Short Game Review: Fallout 3
This is an impressively vast action role-playing game set in post-apocalyptic Washington DC, featuring a variety of branching interactions with other characters, a nice blend of real-time and queued actions in the combat system, and lots of fun outfits to dress up your doll avatar. The central quest is interesting, if quite brief; the side quests and random encounters feel fleshed-out and interesting rather than ancillary; and, for better or worse, inventory management and point allocation can be just as involving as actually experiencing the game world. It has some nice little touches, too, like easy switching between between third- and first-person modes, and simple but logical hacking and lock-picking minigames (which put Bioshock‘s and Mass Effect‘s to shame).
That said, I hit so many glitches that I felt like a game tester. Interfaces break, characters disappear suddenly, quests can’t be completed if done in an unexpected (even if logical) order. I kept having to brave spoiler-laden FAQs and wiki pages just to find out why I couldn’t seem to progress, and the answer was typically “a known bug”—sometimes forcing me to replay an hour or more. I’m looking forward to the downloadable content: I’d like the game to keep going, and I want just a little more material unspoiled by my requisite searches for troubleshooting.
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[...] 3 is a big game, so I thought it deserved the follow-up treatment I’ve done with some other big games. I noticed some nice things I missed the first [...]
By doombot » Short Game Review: Fallout 3 (replay) on 02.04.09 1:20 pm
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