Fallout 3 Review

Fallout 3 is a First/Third Player RPG Shooter game in an open wasteland scenario. Your goal is to survive the post-apocalyptic world in order to find your father, that left you for no apparent reason. This game marks the comeback of an old favorite franchise, made by the hands of Bethesda, well known for the Elder of Scrolls games.

Let's start with the best in Fallout 3: Perks and VATS.

Perks are unique options you can choose every time you level up. Some of them open unique mechanics for the game, like the Cannibal Perk, which allows you to feed on dead corpses to restore health or the Bloody Mess Perk, which gives a chance that every kill will end up in a violent death animation.

VATS System

VATS stands for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Despite the fancy name it is fairly simple, every creature is made by different members (like legs, arms, torso and head) and all of them have their own health. Depending on your position relative to your target your chance to hit those areas changes. Do enough damage and you cripple the member, unless you do enough damage to kill the creature all together. This system works all the time and you are also subjected to it. On top of it you have a limited amount of actions point that you can use every few seconds to slow time and pick by hand the member you want to shoot at.

The Skills system is very simple, but yet important to how the game operate, as every action success chance is determined by them. We like to divide the skills in two big categories: Combat and Survival. Combat skills affect your direct damage with weapons, like big guns, small guns, melee, etc. Survival skills are abilities that will help you survive the wasteland, like sneaking, medicine, speech, etc. One that we think plays special role in the game is the Repair Skill, because it synergizes well with the equipment duration mechanic. Just like in real life, the more you use an equipment, the faster it will break. But if you have a second piece of that same equipment you can salvage parts and repair the first one. This one skill is the sole responsible for most of the in-game money we made, damage we caused, weight we condensed and blood we kept in our veins.

To wrap up we have to talk about the game core mechanics: Attributes, Karma and Radiation.

Attributes are defined as a simple status page (called S.P.E.C.I.A.L.), and each will raise some skills or other status, like health, max weight or action points (used in VATS). Karma has a special place in the game, as every action you take can be considered either Good or Evil, and the game will keep track of them. If your karma is not neutral you might have special dialog options or even exclusive bonuses with different factions inside the game. Nothing fancy, but adds to the role play.

Enough Radaway for 3k+ radiation

Now being in a post nuclear world wouldn't make sense without radiation, right? Radiation plays a big role in the game plot, but mechanically is very dull. Every food, water or region has radiation somehow, the more you enter in contact with it, the sicker you get. Get sick enough and on top of loosing a couple of SPECIAL points you will die. But for you, as the player, to heal radiation is no big deal, any medic in the world will give you a full treatment or you can just carry an endless supply of radiation pill. It just doesn't really make sense that the world is struggling so much with radiation when there are a seamlessly infinite amount of radiation "cure" just laying around. We would have liked it to be a more severe or restrict system, that instead of killing you, could just make you very weak, like everyone else in the wasteland.

Fallout 3 is a bridge between how games used to be in the 90's and how games started to be after the year 2000. The open world and moral choices that the game offers also add a lot of depth to the story. This game is definitely a must and will give you hours upon hours of gameplay!

Final Score: 10 out of 10.