By Jeremy Azevedo

It’s been a great month for gaming... We’ve been bombarded with so many class A titles, from Fable 2 and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia to Guitar Hero: World Tour, Little Big Planet and maybe even Wii Music, if you're into that I guess...

Well, I hope you saved a few crispie$ for Fallout 3, because it’s the shit. I’m sorry to have to ask you to shell out again, what with the economy being as crippled as it is, but consider how much money you’ll save by not going out, because once you start playing Fallout 3, you are unlikely to leave your house for weeks.



Like Fable, Mass Effect and KOTOR, Bethesda Game Studio’s new crown jewel offers infinite ways in which to play. Your actions truly do shape the world around you, and what seems like the “right” or “wrong” course of action may have totally unforeseen consequences. At one point some asshole that tried to encourage me (via a tasty bribe) to detonate the nuke sitting dormant in the center of the town of Megaton. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you exactly what happened, but my attempt to do the right thing ended up in a particularly shocking and tragic turn of events that I was entirely caught off guard by. And had I decided to actually take the dude up on his offer rather than play the hero, there’s no doubt in my mind that I could have simply destroyed the entire town and everyone in it. This is the weight that is applied to all of your actions and decisions in the world of Fallout 3.

Character development allows you to make any kind of hero or villain that you like: Cannibal freaks, science dorks, gunsmiths, highwaymen, politicians... You are the sum of the skills that you choose to develop. Furthermore, you can upgrade your character with a wide range of abilities that range from obvious stuff like higher critical percentages to weird shit, like a guardian angel that sometimes appears to blow your enemy’s head off before mysteriously disappearing back into the wasteland. I would imagine that different playthroughs might offer entirely different experiences, which puts the replayability of Fallout pretty much through the roof.



Everything about the presentation in Fallout 3 is impressive. The V.A.T.S system allows you to pause the game and target specific body parts of your enemies (or NPCs if you are so inclined), as long as you have the energy to do so. This adds a great deal of strategy to the combat, and every time you score a head bursting or limb-dismembering blow in V.A.T.S. mode, you are treated to an incredibly gory cinematic bloodbath that makes Kill Bill look like Rainbow Bright. If you don't have the necessary energy to fight in V.A.T.S. mode, you can swing or shoot away in real time, either in 1st person or in 3rd. Rarely have I seen a game that can combine RPG and action combat so seamlessly, as well as incorporate two different, flawlessly functioning camera systems. Most games can't even get one right.

Perhaps the coolest, though minorest thing about the game is that when you kill someone or something, it stays dead. You can loot every corpse (or even eat them), leave for a few days, come back, and there the body remains. The same physics applies to nearly every object in the game, as far as I can tell. Got more stuff on you than you can carry? No problem, simply leave it in a safe place and come back for it later. It'll still be there. Again, it's not a huge deal or anything to get excited over, but it's a nice touch that makes the whole package seem all the more real and immersive. Honestly, why we still have disappearing bodies and items in games to this day I'll never now. Hopefully this puts a stop to that. Amazingly, the load times aren't even all that long despite all of this!



If you dug the kitchy 1950s sci-fi aesthetic of Bioshock,  the deep character customization of Elder's Scroll: Oblivion, or the post apocalyptic wasteland look and feel of Mad Max, you will most likely find yourself riveted to Fallout 3. The detail that went into the story, characters and theme really should not be missed. Do not hesitate to make this game your next nerd priority.

CraveOnline Rating: 11 out of 10
-1 if you don't like stuff that rules