So I've been playing Fallout 3 recently.

 

Because it was released during the great games rush of winter '08 it faced heavy competition for my time from the likes of Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Mirrors Edge, Left 4 Dead, and Dead Space... and to be brutal all of those games are far more accessible than Fallout 3.

 

That isn't a bad thing... it just means I had to clear my plate a little bit before I really spent some time on it.

 

The premise is that you escape your sheltered vault (where survivors of the nuclear war have been sheltering for the last 200 years) and go looking for your dad to find out why he ran off in the first place.  Once you leave the vault you're cast into the ruins of Washington DC where you can pretty much do what you want.

 

Fallout 3 feels huge... I mean it is huge, not as big as say Oblivion, but it's dense.  The DC ruins has loads of places to visit and the attention to detail in most of them is excellent... you can visit some places and piece together a bit of a story of what happened there just by spending a bit of time looking at your surroundings.

 

The combat works really well too... and above all else it feels like a Fallout game.

 

All in all Fallout 3 is great.

 

I had my doubts about it at first... the whole game looks like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on a city... which is kind of the point but it's depressing on the eyes.  I was unsure about the combat system, and the character animations can be pretty terrible.

But overall it doesn't matter... you lose yourself in it and just stop noticing the little things.

 

I have two critisisms of the game really... and don't let them put you off.

 

Firstly, considering how many interior locations there are, it would have been great to have had more styles of interior.  There are only about 4 or 5 'types' of interior and they all start to look a bit samey after a while.

 

Secondly, because there are so many locations and most have their own little back story... it would have been nice to have an incentive or some sort of unique reward to visit them all.  There are some collectables in some of them but most often you fight your way through some bombed out house and come out with the same kind of stuff that you went in with.  It's very rare that you come out with something really useful that you can't easily get elsewhere.

So is anybody else playing it... if so what do you think?  Were you good, or did you run around the wasteland been a bit of a dick.  I'm been pretty much a good guy at the moment but I think at some point I'm going to create a character called SuperTwat and wander the wastelands throwing hand grenades at people.

 

I'm also going to kill Three Dawg he winds me up.

 

Peace out...