There seems to be a growing trend for me. Games that I don’t find particularly worthwhile the first time I play them somehow magically transform into elements of pure gold. The best example I can give was Forza 2; a game that could have be fed to a pig as far as I was concerned somehow turned in a game of intense addiction in and fun after stewing in my game collection. This leads me on to the latest game in this long line of game stew evolution: Fallout 3.
Fallout and Fallout 2 were originally produced by Interplay, the creators behind the brilliant Baldur’s Gate series, however during the creation of Fallout 3, they then sold the rights to Bethesda and as such, the game has taken a giant turn away from its turn based isometric view origins and wound up running straight into Oblivion. The similarities to Oblivion and others in the series really cannot be denied. The way you make your character is essentially the same; choose your name, sex and what you will look like. Some random stuff happens when you get to further define your character, more random shit leading to more character definition and then finally before jumping out into the wide wide world, you get to go back and change anything that you may not have liked. The similarities can continue to be seen through the game in the combat, landscape and your interaction with people. I’m not saying this is bad, in fact its a constant reassuring cuddle for the new player to the Fallout universe, and while others may criticise the similarities, i find the jarring change from medieval to futuristic wasteland to be enough for me to want to take a look around.
I’m going to get onto the plot at some point so I might as well do it now. The year is….I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention but either way you start the game being brought into life and then spend 19 years or so in a vault designed to shelter people from a nuclear war. Your daddy decides to go AFK into the wide universe and being his child, you insist on going out to find him as well. I can’t really say much beyond that because I’ve gotten sidetracked so many times by the side quests that progression through the main storyline has been rather slow.
In typical Bethesda fashion, the number of character styles you can create is immense. You’ve got the damage soaking big guys who wield tree trunks as weapons, you have stealthy guys that will kill an enemy dead at 8 million yards, geeks, thiefs and people who can manipulate others as if they were folding a napkin in half. I myself went for a combination of stealthy and thief because I like the idea of stealth killing and being able to rob people’s houses in an apocolyptic wasteland is a necessity.
The sheer depth of the game is also immense and is more than likely to scare off the first time player. The amount of items, weapons, armor and junk that you can get your hands on is completly insane and yet despite of all this, your still going to have issues finding the bullets to put in your guns. Whilst I admit that a wasteland may not be the best place to establish an ammo shop, one is desperately needed because you can really chew through your ammo if you’re not careful. The problem is not so inherent at the start as I was getting enough ammo for my hunting rifle to build a small hut out of bullets but as I levelled the number of people carrying such ammo lowered drastically and I am now back to scavenging what I can until I can level my character up enough so that the baddies will start carrying ammo I care about.
And I would really like to know who decided to not give the player a flashlight, rather going for the idea of having a mobile phone strapped to your arm to provide a source of light because it is fucking useless. Wondering around the dark areas of an abandoned factory is sheer terror as turning off your mobile results in complete blindness whilst turning it on gives you a viewing distance of about 2ft which gives you just enough time for the player to grab his junk before a super mutant decides to slam your head into a wall. Maybe thats the atmosphere they were going for but I find it just idiotic, surely someone in this desolate wasteland would have figured out that a torch might be handy to have.
Another criticism I have is in the “crippling” system the game has. Shooting an enemy constantly in the same area of their body will result in the body part being “crippled” but the definition of crippled seems to fluxuate quite badly. It can generally fluctuate between a minor scratch or the whole thing being blow apart which for most areas of the body is find by me but there can and should not be any option when it comes to crippling someone’s head. I must ask, “How in the HELL do you cripple someone’s head without them resulting in death.” Bullets to the skull = death. Not “it is only a scratch” bullshit that seems to have come about. You cripple someone’s head, they go down, thats the way it always works.
On the whole these are minor criticisms and whilst their presence is annoying, it is not going to make you throw the game out. You may note I have made few positive points but I feel its so hard to review this game without the words “like Oblivion” coming into play every three sentences. Those who enjoyed Oblivion will more than likely enjoy this game and whilst those who played the previous Fallout games may find the change a bit uneasy, they can be reassured with the fact that all the story and many of the gameplay elements are still there. It goes to show that the merging of games can be done when the best part of each are taken.