After a few attempts I finally managed to get Fallout 3 to load without crashing my system and after playing for about two hours I am ready to give my initial assessment of the game. I am not an overly huge fan of 1st person shooter type games and Fallout 3 is very much played in the same fashion as Half Life, Doom 4 and others of the same Genre. Fallout 3 does differ in the fact that role playing aspects have been incorporated into the game and these are very cleverly integrated.
You start the game in one of the best character creations I have ever witnessed in a game, where you basically choose the gender of your character at birth and then progress through several stages of childhood developing skills and choosing what type of character you want to be. In the initial scene you even get to choose what your character will look like as an adult, and you can pick a preset appearance, but if you choose to customize the amount of choices are staggering.
You can change the shape of your nose, eyebrow line, facial hair, head hair, eye color, cheek bones, facial density among others. The amount and range of customization is uncanny and if you are really detailed you can drill down as you want. I created an Asian character with a mohawk and made his nose and cheek bones slender. I gave him flaming red hair and he looked pretty wicked when I was finished with him.
The usual perks and abilities are there for you to choose from, Strength, Agility, Luck, Endurance, Intelligence…etc. As well as the skills are almost identical to Fallout 2. You gain your PIP BOY in the 3rd sequence which contains your map, inventory and health indicators.
Game play is fairly smooth but my video card is not new and is over two years old and I am plagued by lag and clipping even during normal walking scenes at 1920×1200 resolution. The texture mapping is excellent and I have the texture details set very low, one could only imagine how beautiful the terrain and people texture maps are if the detail were higher.
Combat is mixed bag, manual combat I find to be very hard to do as the commotion makes me miss alot. But you can use the V key to bring up a targeting screen that will allow you to automatically schedule your attacks and then the scene is played out in a Max Payne type of slow motion mode which is quite fun to behold. I love when you shoot the radroaches and you can see their ichor splatter all over in slow motion. You can choose to target head shots, body shots or leg shots and damage is dealt appropriately. Percentages are listed on each body part showing you your accuracy of hitting the intended part.
Melee is a bit hard to predict as swinging is a bit slow and you have to be very close, it is more fun with ranged weapons, but against radroaches I don’t waste the ammo. One crack of the baseball bat finishes them off anyway.
Story is very predictable initially in the vault and I only just escaped the vault, I like the dialogue portions and choices so far, but this part doesn’t feel too much more advanced than previous first person shooters at this point.
I do miss the turn based combat system of Fallout 2 and actually prefer those type of scrolling out of body games to the 3D Shooter ones, even though you can scroll out so you see your character, this happens at kind of a side profile and walking a specific path is hard to do. I almost wished for a GuildWars type walking interface in this case.
All in all so far in my first 2 hours of playing the game I would give it 4 out of 5 stars, though it did crash several times during movie sequences, it at least functions and works. I hear the crashing is a pretty common bug among various gamers playing it.
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: 3D Shooter Games, Dragon Blogger Review, Fallout, Fallout 3, Nuclear Role Playing, PC Games, Review of Fallout 3
December 10th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I’m with you on thinking the penchant for making everything first person can be annoying. Well though Fallout 3 is presented, I still don’t think there’s anything wrong per se with third person or even isometic approaches a la Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate etc.
Fallout 3 was good, but shallow and in places sloppy. There’s parts that seem unfinished or overly light (the radio broadcasts will drive you crazy - they licensed a grand total of 20 music tracks for a game that lasts hours). It’s good, but although it’s been cited for having great depth, it really doesn’t.