Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition

Clunky shooter and utterly boring rpg.

Cant kill childrens = bad game. No, seriously, what made Fallout 1 & 2 so special wasnt the brutal options you had in the uncut version but the immense deep gameplay mechanics, story and characters. Bethesda build an somewhat enjoyable sandbox with F3 but not a real connected RPG world. Obsidian showed how its done with New Vegas and it was indeed a great game. So, if you consider playing a Fallout FPS play Fallout NV. The Fallout Series in order of greatness: Fallout 2, Fallout 1, Fallout NV, Fallout 4, Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 is inferior in ervery conceivable way to NV, it lacks morale choices, in-depth rpg mechanics, and good factions. It also isn't nearly as replayable. It also doesn't make any sense within the lore. Play Fallout 1, 2 or New Vegas instead.

The positive, the game actually works, just install and hit play. There is a warning but the game runs fine. In my 50 hours of play I had one crash. If you want the game, GOG is the way to go. Now the bad. Pretty much everything else. I never got into the Fallout games when they released but heard great things about 3 and New Vegas. I decided to give New Vegas a try a while back and loved it. Given that many people think FO3 was comparable or better than FNV I figured playing FO3 was a no brainer. Wrong It is a terrible RPG and a poor game. The gameplay is clunky, the story is boring, the characters paper thin, the choices non existent. There is nothing in this game that holds my interest. I can't even bring myself to finish the game. There are no interesting groups, you have generic evil guys who are evil because they are evil, and good guys who are insufferable because the game wants you to like them. It is so bad that I want to side with the bad guys because the good guys are so annoying. This gets into the next problem, I have no choice, I cannot side with the bad guys, I must side with the good guys. There are no real decisions I can make, only superficial and/or black and white ones. Do I help the nice town, or help the evil people nuke the town. Give free water to the city or poison it so millions die? There is no nuance, just be a good guy or super evil. They also have a minimal impact of the story. Even nuking a town causes no real change in the story. You aren't even locked out of a long quest chain a character in the town gives you! Sure it has stats and quests. But no decisions or ability to influence the world. So, bad gameplay, bad story, bad RPG, bad combat, bad characters, bad everything. There is nothing to recommend this game, maybe it was good when it released, but it is terribe today. TLDR: 1 star for the actual game, +1 because the game runs. Unless you have nostalgia from playing the game years ago, give it a pass.

(For full transparency, this is a tidied-up version of my original review) The main story of Fallout 3 is like a poor rehash of Fallout 1 and 2. A civilization needs water, so you go off to find a McGuffin to solve the problem. Along the way, you end up fighting against mutated animals, raiders, mutants, and soldiers in power armor. From what I know about the original Fallout (as well as some information I read in the Fallout Bible), the main factions of Fallout 3 should not be in DC. In fact, it is stated by the leader of one of the factions that they abandoned DC specifically to avoid being nuked. The quests are pretty bad. Go to the quest location, shoot the enemies, and pick up the item that the giant glowing arrow is pointing to. It feels more like Borderlands than Fallout. Yes, there are some exceptions, like Power of the Atom and Wasteland Survival Guide, but those quests take place moments after leaving the tutorial area, and said quests also don't make sense in this setting. How is it that no one has written a survival guide in two centuries since the Great War? Why would you build your town around the very thing that ended your entire civilization? I suppose you could argue that the vaults in this area only opened fairly recently, but I couldn't find any information in the game that supports this idea. It is incredibly sad to see what little care Bethesda had for the setting, which is strange because this game is often praised for how atmospheric and immersive the setting is. How is a two-hundred-year-old irradiated desert where nothing grows and no one produces anything immersive? Since nothing grows, nothing should be alive. Did Bethesda forget what the FEV did to plant life, or did they simply not research the original games enough? I could only recommend Fallout 3 to someone who wanted a Fallout-themed looter shooter, but then I thought the fans were pretty clear they didn't want that after the backlash from Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.