Tech: Fallout 3

"Fallout 3" is a game set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland:



You're a Vault dweller, a person who's lived his or her life within the safety of an underground bunker. One day your father leaves the Vault without explanation, so you go off into the Wasteland to search for him. Or not.

The beauty of "Fallout 3," like most of developer Besthesda Softworks' games, is that you have nearly complete freedom to go anywhere you want in on your own time. Rather than being stuck in the main quest, at any time you can choose to explore something else. There's a lot to run across in the Wasteland, so even just picking a direction and walking as far as you can will result in some interesting discoveries.

That flexibility extends to character creation. There are a ton of ways to approach any challenge in the game - you can smooth talk your way out of troublesome situations, you can use scientific knowledge to solve problems, or you can just blow everything up with a missile launcher. Additionally, at every point in the game you can choose to be a goody-two-shoes or a mass-murdering psycho. Being evil also grants access to additional quests and locations, so it's fun to run through a second time to see what you missed by being too far to one side of the moral compass.

The most common complaint leveled at "Fallout 3" is that it's "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" with guns. And yes, essentially, that's pretty much what it is. But consider that both Besthesda's Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series, even before this latest gamed, shared the same philosophy - open world, moral choices between good and evil, single character emphasized vs. a party, and customizable skills instead of rigid character classes. Isn't "Oblivion," after all, just a first-person Fallout in a fantasy universe?

The big problem I have with the game, the one that keeps it from being a classic, is that several parts of the main quest are awful, cringe-inducing moments that really kill your fun. Additionally, you aren't free to continue adventuring after you finish the main quest, which is an oddity for a Besthesda game. Finally, some crashing and freezing bugs made their way into the final version of the game, so I'm going to have to give "Fallout 3" a...

Rating: 91/100