I think the review's author misunderstood how the orignal Fallout worked, so I'm not going to set a lot of store by what he said about how Fallout 3 works.
Fallout gives you lots of chances to weigh the consequences of your actions. Actually, Fallout 2 is a particularly good example, because a great deal of what you're going to do is determined by who you want in control of Redding. I actually felt like I was the one doing the scheming, though obviously my actual results were limited to a number of hard-coded options. But I talked to everyone in making my decision of who to back, and also in my actual flirting with all sides until I had to do something decisive. But if you read the FAQ, it's actually just a handful of triggers you have to pull to get the outcome you want. The sense that I was doing more than just triggering the events I wanted to see was in my head -- the story and the immersive experience was an emergent sense of freedom my mind constructed out of what boiled down to a handful of choices.
Before Fallout, I thought is was silly to complain that an RPG was linear. An RPG tries to tell a story, and story is linear, and it's okay that it is. But Fallout proved you could have a sense of freedom and also have a story emerge. Even some of the best CRPGs have failed to quite live up to Fallout's achievement, though I'm a lot less willing to dismiss some of the better ones than many of the people here. Again, your actual choices turn out to boil down to just a few, but the sense of freedom made them meaningful.
Compare this to Milton's Paradise Lost. God had a story he wanted to tell about the fall and redemption of mankind. Adam had to commit the sin to kick off the story. It would have ruined the story it Adam had never had a choice, though we all know his fall was inevitable. But Adam diddled around, probably sorting his inventory or trying to poke the animals to see if they said anything funny or exploded eventually. So, God sent in Eve to change the dynamic, possibly get the plot rolling. But it seems Eve was content to gather herbs for her alchemy lab, or something. So then God added the serpent. Boom! The story got rolling -- and all out of Adam's free will even though we know damn well that there was going to be no happy ending in the Garden of Eden. What Milton did to "justify God's ways to man" was to depict him as a GM, trying to create a story out of free choice.
Lack of freedom was never Oblivion's problem. It was that there was rarely ever the girl or the snake thrown in your path. When it came time to advance the plot, you knew where you had to go and you could just teleport there. It was great that you cold spend hours futzing around with horses and picking flowers and whatnot. I myself robbed most of the houses and collected baubles in my mansions. But notice what you get in Fallout -- you're after a water chip for your vault, and the themes of water and vaults keeps popping up, drawing you on to the plot just to investigate these points. You can diddle in the garden all you want, but some piece of information that will drive the plot is never far away in one of the central locations. In Fallout 2 you're looking for a G.E.C.K, from Vault 13 and the inquiry leads you down a lot of rabit trails about Geckos and other vaults, which gradually open up the world that you can interact with for more information to drive the plot.
It looks like Fallout 3 is going to provide that sense of freedom, and that is Bethesda's forte, and I expect it to be fun and even replayable just on that score. But to accomplish what the Fallout games did it must also, as it were, constantly have you tripping over Eves and serpents as you try to diddle in the garden.
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