Two hundred years ago, the world was decimated by nuclear war. The USA was reduced to a vast wasteland of rubble, skeletal buildings and shattered cities, fretted with the falling ruins of freeway overpasses. This is the world you emerge into, blinking in the daylight, and in Fallout 3, it’s yours to explore as freely as you like. When your father leaves the community fallout shelter, or Vault in which you’ve lived all your life, your quest to find him begins. Search for your wayward dad, wander the wastes helping people out, or kit yourself out with all the weaponry you can find and terrorise what’s left of the world in a murderous blaze. It’s entirely up to you.
This game is quite simply a masterpiece. Fallout 3 takes you into a gritty, brutally no-nonsense dimension saturated with atmosphere, and a chilling, enchanting landscape. You’ll encounter raiding parties who’ve set up camps on collapsed overpasses, communities of cannibals in abandoned subway stations, and eerie abandoned houses, with children’s toys and books left where they lay when the bombs fell. As you wander the wastes, your radio will crackle into life and play 1940s and 1950s classics, while hyper-optimistic 1950s billboards beam down at you across the desolation. That’s right, the setting is an alternative 1950s, as if the world had ceased development around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
While the game is built around a central quest, there are any number of side quests you can get involved in, all of which will adapt to the actions you take. You can help the citizens of a ramshackle town diffuse the unexploded A-bomb that lies at its heart, or help an undercover agent detonate the bomb, wiping the settlement off the map while you watch the mushroom cloud from a distant tower. Combat is high-octane, with the game’s VATS system allowing you to pause the otherwise real-time exchange of fire, and select specific targets on an opponent’s body. A cinematic of your attack will then follow, showing your bullets whizzing across ground and crippling your enemy’s firing-arm, or blowing his head clean off his body. An array of weapons lies at your disposal, and you can take on the raiding parties and super-mutants that cross your path with anything from an assault rifle to an old cowboy revolver; or, if you’re in the mood for a scrap, a lead pipe or a sledgehammer. You even come across schematics that let you build your own weapons out of scrap.
Gameplay is smooth and engaging, and the level system leaves you a great deal of choice over how your character will develop. Become a smooth talking sharpshooter or an alcoholic brawler, an expert with explosives or a genius with computers. Whatever you choose, the game will accommodate, and leave you with a satisfying and compelling narrative. Go and buy Fallout 3, you really won’t regret it. Martin Dean
This review was for Fallout 3 on both PS3 and PC formats.
