Others say...

"Good game"
Good game. I enjoyed it. It took me about four weeks to beat. There seemed to be annoying buggy parts in certain points of the game, however I feel it was work the cost of buying it.

"Simply Amazing"
I had so much fun with oblivion and this is even better, I have put it so many hours and I'm still having fun with it. I've beaten the game and am going back for another play through. The game play is awesome, I like how you can have combat like a role playing game or you can play it like a fps its up to you. I would recommend this game to anyone.

"Meh."
I was expecting A LOT out of this game. Well that was not the case. The concept is great but the execution is a bomb. This game was released with BUGS and a ton of them. I can't even explain how many times I wasted so much time doing something to get stuck in a stupid little crevice so I have to reload my last save and do it ALL OVER AGAIN!!! Ugh annoying and a big time waster. There are not that many side missions in this compared to oblivion. The two and only two things going for this game is the V.A.T.S system and the multiple dialogue options. That's about it. I really have no reason to replay this game besides the fact that if you decide to finish a mission one way you could miss out on other missions that will give you achievement points. The only way to get the achievement is to start over.

"Fantastic"
A wonderful game with a broad vision and open ended exploration based game play. This game is the natural evolution of the console rpg experience.

"Dark, sarcastic, humorous, worth playing, not a revolutionary leap in gaming"
I wouldn't call myself 'a gamer' but it just happens that I played the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition last year and I enjoyed it immensely. Once there was little left to explore in the world of Cyrodiil and the Shivering Isles got fully mapped and pacified the wait began for Fallout 3. I am still hoping for a 'Scrolls of the Elders V' installment some day but, Fallout was what was in the pipeline so all I could do was hope for something wonderful to come out from the geniuses at Bethesda. I will first list my impressions of the game, so far.

The game engine:
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Technically, Fallout 3 inherits a lot from Oblivion. Sure, the landscape is very different but you can do in Fallout just about the kind of things that you could do in Oblivion: walk, run, be stealthy, pick up things, drop them, throw missiles, engage in hand to hand combat, have conversations with the inhabitants and pick up your replies from a a list of possible answers, use potions to heal, be nice to other people and trade or make friends or be nasty and steal and so on. Like in Oblivion, you can fast-travel to locations you've discovered for as long as enemies aren't too close, you can sleep in a bed to regain your strength and heal you wounds, you can get sick and your sickness can be cured. Like in Oblivion, the game can be a series of quests or you can walk the land and live off the land if you don't feel like doing what others ask you to do. You develop certain skills but the skills engine is a bit different - you can pick the skills you wish to develop as you level up and, unlike Oblivion, you won't become a better athlete if you keep jumping up and down one thousand times.

New in Fallout is the V.A.T.S. system that allows you to stop time and pick up specific body parts to hit when in combat. It's not so bad and, from time to time, you get to see pretty good slow-motion shots of your enemy's head exploding, jets of dark blood coming out of his neck. It's fun and it's preferable to real time shooting when you're a little short on ammo.

The Pip-Boy device is nice but it's just a streamlined version of any RPG's status/inventory facility. It does allow you to listen to the radio but, after a little playing with the radio on, I learned that listening to the radio while on a mission can be VERY dangerous to your character's health as you can't hear the bad guys approaching and they CAN hear you, loud and clear, from quite a distance.

Building your character:
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Also like in Oblivion, your past actions have future consequences and this begins shortly after your 'birth'. You have the ability to design your good looks, move 'points' around to enhance or diminish certain attributes, pick 'perks' and distribute experience points as you level up. Again, like in Oblivion, your skills can be enhanced by reading 'skills books' and you can be trained if you find someone willing to do it.

The story line:
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It's quite simple and it's basically 'find your daddy', following some disturbance inside the completely insulated 'vault' where you spent your entire life up to that point. Your father breaks out and your first quest is for you to escape as well and then try to figure out the world outside. Well... it's not exactly pretty. A couple hundred years post nuclear Armageddon, people in the Washington, D.C. area struggle to survive and stay away from mutants, bandits, crazies or political opportunists. The only way to gather information about your father is to do others small favors in exchange for information and you need to keep yourself healthy, fit and well-armed while at it. You fight the bad guys and, depending on what you want your character to be like, you could do bad things to the 'good' people too but, remember, there's a price to pay for everything.

The art:
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The word is a dull-brown-gray, slightly cartoonish version of post-nuclear D.C. You will recognize some of the 'old' buildings: the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Air and Space Museum. You will encounter quite a variety of human characters and, up to this point, I've been interacting with a relatively large number of 'monsters', ranging from two-headed cows and fire-spewing ants to giant and relatively hard to kill mutants.

The acting:
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The voices are good but, of course, this is a game and all spoken dialog is pre-recorded and, pretty soon, you will notice that characters will keep saying the same thing, over and over. Their closeup shots of their faces are not as bad as what you had in Oblivion but, let's say that there is some room for improvement in this area. The pre-release word was that the Fallout characters were a lot more intelligent than Oblivion's. Maybe they are but most characters' phrases portfolio is not that vast and you can have encounters where one grateful character stops you to offer you profuse thanks and some small token of appreciation for what you've done and, 5 seconds after she says goodbye, if you try to talk to her again all you get is a 'leave me alone' or 'get lost' reply.

The several milestone encounters - with the head of the 'family', with Three Dog, with Dr. Lee are quite well acted.

The monsters you fight are more intelligent than Oblivion's. The more humanoid ones are capable of attacking, retreating when wounded (only to come back at you later), working together toward your defeat.

The bugs:
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And, not, I'm not talking about the fire ants. There are a few. There is the much-discussed G.O.A.T. exam glitch where you end up waiting forever for the examiner to hand you the exam papers - and I had to restart the game because of that. Then, on a couple of occasions, I found myself trapped and unable to move (load a previous save) or, after sitting on a bench, the world around turned very, very strange and the 'reload' was the only way out of that, I've met an invisible trader that I could hear but he wasn't anywhere around but, somehow, I was able to pass through his beast of burden. All minor bugs, except for the G.O.A.T. glitch.

Game's complexity:
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I can see how not everyone will agree but I found Oblivion a much more complex world. There are more attributes to tweak in Oblivion, you can pick from several races, join guilds, train and develop many skills, explore dozens of dungeons, forts, ruins, visit many villages, towns and cities, interact with more characters, operate on several realms but maybe, after only 20 hours or so of Fallout (level 7) I've only scratched the surface and, if that's the case, I will come back to this review and correct it.

The humor:
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There's as lot of it in Fallout. A lot of it is visual, three Stooges-like where you slap your enemies around and see their body parts flying. There is also some very subtle and not so subtle political humor, which I found very fascinating and quite refreshing. And, of course, it's the way characters seem to relate and react to their sordid physical surroundings which could seem 'funny' to us, since we are not 7th or 8th generation inhabitants of the post-nuclear wastelands.

Overall impression and rating:
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I like playing Fallout but mostly because Elders Scrolls V doesn't exist. It's a good, solid game with some improvements over Oblivion but, as far as I can see, lacking a lot of innovation. It's like the big automakers developing a standard chassis and then building all kinds of different models on it. Oblivion and Fallout are both built on the same chassis and it shows - the colors and the shapes may be different and there may be different options but, basically, deep down, they are family.

Compared to Oblivion, Fallout's, positive improvements are its voice acting, there's more humor, the V.A.T.S. system is a new innovation. On the lacking side, the Oblivion is a vast, colorful, hugely complex world compared to which Fallout's feels almost claustrophobic.

I am giving Fallout 3 a 4-star rating (it's really 3.5 rounded up) and I would recommend it as a 'buy' for giving us an interesting story told with more or less the same old tools when, one assumes, much better ones could have been developed.