOOD and MUAHAHA EVIL. But that’s kind of OK, because somehow, they don’t FEEL like they’re presented that way. The evil choices are evil enough to make even a die-hard videogame bad guy like yours truly wince on occasion. And, like you’d expect, you’re not limited to the conversation tree choices to be good or evil. You can give water to beggars, steal stuff everywhere, and the like. If you get frustrated with a quest, you can even end it by shooting the quest-giver in the face. I mean, uh… I heard.

Story

Meh. It’s adequate. There are a series of primary story points that you can influence in one way or another. Do you really need a story to get yourself out there, blowing up mutated bad guys in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? I didn’t think so. The voice acting is reasonably good, though the static flavor speech gets old in every city, quickly. Unlike Fallout 1 and 2, you don’t get a complete ending explaining the entire future of every person and place you encountered — which is kind of a bummer, but I guess I’m not surprised, since they have to ANIMATE that kind of thing now.

Overall

I finished this game pretty quickly. If you power through the story, it’s over fast. In fact, I only even got to level 13 (of 20, I think). I never felt insanely overpowered. I do feel that I cheated myself by powering to the end, so after a cooling-off period, I’m going to go back and explore — I suspect that I saw perhaps a third of what the Capital Wasteland had to offer. The “feel” of the old Fallout games was kind of there, and kind of not — there’s Pip Boy and all that, but not a whole lot, and I really miss the whimsical humor of previous games. (I sure didn’t find a Bridgekeeper this time, though I want to take this opportunity to thank the Mysterious Stranger.) On the other hand, my one absolute roleplay requirement (which I won’t go into, because it’s a spoiler, but let’s just say there’s a purpose to maxing out your Speech skill) was met.

Maps felt just a touch on the small side. But then, loading times (on the XBox 360) weren’t insane, so it didn’t end up bothering me. Side quests are generally enjoyable and totally worth doing — you end up with a bunch of character perks and achievements that way. The art and visual appearance generally felt excellent, though strangely, simple character animations (like walking) felt a little stilted despite awesome ragdoll and “flying body parts” effects on dead things.

Technologically, things went surprisingly smoothly. On the 360, I had the game freeze entirely once, and only stutter while loading a couple of times. (The lazy-loading of sound effects is kind of funny, on the rare occasion when you interact with something new and don’t hear it for a second or so…) I lost NPCs that I was leading around on a few occasions, but I can’t say for sure whether that was a bug or my lack of leadership skills.

With all that said, this is a really solid first-person semi-action RPG. I’d rank it as the best game I played this year. If you’re looking for a good RPG, I’d strongly suggest checking this one out.