FEARNet.<blockquote>It’s here at your second “birth” that Fallout 3 takes all of the concerns of the naysayers who bemoaned the franchise’s changes, from an overhead turn-based system to a first-person semi-real-time setup, and throws them to the wind. Leaving behind the cramped corridors of Vault 101 and seeing your first sun-baked glimpses of a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. ranks up there with the best game experiences of the year. The new franchise holders at Bethesda may have changed the formula, but their approach (dubbed “Oblivion with guns” by the aforementioned naysayers) works beautifully.
Fallout 3 is like meeting up with your high-school girlfriend all over again, but her acne’s cleared up and she’s lost the braces. It’s fresh and familiar, and with at least 100 hours of gameplay, it’s one hell of a value for 60 bucks. To quote Ron Perlman in his opening monologue “War never changes.” Fallout 3 has, however, and it’s better for it.</blockquote>Bobby Anguelov's Blog.<blockquote>Fallout 3 is simply oblivion with a skin, the shitty empty villages are there, the pointless dungeon crawls and fetch quests are there. Its a silly hack and slash with practically no character customization, everything that made the original fallouts what they were is gone. This is a glorified fallout tactics, a dumbed down, watered down attempt at the greatness of the first games. It is a failure as an RPG, but as an action hack and slash it isnt so bad, but thats not fallout, fallout wasnt a hack and slash. Fallout3 is what icewind dale was to baldurs gate.</blockquote>The Northwestern.<blockquote>If you’ve played 2006 Game of the Year “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” you’ve already played 2008’s most anticipated game, “Fallout 3.” That’s because all-star developer Bethesda Softworks crafted “Fallout 3” off of its “Oblivion” engine, so the two largely play and look the same.
Truth be told, I’ve been counting down the days to the release of “Fallout 3.” It’s based on two cult-classic 1990s PC titles. “Oblivion” is one of my favorite games of all time, and the story is brilliant.
“Mass Effect” character interaction is far better and more complex. In that epic, your character actually speaks, whereas here you just choose among various text options.</blockquote>Australian Gamer.<blockquote>Fallout 3 also has a really good story, and unlike the shoddy “rinse and repeat” main quest from Oblivion, the Fallout 3 main story arc is a genuinely good story.
Fallout 3 is a great game, not just because it looks nice or because it plays well, but because it has a great story. Fallout 3 is, for the most part, an immersive and enjoyable experience. If it weren’t for the stunning array of bugs, it’d be in my top 1 or 2 games for the year. Unfortunately for me, like most RPGs, it takes more time to play than I really have available to play.</blockquote>Snappy Gamer, 5/5.<blockquote>Fallout 3’s world is densely packed with compelling reasons to revisit past locations again and again, and full of more amusing surprises with each new location you discover. In our replay we found it to be a very different experience, offering up many intriguing new possibilities. This may well be the only RPG you’ll ever need.
As a role-playing experience, there’s more than enough for hardcore fans to be appeased, but there’s a surprisingly rich tactical shooter in here too.</blockquote>Teabag Gaming blog, 8/10.<blockquote>For such a huge RPG, Bethesda really needed to nail the gameplay if Fallout 3 was to be a success. The game plays out pretty much the same as Oblivion in terms of movement and combat with the exceptions of using guns and batons instead of bows and sword. Fallout 3 is completely played out in real time, the combat, and the exploration, making it a more comfortable game to adjust to for eastern gamers, and fans of first person shooters.
Despite being overshadowed by the huge success of Bethesda’s monster hit, Fallout 3 has shone through, despite borrowing a vast number of features from Oblivion. It may lack the splendour that came with the lush plains and rolling hills of Cyrodil’s landscape, but the Capitol Wasteland is a unique world of its own.</blockquote>GameFans Network, 8/10.<blockquote>As mentioned, be sure to explore the game and what is has to offer. A great thing about games like Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls is that they are made for you to explore, yes there is a main story line, yes you don’t have to worry about all those little extra side quests; but you should! Wondering off in to the wild and not having a care in the world apart from beating that ugly 2 headed cow heading towards you it was makes Fallout 3 a great game.</blockquote>the-crypt.info.<blockquote>The seven year interregnum between the last game in the series and this episode has given the developer the opportunity to immerse the player within the Fallout universe in a way none of the previous games could manage. The original isometric portrayal of Fallout 1 and 2 was a result of the limitations of the technology of the day and smaller development teams than any perceived need to render the game in such a viewpoint. Instead of sticking to this recipe, Bethesda have used their previous experiences with the Gamebyro engine (Morrowind and Oblivion) to render the dark and twisted wastelands from both first and third person perspectives; the results of this revision are truly spectacular.
Surfing the boards, forums and wiki’s on the net also reveals a mind-blowing number of quest bugs, game freezes and a number of NPC behavioural issues that would have a crack team of Social Workers and Psychologists working overtime until next Christmas. It would seem that Fallout 3’s post-release team will have quite a bit of work to do with patches and updates over the coming months.
This is the world of Fallout at its immaculate best.</blockquote>Zo Knows Gaming blog, 3.0/5.0.<blockquote>I did like the ability to talk to a lot of the characters and build relationships with them and I also liked the karma system that went up or down based on your actions which in turn affected who NPC’s reacted to you. In the end, the game does get a little more interesting as you play through, but it is not sufficiently engaging to even make you want to play that far.</blockquote>Leeds Guide.<blockquote>We've barely scratched the surface here, but suffice to say Fallout 3 has devoured our free time like an irradiated rat. It's visceral, engrossing, intimidating in scope and coherent in design, and brilliantly it delivers an experience which is decidedly unsettling - grim, fearsome, amoral - and yet deeply good fun. We can't think of a finer way to package the apocalypse.</blockquote>
Fallout 3 is like meeting up with your high-school girlfriend all over again, but her acne’s cleared up and she’s lost the braces. It’s fresh and familiar, and with at least 100 hours of gameplay, it’s one hell of a value for 60 bucks. To quote Ron Perlman in his opening monologue “War never changes.” Fallout 3 has, however, and it’s better for it.</blockquote>Bobby Anguelov's Blog.<blockquote>Fallout 3 is simply oblivion with a skin, the shitty empty villages are there, the pointless dungeon crawls and fetch quests are there. Its a silly hack and slash with practically no character customization, everything that made the original fallouts what they were is gone. This is a glorified fallout tactics, a dumbed down, watered down attempt at the greatness of the first games. It is a failure as an RPG, but as an action hack and slash it isnt so bad, but thats not fallout, fallout wasnt a hack and slash. Fallout3 is what icewind dale was to baldurs gate.</blockquote>The Northwestern.<blockquote>If you’ve played 2006 Game of the Year “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” you’ve already played 2008’s most anticipated game, “Fallout 3.” That’s because all-star developer Bethesda Softworks crafted “Fallout 3” off of its “Oblivion” engine, so the two largely play and look the same.
Truth be told, I’ve been counting down the days to the release of “Fallout 3.” It’s based on two cult-classic 1990s PC titles. “Oblivion” is one of my favorite games of all time, and the story is brilliant.
“Mass Effect” character interaction is far better and more complex. In that epic, your character actually speaks, whereas here you just choose among various text options.</blockquote>Australian Gamer.<blockquote>Fallout 3 also has a really good story, and unlike the shoddy “rinse and repeat” main quest from Oblivion, the Fallout 3 main story arc is a genuinely good story.
Fallout 3 is a great game, not just because it looks nice or because it plays well, but because it has a great story. Fallout 3 is, for the most part, an immersive and enjoyable experience. If it weren’t for the stunning array of bugs, it’d be in my top 1 or 2 games for the year. Unfortunately for me, like most RPGs, it takes more time to play than I really have available to play.</blockquote>Snappy Gamer, 5/5.<blockquote>Fallout 3’s world is densely packed with compelling reasons to revisit past locations again and again, and full of more amusing surprises with each new location you discover. In our replay we found it to be a very different experience, offering up many intriguing new possibilities. This may well be the only RPG you’ll ever need.
As a role-playing experience, there’s more than enough for hardcore fans to be appeased, but there’s a surprisingly rich tactical shooter in here too.</blockquote>Teabag Gaming blog, 8/10.<blockquote>For such a huge RPG, Bethesda really needed to nail the gameplay if Fallout 3 was to be a success. The game plays out pretty much the same as Oblivion in terms of movement and combat with the exceptions of using guns and batons instead of bows and sword. Fallout 3 is completely played out in real time, the combat, and the exploration, making it a more comfortable game to adjust to for eastern gamers, and fans of first person shooters.
Despite being overshadowed by the huge success of Bethesda’s monster hit, Fallout 3 has shone through, despite borrowing a vast number of features from Oblivion. It may lack the splendour that came with the lush plains and rolling hills of Cyrodil’s landscape, but the Capitol Wasteland is a unique world of its own.</blockquote>GameFans Network, 8/10.<blockquote>As mentioned, be sure to explore the game and what is has to offer. A great thing about games like Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls is that they are made for you to explore, yes there is a main story line, yes you don’t have to worry about all those little extra side quests; but you should! Wondering off in to the wild and not having a care in the world apart from beating that ugly 2 headed cow heading towards you it was makes Fallout 3 a great game.</blockquote>the-crypt.info.<blockquote>The seven year interregnum between the last game in the series and this episode has given the developer the opportunity to immerse the player within the Fallout universe in a way none of the previous games could manage. The original isometric portrayal of Fallout 1 and 2 was a result of the limitations of the technology of the day and smaller development teams than any perceived need to render the game in such a viewpoint. Instead of sticking to this recipe, Bethesda have used their previous experiences with the Gamebyro engine (Morrowind and Oblivion) to render the dark and twisted wastelands from both first and third person perspectives; the results of this revision are truly spectacular.
Surfing the boards, forums and wiki’s on the net also reveals a mind-blowing number of quest bugs, game freezes and a number of NPC behavioural issues that would have a crack team of Social Workers and Psychologists working overtime until next Christmas. It would seem that Fallout 3’s post-release team will have quite a bit of work to do with patches and updates over the coming months.
This is the world of Fallout at its immaculate best.</blockquote>Zo Knows Gaming blog, 3.0/5.0.<blockquote>I did like the ability to talk to a lot of the characters and build relationships with them and I also liked the karma system that went up or down based on your actions which in turn affected who NPC’s reacted to you. In the end, the game does get a little more interesting as you play through, but it is not sufficiently engaging to even make you want to play that far.</blockquote>Leeds Guide.<blockquote>We've barely scratched the surface here, but suffice to say Fallout 3 has devoured our free time like an irradiated rat. It's visceral, engrossing, intimidating in scope and coherent in design, and brilliantly it delivers an experience which is decidedly unsettling - grim, fearsome, amoral - and yet deeply good fun. We can't think of a finer way to package the apocalypse.</blockquote>
