I 100%'d this game as fast as I could. Every fish, every pole, and every discovery was going to be mine. As soon as I understood the game I loved it. 12 hours later, I realized I should've savored it. The gameplay loop of catch and discover was enthralling, but there's little difficulty. Finding new challenges and new biomes to catch fish drives your little boat across the map. You're guaranteed to catch any fish you find, and if you've ever been fishing (and found the right spot), you know catching a fish every cast can get boring. Finding new fish art is always rewarding and the aberrations mixing real aquatic species with fantasy mutant creatures is a brilliant way to spice things up. It only took me an extra hour or two to get every aberration. The story is a B+ and offers predictable Lovecraft and unpredictable discovery. It matches the A- art beautifully and creates a great world during the day and effective atmosphere during night. There's not much more to say beyond that. I'd wager the most polarizing part of the game is the inventory. Each fish has a different Tetris shape and your inventory is not only limited by number of squares but by shape of your boat and and type of squares you can place rods, lights, trawls etc. It creates a meta game where you can keep as many fish as you can sort. There were several times where I'd spend the extra 5 minutes rearranging my inventory to fit my latest catch and realize I could fit if I moved the 2x2 fish where the Tetris L-block is and rotate it to fit near my engine. I wouldn't expect everyone to love it, but I'm surprised there weren't different shaped boat hulls to accentuate this feature. Buy this game. Enjoy the adventure. After that, if you're like me and want this game to be your favorite of all time, join me in the "waiting for THAT update" camp.
After playing Fallout NV, 3, and 2, this was a trip back to simplicity. You have a goal, and you are given a considerable amount of ways to accomplish this goal (or fail it). It straddles the deep and shallow end of complexity when it comes lore, factions, characters, and alignments, and after you rush through to avoid both timers (there are two time limits) you realize your actions and inactions and play again fixing your mistakes or exacerbating them. It just needed to prove what Fallout could be and threw in some solid characters and quests to boot.
Nuance is the word of the day because Fallout 3 lacks it in bundles. World, characters, choices, factions, and gameplay all thrive with nuance. I will explain how much nuance and care went into each of these topics in Fallout 3 as someone who has played 1 thru NV. Bethesda had the task of making a 2D world 3D and ironically made it 1D. Fallout is set in the future but one with an alternate technological history with its own strengths and weakness compared to our own. An example is a Robobrain which has clunky treads, a box frame body, air-duct-tubing arms, a brain in a jar, and wields a shotgun that makes its tube arms awkwardly contort to fire the gun. It is a quintessential 1950s sci-fi robot and would be called an "android" saturated with sarcasm. Fallout 3 has androids that are indistinguishable from human beings, and the owner of an android has to comb the capital wasteland to find it since it's practically human. There were AI characters in the other Fallout games, but they were either computers the size of a room or a hollow mouth piece that would fail the Turing Test like a Robobrain trying to use stairs. Characters, choices, and factions mostly fit into two camps: slaving, civilian-killing, sadistic, fascist meanies >:( and altruistic, cleansing, empathetic, future-thinking, good guys! Side quests offer some degree of perspective but end up hollow. You can choose to get the residents of Tenpenny tower to allow the ghouls they despise to live there but the ghouls are just as bigoted and kill all the residents. You can choose to spare, kill, or negotiate with the self-convinced vampires, but you save or doom a camp of 6 non characters. The one thing Fallout 3 excels at is looting. The game will genuinely make you feel like a scrapper picking up junk and finding the right person to peddle your junk to for a profit. Valuables are hidden beneath, behind, and in the last place you'd look. If you don't understand these issues then buy this 5 star game now!!
Since there are plenty of reviewers with... obfuscated views and I've had enough of the crashes after using a stimpak in combat, here's what to genuinely expect if you've played NV and 3 and decided to try 2: Expect unbelievably annoying crashes, terrible action translation (you will not know when you are stealing, when you are taking rads, or when you are about to do something that will get a major character to attack you), and infuriating followers that will burst 6 shotgun shells into a 26 hp dog and block you in every time you enter the building which requires you to manually push them out of the way. Expect to love this game if you are a 35 y.o. geek and the mere mention of a property gets you salivating. You will love the "references" (a loose definition since I mean the most popular line/s or just literally a character/object from the property). There's Star Trek, Monty Python, Princess Bride, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Aliens, Terminator 2, Wizard of Oz, Risky Business, Wall Street, Scarface, the Godfather, Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1984, Gunsmoke, Magic the Gathering, and Rocky, but I got tired of making a list of all of them while playing. They showed a clear lack of restraint which is a shame because... Expect a fleshed-out world and provoking concepts in the wastes. An early example is that after having many random encounters running into slavers walking around selling their slaves you will run into a slaver's guild. Likely the next place you'll go will be Vault City which is the technotopia of the wastes where advanced medicine, proper nourishment, clean water, protective walls, and laser towers adorn the only safe town in the wastes and one of the few ways to gain residency is to become an "indentured servant" they're cleverly called. The exchange of liberty for safety is a timeless conundrum that would be best without being capped off with a meta 420 water chips joke about the first game. Expect it to be good and frustrating.
